The show was billed as an evening underneath the stars at Gundlach Bundschu Winery and the winery’s website stated that “the current touring iteration of the Dave Rawlings Machine will provide a night of distinctive picking, high lonesome songs, and many other fine acoustic entertainments. “ Indeed, this was an almost perfect description of the evening. You can’t go too wrong at this beautiful estate in Sonoma with wine sold by the glass or bottle and everyone nestled on a hillside overlooking a simple stage underneath a blanket of stars.
David Rawlings and his machine took the stage with strings in hand just after 8:00pm, opening with “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” and continued to warm up the audience with Jesse Fuller’s “Monkey and the Engineer.” Yet it wasn’t until the fist few cords strummed of Gillian Welch’s song “Wayside/Back in time,” that they sounded like a full band instead of an opening act. The song filled the open outdoor space and it seemed everyone listening traveled somewhere back in time by the pure essence of Welch’s vocals and the strength of the song. The rest of the first set lingered amongst classic Dave Rawlings Machine songs, “When You’re Young You Get Sad,” followed a methodic trance inducing, beautifully soulful rendition of, “Bells of Harlem” and ending with “It’s Too Easy.”
Most noticeably, the sound of David Rawlings’ voice was sweet and worked extremely well in ballads where his voice distinctively sounded like Bob Dylan in his younger years. But Rawlings could use much more rust in his voice for the songs he attempted. He could stand to croon more. In an essay written by Rachel Rubin, she states, “Musician Bill Monroe, considered the “father of bluegrass,” used to claim that he would practice a song by singing it as high as he could—and then go on stage and sing it a half-step higher.” If Rawlings approached his singing with that much abandon, he might just take the listener deeper into the affection he so obviously has for the music he plays.
The second set immediately picked up pace with John Paul Jones (yes, formally of Led Zeppelin) absolutely picking up a storm on the mandolin. A most impressive performance, that alone was worth seeing the band just to witness the pure talent of this multi-instrumental musician. And listening to Rawlings and Jones play together when their strings seemed to talk to each other, was mucianship at it’s best.
A few song choices had rather elementary lyrics with numerous mentions of candy and soda pop. Yet Rawlings took the more traditional children’s song of “This Land is Your Land,” and completely made it an audience favorite. The band joked throughout the evening about giving the audience a healthy dose of banjo, and indeed they didn’t disappoint.
Overall, the group is most appropriately named not as the Dave Rawlings Band as their sound isn’t practiced like that of a band that has played together for years, but more so, five extremely talented musicians that are each well oiled and make a machine worth coming out to hear.
