Dave Alvin donned a huge Stetson hat for his show at the Hamilton last weekend.
He has worn many hats, figuratively, since making himself known through blistering guitar work in The Blasters 45 years ago. There was a long solo career that alternately dipped into traditional folk, the mythos of California, and the joys of band work over a dozen albums. He filled in for a bit in the punk band X and its country offshoot, The Knitters. And he’s been touring with his Texas friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, with whom he’s recorded a pair of satisfying albums.
He’s out now with yet another outfit, The Third Mind, a kind of supergroup of strong Golden State musicians whose logo and approach lean on the psychedelic. And while electric guitars, improvisational jams, and a proximity to the Grateful Dead ethos are part of it, the main conceit of the band, Alvin says, was to go into a studio with seasoned enough musicians that when you decide on a song to cover—usually from the rich vein of San Francisco folk-rock of the late 1960s—everybody immediately dug in.
It was an approach used by Miles Davis in the studio—turn on the tape and see what happens. And though what they do isn’t jazz, the same free approach applies for The Third Mind, whose band title even suggests: Don’t think about it, let it flow. Already, there have been three studio albums from the group since 2020, though touring hasn’t been as common because of the band members’ demands elsewhere. So it was a delight to see them in a DC club, conjuring uncommon approaches to deep nuggets being brought to light.
Their dreamy opener set the stage for the night, with a cover of the Jaynetts’ 1963 “Sally Go Round the Roses.” Sung by a Bronx girl group who proved to be a one-hit wonder, the track was first embraced in San Francisco, where it was also influential in building the San Francisco sound (Grace Slick sang a version with The Great Society). It was prime material to show off the guitar interplay of Alvin with Mark Karan, who has played in a number of post-Dead bands from RatDog to the Other Ones to Phil Lesh and Friends (Karan fills in on the road for Victor Immerglück of Counting Crows, who is featured on the Third Mind recordings).
But it was also a good introduction to the solid bass of Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven and the booming versatility of drummer Michael Jerome, who has played with John Cale and Richard Thompson and played at times with a timpani mallet in one hand and a brush in the other. It was an especially good showcase for vocalist Jesse Sykes, who might not have been that audible on acoustic guitar (there were some sound problems early in the set), but her unique, tremulous, emotive voice had a lot to do with the overall sound and approach of The Third Mind.
The song choice was also key. They included a welcome revival of the Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ is Easy”; a smoky “Darkness, Darkness” in honor of its recently departed author, Jesse Colin Young; Fred Neil’s “Little Bit of Rain” to end the main set; and two from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Butterfield Band was famously a Chicago outfit, but their “East-West,” a 13-minute title track from their 1966 second album, stretched out to nearly an hour when played live—another huge influence on the San Francisco sound, after the band played at the Fillmore there. Third Mind played that as well as “In My Own Dreams.”
It was a nice touch to include Pharaoh Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” not only for its spiritual uplift but also for its opportunities for improvisation. Alvin tends to think that all music is folk music, but the set included a couple that have been firmly enshrined as classics in that realm: the 18th-century murder ballad “Pretty Polly” and the standard “Morning Dew”—both proving evocative in the 21st century and open to freewheeling interpretation.
Sykes made sure to note that while the latter is often associated with the Dead, who played it hundreds of times live, it was written by the Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson in the early 1960s (who is alive and living in London at 84). The Dead connection was strong, though, in a club whose calendar is regularly filled with Dead tributes of many stripes, with Karan’s presence in conjuring those Jerry Garcia-like tones almost by osmosis, to a similarity in finding electric improvisational gold in old acoustic standards.
In the current tour, they have also been playing the Dead’s “Dark Star” as well as Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree,” a precursor to Garcia’s similar song. There seemed to be no time for either in DC, though, where the club may have been interested in a more relaxed Sunday night curfew. Instead, there was something more interesting in the encore—a rare original composition between Alvin and Sykes, “Tall Grass,” before a rocking version of the Mimi & Richard Fariña song “Reno Nevada,” that Alvin said had a Howlin’ Wolf infusion. It proved that rock ’n’ roll is a pretty good folk music as well.
