Beer for My Horses: James McMurtry, the Tractor Tavern & a Triple Crown
Mike Seely
Posted On June 7, 2015
Saturday was fuckin’ perfect.
For the first time in 37 years, a colt galloped to victory in the Belmont Stakes to claim horse racing’s Triple Crown. It was 80 degrees in Seattle–mild by Texas standards, but a scorcher to the average Northwesterner. It was the sort of day that helps Seattle’s lone de facto icehouse, Pono Ranch, justify its existence, as people downed Rainier tallboys on Ballard’s industrial canal while James McMurtry tuned his guitar a few blocks away at the Tractor Tavern.
Once they got grooving in front of a sold-out crowd, McMurtry and his bandmates suffered a handful of false starts on account of discordant strings. Occupational hazard, as McMurtry politely explained from the stage, a longhorn skull hanging from the black curtain behind him. Clad in a white fedora and a peachy guayabera shirt, and sipping, as always, from a Lagunitas IPA between a trio of tunes–“Turtle Bayou,” “Red Dress” and “Just Us Kids–guaranteed to get beers spilling, McMurtry sarcastialy introduced “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” as a romantic ballad. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to call that tune “Choctaw Junior”; he then played four more tracks from his latest album before treating the crowd to the real deal, adding an extra verse or two to a particularly epic version of his mythical methamphetamine masterpiece.
McMurtry’s songs are chockablock with vivid geographic exploration, and Complicated Game is an album rooted on the Atlantic seaboard. Two accordion-inflected tunes, “Carlisle’s Haul” and “Long Island Sound,” bookended another trio of reliable live stalwarts (“Fraulein O,” “Childish Things” and “Restless”). These shoreline songs are relevant to a city like Seattle and a neighborhood like Ballard, its docks crammed with massive Alaskan fishing vessels. But last night, they served a dual purpose, taking the audience back east on a day when a struggling sport finally regained its stride, trotting briskly around the Big Sandy on a horse with a misspelled name.
Set List:
Turtle Bayou
Red Dress
Just Us Kids
How’m I Gonna Find You Now
Copper Canteen
You Got to Me
She Loves Me
I Ain’t Got a Place
Choctaw Bingo
These Things I’ve Come to Know
Carlisle’s Haul
Fraulein O.
Childish Things
Restless
Long Island Sound
No More Buffalo
Too Long in the Wasteland
Levelland
Lights of Cheyenne
