Author Archives: Roger Catlin

Bob Dylan’s summer US tour, winding up this weekend in Nashville, has its own title, after 30 years of being the Never Ending Tour and another five years of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour to coincide with the 2020 album of the same name that’s dominated shows ever since.

The 2026 two-month swing, which stopped last weekend at Wolf Trap in Virginia, is titled “The Long Hot Summer Tour” and has been both. But it’s been more notable for its sudden, largely unexplained change of guitarists. Bob Britt, who has been playing with Dylan since 2019, disappeared after a June 26 show in Albuquerque (he wasn’t fired, he said, but he hasn’t said much more). Second guitarist Doug Lancio, who has been part of Dylan’s band since 2021, left even earlier, after a pair of shows in Berkeley the second week in June.

These are not unimportant roles, since Dylan himself inexplicably gave up guitar for keyboards on tour about 2002 (because of arthritis? To better orchestrate the band? I’m thinking it’s also been easier for him to refer to lyrics when they’re sitting on his console rather than on the floor).

Of the newbies, Chicagoan Joel Paterson, a lanky, respected player whose most regular gig has been Mondays at the Green Mill there, took over solo for a week at the end of June, before being joined by a New York-based jazz player Julian Lage, who was on a half dozen dates through mid-July, but apparently had his own quartet gigs booked already, some of them internationally. So the latest addition to the guitarist lineup has been Memphis-based Jad Tariq, for whom the July 24 Wolf Trap gig was only his fifth appearance.

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Six years after his death, the legacy of John Prine and his trove of enduring songs are not likely to fade anytime soon, especially with the scheduling of several events to mark what would have been his 80th birthday later this year. The first of those was also a season’s highlight at Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center in Vienna, VA, on June 9.

“Songwriters Celebrate John Prine” drew an enviable roster, including Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Patty Griffin, and I’m with Her, to sing Prine’s songs as well as their own originals that might have shown an influence. A benefit for the Hello in There Foundation, founded by his family, was surprisingly female-dominated. Not that anyone would necessarily think of Prine as a feminist songwriter (aside from “Angel from Montgomery” forever associated with Bonnie Raitt).

But the night was also a showcase for rising songwriters (and a descendant) for longtime Prine enthusiasts to discover. That was the case for Colorado singer/songwriter Jobi Riccio, who began the proceedings with one of Prine’s best tunes from his final work, “Summer’s End,” followed by her own love song, “Idaho,” from her album Face the Feeling that came out last month.

Like the others on the bill, she benefitted from the knowing, tasty sounds of Prine’s own backing band, led by guitarist Jason Wilber and including Dave Jacques, Kenneth Blevins, Bryan Owings, and Fats Kaplan, whose pedal steel work lends a nice country feel to nearly everything. The band added keyboardist Jen Gunderman, who had played with The Jayhawks for years.

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Vienna, Austria, may have been the center of the international music world on a recent Saturday because of the big Eurovision Song Contest finale. But in Vienna, Virginia, that same night in a strip mall, the irrepressible septuagenarian guitar-slinger Bill Kirchen was tearing up the place on the eve of issuing his latest album.

Ably backed by longtime players Jack Saunders on bass and Rick Richards on drums, the fiery show even featured local guitar hero Dave Chappell on a handful of songs, adding a jazzier tone to Kirchen’s relentless rockabilly twang.

Kirchen’s shows are always something of a homecoming in the DC area. Though he was born in Connecticut 77 years ago and formed Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in Michigan nearly 60 years ago, he moved to the mid-Atlantic in the ‘80s and stayed for a couple of decades. Eventually, he and his band Too Much Fun were a regular Tuesday night attraction at a beloved joint in Annandale called the Sunset Grill.

A number of the old “Grillbillies” were in attendance at his packed show at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, and though their reunions made for some occasionally annoying background noises, that rumble also turned the club into the kind of freewheeling honky tonk where the best of Kirchen’s tunes were born.

As dexterous as he is on guitar, where his fingers are unfailing on the Telecaster, Kirchen is a laconic frontman, with a number of stories and witty asides between the songs. A longtime devotee to classic and obscure country songs with a diesel-fueled penchant for truck driving songs, he honors and preserves a whole genre to life, even as he adds life to it with some new songs.

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The sudden rise of viruses worldwide reminds us of the lingering effects of the pandemic that shook the world six years ago. For musicians, the time meant the immediate suspension of touring plans, replaced by isolation and introspection, with writing songs alone in an unsettled time.

Such introspection has always been a part of Sam Beam, who performs thoughtful, tuneful chamber folk under the name Iron & Wine. He created so much music during the shutdown days, it’s still coming out. The new Iron & Wine album Hen’s Teeth, largely recorded when he made his last album Light Verse in 2024, is the basis of his current tour, which played a rich, sold-out stop at Washington’s 9:30 Club last week.

Eight of the 10 songs of Hen’s Teeth were played, with just three from the previous Light Verse. But those few were already treated like classics, such as “All in Good Time,” which became a sing-along high point.

Beam in his chest-long beard and wiry, greying hair may look like a fiery, vindictive prophet (and his band, in their shades of red and maroon, disciples). But he comes off as a kindly and benevolent soul on stage, engaging easily with the charged-up crowd, who were just as happy to hear all the new music.

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It’s a little jarring that bands that reached their heights in the ’90s are now mounting 40th anniversary tours. Just as we’ve gotten used to grey hairs bopping to ’60s and ’70s revivalists, there are throngs wagging their white-haired heads to the anthems from out of the grunge-era Clinton Administration—and sometimes bringing their kids along so they can witness in person the bands that dad used to blast from the CD player.

That was the scene when The Afghan Whigs played a packed 9:30 Club in Washington last week, their first return there in years, with Mercury Rev opening.

It was a loud, roaring show from the Whigs—with decibels so cranked it threatened to blow hats off. And in place of a tour built around a new release, this one was well balanced over their career, though there was a hint of their next steps with a couple of songs from an album due later this year, the piano-led “Duvateen,” definitely an outlier from all the guitar-driven rock, and the menacing “House of I” with its insidious “Sympathy for the Devil” style doo-doo’s.

Just two original members remain in the Whigs, frontman and driving force Greg Dulli and bassist John Curley, and each carries the well-groomed grey of grizzled grunge-era veterans. Their age (early 60s) is contrasted by the relative youth of the current members, from the behatted Christopher Thorn of Blind Melon on guitar, and the versatile Rick G. Nelson on keyboards, strings, and fiddle, to newly added drummer Bryan Lee Brown (replacing Patrick Keeler, busy working with Jack White’s band).

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Looking like a pair of archetypal men of the West, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore pick up their guitars and face each other like old gunslingers, eventually conversing enough musically to sync up—one electric, one acoustic—as they begin their two-man show.

In many ways, the two musicians couldn’t be more different. One is from California, the other from Texas; one tall, the other shorter; one with a deep baritone, the other with a keening, distinctive tenor.

Then, of course, there is the difference in their guitars—Alvin’s stinging electric leads, honed in driving bands like The Blasters and most recently firing up the psychedelic band The Third Mind, almost don’t fit with the gentler, steady acoustic work of Gilmore.

But the two have addressed these differences agreeably, first on their initial duo album Downey to Lubbock in 2018, and again in their 2024 follow-up, Texicali. The formats on each album were the same—Alvin would take the lead on one song, Gilmore would take the next. Alvin’s band, The Guilty Ones, would back them both (and Jon Langford of the Mekons would design both covers).

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Despite the flashiest outward appearances of popular music, spinning into the future drenched in electronica, glitter, and maybe penned by robots, some artists still pride themselves on kicking the backroads for inspiration.

Discovering old tunes like fossils underfoot, drawn to their ancient longings, hard-won truths, and surprising turns and mysteries, these prospecting musicians dust them off, clean them up, and bring their own perspectives, finally presenting them to living, breathing audiences who otherwise might not have heard of them.

North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell is one of them, sitting unfussily on a chair at Union Stage in Washington, DC, last weekend, picking out old blues, gospel spirituals, and field hollers from a variety of sources. His opener, for example, “Jump for Joy,” was a cover from someone the nation should remember, if not those in the city of his birth, Duke Ellington. “He’s from down here, I believe,” Fussell commented before covering someone equally surprising, the UK’s Nick Lowe and “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” with a relaxed approach that made the jaunty new wave hit at first unrecognizable.

But mostly, he seemed to set his wayback machine to the early days of regional recordings in the South, when homegrown musicians came up with songs they might have heard from bluesmen busking on a downtown street, or from their own grandparents’ porch, or from church choirs trying out arcane practices like shape note singing. In those days, there was time to celebrate a “Jubilee,” to mention one song title, or take up the suggestion to go “Donkey Riding” (which may have referred to a 19th-century steam engine and not the mammal).

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Winding up another of what guitarist Sean Eden called a “micro-tour,” Luna returned to the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, VA, last week, opening with the glasslike instrumental strains that eventually aligned into John Barry’s theme from Midnight Cowboy.

It set the stage for a certain kind of twangy urban sophistication and intrigue that has been the hallmark of the Luna sound since it began out of the ashes of Galaxie 500. Standard-bearers of a certain New York guitar rock—artsy and angular, alternately poetic and driving—Luna extended the traditions of the Velvet Underground and Television with inventive music (that sometimes used some of the musicians from those bands on their string of 1990s albums).

Trapped in the confines of critical acclaim and commercial indifference, they disbanded in 2005, only to delight fans by reuniting a decade later with a seeming shrug. Since then, they’ve toured in these occasional week-long bursts of dates, releasing just one Luna studio recording since the reboot—a half-instrumental, half-cover album in 2017.

Through it all, there have been releases of different configurations, mostly from frontman Dean Wareham (whose latest only came out last month). And there have been duo works with his wife and Luna bassist Britta Phillips—all of which were ignored in the live show. More connected to the present, Luna released three live albums in 2022, covering recordings from 30 years earlier. They had pulled that trick only the night before, in Philadelphia, of the entire Bewitched, for no announced reason.

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Rhett Miller always looks game for a show, whether or not he’s with his great band The Old 97’s, or even after experiencing vocal cord surgery. Kicking off his latest tour last week at Union Stage in Washington, DC, he came with his acoustic guitar and high energy gumption, his orange guitar case behind him spelling out his name, but also, crucially, the name of his regular band.

So instead of stressing his latest solo album, A Lifetime of Riding by Night, he tore into the classics from his band, from “Jagged” and “Won’t Be Home” to start to “Question” and “Timebomb” at the end. And a room full of longtime fans was happy to sing along at every turn. Fully three-fourths of the 21-song set were Old 97’s classics, and nobody was complaining.

As chief songwriter and singer for the band, Miller, of course, can carry off acoustic versions of them, given that the playing is aggressively energetic. And it’s fun to hear them presented in such close proximity. But it wasn’t as if the band, recently given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Americana Music Honors, wasn’t missed. Driving acoustic guitar is fine, but it can’t provide the sonic blast that Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea, and Philip Peeples bring to performances.

Still, the ever-youthful-looking Miller at 55 did what he could to provide engaging stagecraft by wagging his locks or windmilling chords on his guitar. Impending holidays gave him an excuse to bring out a couple of songs the band provided for The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Holiday Special, portraying an alien band called Bzermikitoolok and the Knowwheremen, playing both “I Don’t Know What Christmas Is (But Christmastime is Here)” and “Here it Is Christmastime,” which Kevin Bacon sang in the special.

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One would hope that talented musicians with a following are adequately rewarded to sustain their art, without having to take on odd jobs.

So it may be a little dispiriting to learn that Jens Lekman, the Swedish singer-songwriter with a singular style, has augmented his career by playing more than 130 weddings over the years. Maybe he does it for the extra income, or perhaps he’s gathering material. Most likely it’s because he’s a nice guy with a disarmingly direct connection to his fans (he vows to respond to all fan emails on his website, and I can attest to his generosity in that he played a benefit concert for one of my daughter’s friends badly hurt in a car accident years ago).

At any rate, his time playing for couples on their big day led to more of his own creativity with his latest album, Songs for Other People’s Weddings. It’s a concept album about a fictional wedding singer, named J, who goes a step further by first meeting with couples, learning their stories, and writing new wedding songs just for them.

In the story, he meets a girl also identified with an initial, V, and follows her from Gothenburg, Sweden, to New York, only to see them break up. If it sounds like a good romantic yarn, that’s what the popular young adult fiction author David Levithan (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) thought as well. Together, they came up not only with lyrics and direction for the album, but Levithan also wrote his own novel with the same name, Songs for Other People’s Weddings, issued in tandem with the book.

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Jorma Kaukonen doesn’t turn 85 until next month, but the celebrations have already begun, with the first of a handful of concerts that cover his lengthy career alongside a half dozen notable and rotating guest stars. His hometown show at the Warner Theatre in DC brought his longtime collaborator Jack Casady on bass, along with Jim Lauderdale, Steve Kimock, Cindy Cashdollar, harmonica player Ross Garren, and drummer Justin Guip in various configurations.

Kaukonen is the giant around whom all the music revolved, though he began the show solo. With his white hair and beard, he resembles something of a sage of the guitar by now. And though the world got to know him as the wild-haired young electric guitarist that powered Jefferson Airplane, he sat to exclusively fingerpick his acoustic guitar, as he did when he started the offshoot Hot Tuna with his old high school buddy and Airplane mate Casady more than half a century ago.

Kaukonen’s vocals aren’t as smooth or supple as they once were—indeed, he’s prone to adding little grunts and un-huhms at the end of a lot of lines in the manner of the old country blues players he so emulates. The clear emphasis, though, is on the finger work, which is nimble as ever, flying through songs that inspired him—particularly those from the bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, three of whose songs he performed, including “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” “I first started playing this song at 19 or 20,” he said with a smile. “It has a lot more meaning to me today.”

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For her big headlining tour, singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, whose music combines Southern gothic, indie confession, and art rock, set up recorded ambient music beds. The “transition tracks,” as she called them, were to play keep the sonic groove going between songs as she and her four-piece band shifted from one song to another, largely from her latest album, Planting by the Signs.

It was meant to create seamless atmospherics between her arresting, slow-burning songs. Also: “They keep me from talking.” But early on in her show at the Atlantis in DC, she had her keyboardist cut the tracks off. Goodman, who is equally entertaining as a droll raconteur, knew what she had to say would last longer than interstitial music.

She only had a few of these spoken segments. In the first, she admitted she was going to play a lot from the new album. In another, she tried to follow up on instructions for the disposable cameras she had distributed before the show in an effort to get some authentic, non-digital, visual record of her tour from the very fans in her audience for a promotional zine her record distribution company was doing to get attention for her latest work.

She also spoke about the stark contrast she was finding (and everyone in the audience knew) between the “hellhole” descriptions of cities like DC that her mother feared, and the quite opposite actuality.

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