Its Easter time and that means three things: Blues Festival, Blues Festival Sideshows and chocolate. With the festival done and dusted, the sideshows continued to flow through the country and some of them have been downright tasty. G Love and Special Sauce delivered to a souled and sold out crowd at The Basement on Sunday. If you looked around in the crowd that night there was one lanky hippie partaking of some Sauce and that was Chris Robinson.
Robinson and his brethren have been maintaining the groove and comradeship of the road for a few years now. The Chris Robinson Brotherhood may not be heard on your FM radio dial but their music takes you back to a day when that media was free form and songs that went on for over 10 minutes were fairly normal works of art. Tonight the congregation were to be treated to a lengthy journey into psychedelic rock and roll and everyone seemed eager to partake of the sacrament.
The Brotherhood are made up of some stellar players. Adam MacDougal, formerly of The Black Crowes, plugged away majestically on the keyboards; Neal Casal ripped the place apart with his lead guitar and slide work; Tony Leone on drums and Mark Dutton on bass kept the trippy machine in the groove. Chris Robinson of course laid down some additional guitar work but his stunning singing throughout the night was truly heavenly.
The Brotherhood played scrumptious country rock like ‘Jump The Turnstiles’ and ‘Clear Blue Sky’ and at other times you had funky jams like ‘Ride’ and ‘The Music’s Hot’ that gave all members of the band a chance to solo. Wearing their Grateful Dead roots firmly in their lengthy hair, the jams took you away and set you free.
‘Vibration And Light Suite’ seemed to go on forever with the interplay of solos melting into each other. With a few hundred shows under their belts and each one going for well over three hours, The Brotherhood probably never play the same song the same, but that is the beauty of this music. If you came looking for Southern Rock, you were in the wrong place.
Robinson did tip his hat on the encore to Bob Dylan with a full throttle cover of ‘Crash On The Levee’. Black Crowes fans and Otis Redding ones also lapped up the final offering of “Hard To Handle”. This one seemed to be added to the Brotherhood’s set list recently, maybe just for us Australians. No matter the reason it was a pleasant and energetic finish to a fabulous two set affair.
The crowd got moving a bit more and the dancers, even some guy in a very loud Skull and Roses Dead shirt, boogied like the evening had just begun. It may have been Monday night after a long weekend but the 3 plus hours The Chris Robinson Brotherhood had delivered saved everyone’s soul and brought everyone back to life. They certainly did roll away the stone and rocked the joint admirably.
