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Transcript
Welcome to Marinade Moments. I am your host Jason Earle and this is the show where I tell stories from a life well attended. I’ve been fortunate to take in a ton of cool events in my life. This is the space where we bond over the beauty of live music. On this episode I am going to tell the tale of seeing Sturgill Simpson at Jack Rabbits in Jacksonville, Florida on November 2, 2014. I’ll start by reading a piece I wrote right after the show and then add some context at the end. This post first appeared on my old blog Floridabout. Damnit, I miss blog culture.
“Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT/They all changed the way I see/But love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.”
-Sturgill Simpson in his wonderful song Turtles All the Way Down the Line
That was going to be my hook for this post. Shit, it does the trick, right? But during the process of ensuring that I quoted Sturgill properly, I Googled the lyrics to the song. Spend a couple of minutes with this-
I’ve seen Jesus play with flames in a lake of fire that I was standing in/Met the devil in Seattle and spent nine months inside the lion’s den/Met Buddha yet another time/And he showed me a glowing light within/But I swear that God is there every time I glare in the eyes of my best friend…
There’s a gateway in our minds that leads somewhere out there, far beyond this plane/Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain
Those lyrics ain’t exactly Top 40 material. Yet Sturgill Simpson humbly and graciously pointed out mid-set at Jack Rabbits last month that two artists had more than one album on the Billboard charts at the time of that show- Sturgill and Taylor Swift.
For juxtaposition’s sake-
‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play/And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate/Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake/I shake it off –Taylor Swift
Such is the good and somewhat befuddling of American society. We are huge and diverse and we sell out Jack Rabbits on a Sunday night for a guy who managed some semblance of mainstream success with lyrics like, When reptile aliens made of light/cut you open and pull out all your pain, while simultaneously making a multi-millionaire out of Kim Kardashian.
To each their own, but meanwhile Sturgill Simpson is our time and place’s answer to Steve Earle or Waylon Jennings or any number of transcendental talents who made us think about country music in a different way- genre-bending bad asses that completely reinvented tunes of a certain bent.
He undeniably sounds a lot like Waylon- a fact that Sturgill begrudgingly acknowledged mid-set when he declared that Jacksonville would be witnessing the last time that he would cover Watasha, and then proceeded to melt our faces with an outstanding version of Waymore’s Blues.
Comparisons aside, Sturgill Simpson stands soundly on his own two feet. There are few singers or songwriters in roots music who can hold a candle to Waylon Jennings. So far in his rise to prominence, Sturgill Simpson belongs in that breath. He put on the kind of show that keeps a working man out beyond his bedtime and leaves him buzzing for days subsequent. We witnessed slam poetry for the intellectual Southern set that night- a beautiful moment that is unlikely to be recaptured due to the size of venues that Sturgill now rightly commands. Here’s to hoping that the tides of popular sentiment allow the Sturgill Simpson’s of the world to keep pace with the starlets of pop.
I almost didn’t got to his show. My beloved Jacksonville Jaguars played the Cincinnati Bengals that day. I was a season ticket holder. I had a routine on those days. Since I’d be drinking a few beers I always got home right after the game and hydrated. Wound down and went to bed as early as possible so as to feel good the next day. A football game will take it out of you.
Just as I was settling in for the night, I got a Facebook message from an old friend. He had an extra ticket to see Sturgill at Jack Rabbits. Jack Rabbits is a tiny rock club. I got out of bed, dressed, and hustled over there on my bike.
Sturgill was on the precipice of really popping. Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had taken the Americana world by storm and the genre itself was finally getting its just due outside of a niche fan base. I don’t think anyone would have predicted the ark of Sturgill’s career going the way it did. An Anime soundtrack, two bluegrass records, his rebirth as Johnny Blue Skies. But, you knew something very special was happening.
I guess my main takeaway is one I don’t listen to as much as I should. Always go to the show.
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