The winter leg of the “Underneath the Powerlines Tour” opened in Knoxville, Tennessee at the Bijou on a Monday night. Chilly winter air & snow flurries kissed the concertgoers walking up Gay Street, but it was plenty warm with energy & anticipation on the inside of the venue.
In one of a few sparse spoken interludes of his entire 105-minute set, Jesse Welles noted that it was good to be in the city that provides the setting of the novel Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. I don’t think the literary sensibilities were lost on the intergenerational sold-out crowd.
As to literary lyrics, the night was a feast, beginning with the “born in Tennessee but raised in Kentucky as God intended” opening act of S.G. Goodman. Touring behind her southern gothic masterpiece LP “Planting By The Signs,” S.G. is a mellow, funny, & soft-spoken front-woman from the stage & such a genuine person that to be in her presence is a radical revelation. Accompanied by a full ensemble, S.G. is Flannery O’Connor with a black Gibson guitar, backed by an Appalachian psychedelic garage band. From the searing storytelling of “Snapping Turtle” to the hymn of inclusive intimacy of “I’m In Love,” a set with S.G. & her boys is a stunning situation in living folklore.
Toward the end of her set, S.G. invoked our union ancestors from the coal wars with an acapella rendering of “Which Side Are You On,” which merged into a riotous delight of distortion & reverb & crunch with “Work Til I Die,” the raucous cowpunk hymn of the southern working class. S.G. exits the stage like a queen, while the band rides out the crushing crescendo.
Within minutes, S.G. was at the merch table, signing compact discs & vinyls & taking pictures with her fans. The merch included the usual hats & shirts & coozies, but also a pouch of seeds & boxes of matches or playing cards, & of course, a ‘zine. I love that artists are making their own paper ‘zines again.
Jesse’s 28-song set had the symmetry of a solo acoustic opening section, a full band meaty middle, & an extended acoustic encore.
The affectionate crowd hung on every word, every note, every song, & punctuated the pauses between tracks with howls & emphatic petitions of “I love you.” Silver hairs & teenagers & every demographic in-between comprise the deep well of Welles heads. The transition from the first acoustic section to the electric set was like the colors coming out in Oz, it was like Dylan’s move from a Greenwich Village unplugged strummed sermon to a Newport Festival plugged-in surrealist electric blues.
As the band stepped-out & the rock sounds surged, an oversized American flag unfurled behind the stage. At first I thought it was a video projection that would change by the next song. No, this was an obscenely gigantic flag, fit for a car & truck dealership in a deep red state. But make no mistake, this bold icon was deployed as more MC5 & Abbie Hoffman than as Lee Greenwood & Kid Rock.
This artist adopts classic-rock roadhouse tropes both unironically & unapologetically & with the bookish side, it’s like Jim Morrison meets Jim Harrison. Throw in the Black Sabbath, CCR, & Bob Dylan covers & sprinkle in some LSD references & the yearning of 1970s folk-rock radio, you get the idea. The American flag fits when understanding this larger context. It’s reclaimed with the fervor of a peaceful revolutionary. It honestly calls up these lines by the Kentucky poet Wendell Berry: “Denounce the government and embrace/the flag. Hope to live in that free/republic for which it stands.”
Jesse played most anything & everything you needed to hear from the flurry of recent albums since he blew up not that long ago, from “Walmart” to “War is a God” to “War Isn’t Murder.” The only “hit” I feel like we missed was a full-band version of “Fear Is A Mind Killer.” I have the entire setlist pasted at the end of this reflective review.
It’s all here, all the references, influences, & inclusion, & it needs no disclaimers or gatekeeping, it’s the biggest tent of all possible tents, which I presume is at least partially the source for some of the anti-Welles backlash. The tired critique supposes his trite insincerity, which is wonky, only because he is so sincere. But no sincerity is more earnest than the cynical eyeroll, against your own folky family. They seem to think that Jesse Welles is a coin-operated song-generator to give your liberal couch-boomer version of the Facebook-grandpa all the nostalgia content he craves.
Of course, I think it’s all bullshit, all this comments-section posturing, because what we really crave is the human connection & the spirited solidarity. Frankly, the Jesse Welles vast discography & his communal concerts, all provide the passion & purpose & prophecy we need, a pierce to the veil of apathy & complacency.
Yes, the postmodern Instagram TikTok factory has created a steamy heap of simulacrum, & it’s wild that these Jesse Welles injects his peaceful poetic insurrections into reels on your daily doomscroll. But it’s not just another white dude folksinger with an acoustic guitar, it’s the voice of Thoreau & Kerouac & Rumi & Walt Whitman, breaking the curse & cursing the trance, to make us feel alive again, to feel like we might actually have a chance.
Speaking truth to power in your purple college towns, purple churches, & purple workplaces can be a real sacrificial pain in the ass, with consequences to your mental health & job security & personal safety. To say nothing of folks living in MAGA colonies of nationalist patriarchal enclaves.
No, in this terrifying timeline, a Jesse Welles concert reminds you that you are not crazy & you are not alone, & yes, they are gaslighting us.
If it all sounds like hate & hypocrisy too much of the time, well, that’s because some of your friends & neighbors & family members are contaminated by all those things, even on a good day. A Jesse Welles song circle is a place where nobody is scared to admit that the Emperor is a naked narcissist & we have the power to get out of this shit when we learn to believe the evidence of our instincts & intuitions about the wanton warmakers & grotesque greedheads.
There is a timelessness to the truth-tellers, & Jesse Welles is a peaceful peacenik warrior wielding the guitar like Woody Guthrie has come back to remind us all, to remember who we are. Jesse says what you were already feeling about all this fascist nonsense, & he says it with the dense poetic line of a beatnik wordsmith who has studied the greats to fuel his greatness. It’s refreshing to me that he acknowledges the river of his lineage, the connective tissues & juicy root systems of our revolutionary musical rhizome.
This leg of this tour is what this world & this winter needed right now. I was more excited for this show than any show so far this year, & I had that tingle-goosebump feeling of being in the presence of history remaking itself to save us from ourselves. I know tickets are tricky to find, but get yourself, if you can, to see Jesse & S.G. on this tour.
I say that they are a prophet & a saint, not to prop them on any pedestal, but because at a show like this, we all feel the emergence of our shared saintliness to speak our own fragile prophecies, right now, because all the time we have is the time we have now. Let’s use it to share all this magical music together & then take these messages out into this messed up world.
-Andrew/Sunfrog
Teacher On The Radio/Everything’s Folked fanzine
Solo Set
Join Ice
Walmart
Whistle Boeing
Fat
The List
United Health
Cancer
The Great Caucasian God
The Poor
Band Set
Domestic Error
Philanthropist
Red
God, Abraham, & Xanax
War is a God
Malaise
It Don’t Come Easy
Horses
Paranoid (Black Sabbath cover)
Masks Off
Wheel
Have You Ever Seen the Rain? (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover)
Encore:
Bugs
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Bob Dylan cover)
Turtles
Gilgamesh
That Can't Be Right
See Arkansaw
War Isn't Murder
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