Good morning folks,

I won't write much here and will allow others to fill in the details.

Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion took the stage to open the show just
a few minutes after 8PM. A nice couple, a couple good songs, some
interesting high-bluegrass harmonies and an opportunity for Irion to
show pizazz on the dobro and the guitar.

After a short break, and just around 9PM Greg took the stage. Yes, funky
hat, red bandanna, dark glasses, over sized pants, jacket and all and
from the moment his fingers touched the guitar and the vibrations from
his vocal chords hit the electronics in the mic, the rest of the evening
was magic. It was a much better show than I had anticipated and as his
set ran for almost 2 hours, more than fulfilling.

"The blues are just bad people feeling good" - GB

For the next two hours it was story song after story song with a few
older melodies dropped in here and there but you had to pay attention
sometimes to recognize what they were for their recorded forms were
altered to a degree giving the impression that they too were in the
evening's story song pattern. And the early folkie stuff? Now it's all
blues. "Good Morning Coffee", his second number, was interwoven with a
story about waking his wife up one morning that kept us all laughing and
wondering, is Iris DeMent really that rapacious in the mornings? Pour
warm water over the beans so they don't scald? She MUST be tough.

Sometimes it was hard to tell when his intro to a song ended and the
song itself began but all the while his blues guitar rang true. I'll
leave it to another writer to list the playlist from the show last
evening. Brown claims he doesn't work from a set playlist, that it
doesn't work for him and that all the patter was nothing but filler
giving him time to decide what to play next. True fans would have known
from the way he tuned what was coming next even, as I wrote before, if
the folk was relegated to history and the same songs reborn as blues.

Brown played a version of "Canned Goods" and for those familiar with the
version on "A Live One" he didn't let us down. We got a different story
last night about why his grandma insists on planting ten rows of green
beans each year, for it is one way of pulling the family together in
late summer if for no other reason than to fill their trunks with a
little taste of summer.

"Sometimes you have go look for your life" - GB

During the second half of the show Greg brought Johnny Irion back on
stage and let me tell you, while Irion plays well against Sarah Lee
Guthrie, he becomes enlightened when he sat in with Mr. B. The two of
them together crafted the best music of the evening. There's a
remarkable degree of skill involved jamming with a guy like Brown when
you don't really know the songs and the riffs aren't standard and while
I, and the audience, already believed Irion could play well enough, it
was his set with Brown that truly solidified his abilities. He had to
work hard to keep up but the two musicians played as one and as the hour
became late the audience showed no signs of being tired or weary, only
electrified by the now four part blues harmonies emanating from the stage.

At one point Brown called for requests from the audience: a woman called
for "Boomtown", a man in the middle of the room wanted "Oily Boys". Greg
played neither and I'm happy he didn't. While I understand Pawling is a
sprawling town and the megalopolis to our south creeps inexorably
towards us each day and I'm the guy that eats, sleeps and drinks the
battle against it <http://www.planputnam.org> 24/7/365. And, while I
also understand that the junta in Washington is a corrupt bunch of [fill
in expletive here] I just didn't want to bring that ugly world outside
into the magical space created in the room and Brown must have sensed
that for he took other suggestions and played on and on and on.

I apologize for the crappy cellphone picture. Had I known I could have
brought my camera along I would have done so and had a better image
representation for you all. Next time.

I did not have equipment to record the show last evening and if someone
did manage to save it for posterity, it is one VINE that will find
rebirth at every possible opportunity.

Pacé,

Jeff

PS: If you're the guy in the Green Subaru the Sheriff's deputy pulled
over on the northbound lane of Route 22 last evening, write me offline.
It's illegal for the cops to "conveniently" hang out in a parking lot
directly across from an event especially when there are so many other
parking lots they could be hanging out in, cars sitting driver's side to
driver's side waiting... I suppose Pawling needs a Dunkin' Donuts nearby
to keep those guys productively occupied.

PPS: I'm not going back to check grammar and structure in the above
write-up. Sorry. It's time for some coffee... scalded beans and all.


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