It was billed as the Dave Rawling’s Machine with special guest Gillian Welch and it took a few weeks surprisingly to sell out. The show was held at SF’s famed Great American Music Hall which served as a bordello back in the day.
The show included lots of new material not unlike that which we’ve come to expect and enjoy in the past. Some highlights included “Monkey and the Engineer” made famous by the Grateful Dead’s 1980 acoustic incarnation, “This Land is Your Land” including the rarely heard verse about the No trespassing sign.
While David’s guitar playing is often very similar from tune to tune, it never got tiresome and the two of them wrung out every ounce of emotion from a tune before the finish. The mostly 20-30 something crowd got an education in rock history as the twosome played the dickens out of the Neil Young dope song “Tired Eyes”, a transcendent version of Dylan’s incomparable “Queen Jane Approximately” and yet another druggy song “White Rabbit”. The duo has always had a doper vibe going on and they also included the tune they wrote with Ryan Adams “To be Young is to be Sad is to be High”.
It has been almost 5 years since “Soul Journey” was released and Gillian and David’s fans are eagerly awaiting another disc. This conert proved they still have the chops and fire plus a real strong base to build upon for their next album.
