Tennessee Theatre - Knoxville, Tennessee - 9.15.10

The Black Crowes

Tennessee Theatre

Knoxville, Tennessee

September 15, 2010

Acoustic Set

Welcome to the Goodtimes

Jealous Again

Fork in the River                                         

Whoa Mule

Ballad In Urgency >

Wiser Time

Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

Good Friday

My Morning Song

Bad Luck Blue Eyes, Goodbye

 

Electric Set

Soul Singing

Been A Long Time (Waiting On Love)

Girl From a Pawnshop

P25 London

A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound   

Nonfiction >

Thorn's Progress >

Spider in the Sugar Bowl tease >

Thorn In My Pride

Sting Me

Hard To Handle

- encore -

Shine Along

Boomer's Story

We'd like you to look at the above setlist.  Okay, now look at it again.  Don't just skim through it.  Look at it.  Think about it.  Only one cover in each set, not including the encore, and not one unreleased song in the entire show...seems like it might have been a fairly standard evening, no?  Yet if you were there, you never knew what was coming next.  A night of guessing from beginning to end.  Little things like the Goodtimes opener, Fork In The River popping up early followed by Whoa Mule, the surprise appearance of Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You, Good Friday sneaking in the backdoor and Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye having the balls to close out the set...fantastic.  The whole first half of the night was like a nice, relaxing smoke out of your favorite corncob pipe on the front porch.  The only thing that might have made it any better would've been if everyone in the audience were all given their own personal rocking chair for the acoustic set.  Just a laid back, relaxed first half of the evening.

Shows like this are why seeing the band on multiple nights is paramount.  Don't listen to people who weren't there that try to tell you based on looking at the set that it was nothing special.  These are the same people who attend shows with sets similar to this and then tell you it kicked all kinds of ass.  It's like looking in the paper at the box score of a football game seeing that Chris Johnson scored on a 9-yard TD run.  You think "Eh, a 9-yard run is nothing special," until you actually see the run, and then you say, "God damn that was a nice run."  This is pretty much how it goes when describing Crowes fans who glance at box scores, er setlists and pass judgment.  When you're searching for whatever it is you seek in your day-to-day life, when you long for a little spontaneity, a little unpredictability...for Black Crowes fans the answer is sometimes as simple as sets like this.  You don't need Bewildered, Grinnin', Exit, or Pastoral to have a good time.  And where else would you have rather been anyway than in there watching them play?  

Back to this business of looking at the setlist - check out the first five tunes in the electric set.  Impossible to have predicted that sequence.  Not knowing what's coming next is one of the greatest feelings a Black Crowes fan has at a show.  When you start to get a feel for what's around the next corner like you're a clairvoyant BC psychic, the beat in your feet tends to lose some of that action.  (See: Festivals)  It's not a common occurrence, but if you've been to enough shows you've probably felt that feeling before.  And by "enough shows" we're looking at all you freaks out there in all shapes and sizes...men, women, long-haired, short-haired, tatted up, ink free, pierced or not pierced, rocking a Willie Nelson T or chillin' in the Tommy Bahama shirt your wife got you for Father's Day...no matter who you are, chances are if you're reading this blog you are a gold card carrying member of the freakshow clan and at times you feel like you have extra-sensory perception into what direction a show is headed after a few songs.  Well, tonight in Knoxville all your powers were rendered useless.  

After Soul Singing opened the electric set, your money may have been on a Sting Me, Another Roadside Tragedy or maybe a Share The Ride to have come next.  Well, as Gomer Pyle used to say...Surprise! Surprise!  It's Been a Long Time Waiting On Love and an even longer time waiting on this one to move up earlier in the set but finally, tonight it got relocated.  We'd like to see it show up more in the middle portion of shows and hopefully we will during the coming weeks.  After Been A Long Time worked everyone up early on in the second set with its bad ass outro jam, Girl From A Pawnshop drifted in to allow folks a nice cooling down period.  And just as you wiped the sweat from your brow it was surprise time again as P25 London appeared out of thin air...and ps - if you're not a P25 fan, how about you cry me a monsoon?  Get busy on it.  While yer at it, make it deep.  No other band in the world could write or play a song like P25.

A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound even when it rolls through Appalachian country, and tonight it made that sound for the first time in a few weeks since it last rolled down the tracks on its way through St. Louis.  This town and this song are like Fred and Ginger, Abbott and Costello, Tango and Cash...they're fine on their own but in the end they're meant to be arm in arm.  It was also played last time the band rolled through town and if you haven't put 2+2 together yet on where we're going with this, maybe you should read the lyrics...

It reminds me of the girl
That came from Knoxville town
And how on that April day
When she took this old boy down 

Oh Tennessee you got me runnin'
And I'm not coming back this time
Way out west is where I'm going
To forget the one I left behind

And we're back.  Following the Knoxville tip o' the cap, Nonfiction settled in with a nice jam that segued into Thorn's Progress, which again found its way into the requisite Spider in the Sugar Bowl Blues tease before rolling into Thorn In My Pride.  By the time we got through Steve's solo, Chris' harp breakdown and the wrap up of Thorn, more than 30 minutes of the electric set had been eaten.  That's a big piece of pie right there, and a lot of fans have been clamoring for Thorn to go down to Cozumel for a few days and make room for more songs.  Still, even if you've seen it before, don't forget these are the last few weeks of Black Crowes you're going to have for a long, long time.  Like Tom Keifer sang...

And guess what, the surprises weren't done yet as the rare late set Sting Me reared its head and made sure nobody checked out too soon after the Nonfiction > Thorn marathon.  Hard To Handle closed the set down and a mellow encore of Shine Along and Boomer's Story brought the night to a close.  Shine Along was even a surprise, and if you say otherwise you'd be wrong because it has never appeared during an encore before.  Lyrics indirectly made for the times too -

I've been out on the rails too long 
Got a mind that is worried
That the end is coming up on me strong

By the way, Boomer's Story was written by a guy named Ry Cooder.  If you don't have any of his records, 8-track tapes, cassettes or cds at home you need to find a way to make it happen.  If all you know of this man's catalog are Crow Black Chicken and Boomer's Story because The Black Crowes have covered them, you're committing a heinous crime against yourself.  Start here, make a pit stop here and see what you think about this but don't stop.  Keep going.  Put the words "Find more Ry Cooder music" at the top of your to-do list.  

So that's it folks.  On to North Carolina and the town of Raleigh we go...