Maybe a few hundred punters had ventured down to The Standard in Sydney on a Saturday night to catch the very talented Jonathan Wilson and his first-rate group roll out over a dozen songs.
Wilson and his search for a certain sound had him channelling music from decades ago that would sit comfortably with Crazy Horse, Pink Floyd, Dylan, America, and especially The Grateful Dead. It was a night where the people who got it were shaking their bones, their eyes were either closed in rapture at the sound or they were smiling and grooving with the band. It was intimate and it was truly special.
Wilson has only delivered one solo album, 2011’s Gentle Spirit, but he has been tagged with reinvigorating or recreating the Laurel Canyon sound of the late 60s and 70s. Part of this is geography (because that was where his studio was) and the larger part is the people he has surrounded himself with.
There must have been something he picked up in the Carolinas before he moved out West that enabled him to synthesise the sounds of a certain few summers into his record and into his live shows. Wilson and his band have just completed a stint supporting Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, so that may give you a better idea of where his music fits.
This not a trip down memory lane but it is music that brings your heart, soul and spirit back to another time.
With only one album, the song selections were going to focus on Gentle Spirt, except for new track “Moses Pain” which had intricate and stunning interplay throughout the folk rock song.
The two guitars of Wilson and Omar Velasco harmonising on “Desert Raven” are what make it a masterpiece. The psychedelic rave of “The Way I Feel”, a Gordon Lightfoot cover, only needed a trippy light show behind it to take us back to The Fillmore.
He and his outfit have it down pat. “Natural Rhapsody”, for example, had many a ‘Jerry Garcia moment’ as the song jammed along.
The lengthy solos from Jason Borger on keys gave the music even more depth and the guitar fireworks of Velasco and Wilson were ably held together by drummer Richard Gowen and Jake Blanton on bass.
With the classic guitars and equipment, Jonathan Wilson is truly trying to find the actual sound of 1970, a sound that is either in your DNA or you haven’t discovered it yet.
It is hard not to connect it to a certain period of our human condition – maybe the music was better then. It could have been the water or the Kool-Aid, but closing off with his track “Valley Of The Silver Moon”, you know that Wilson has struck some hearts with his gold.
-Paul Busch
