Feed Your Head

Adventures with Dave Rawlings, Paul Kowert and Gillian Welch in Winnipeg

Backstage at Winnipeg Folk Festival: David Rawlings, Paul Kowert, self, Gillian Welch

Good day, gentle reader,

I hope this finds you comfortably settled in a place that you like to be, at a temperature that suits you.

I’m in broiling Tennessee, cocooned in air-conditioning, and musing on my recent excursion to Winnipeg Folk Festival. It’s a great place for collaborations: last time I was there with The Sadies, Canada’s current echo of The Band. We performed The Band’s Stage Fright album in its entirety to an audience of humans and, thronging the guy-ropes, dragonflies bred specially to devour the mosquitoes that plague northern climes in midsummer.

Up in the ‘Peg this year it has been too dry for insects (I counted only one mosquito and one dragonfly) but I did get to take the stage with my fellow Nashvillians: Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.

Gill, Dave and I seeped into each other’s lives years ago: before they had even met each other they had both been coming to see me playing shows with The Egyptians in the late 1980s. Apparently I even signed Dave’s guitar at an instore in Boston - wonder if he still has it?

As the 21st Century delivered its first apocalyptic calling cards, I gradually became aware of Gillian Welch, as the duo were calling themselves then. Here was modern life reversed: listening to songs like “Dear Someone” and “My Morphine” took many spirits, mine included, to the better end of the world. Here was a place of depth and tranquility, evoked by two young old-timers with a kind of Amish aura. I sensed a kinship - these folks, too, had their compasses pointing back to the past.

So I was intrigued when I first saw them perform live, in London, to hear them playing songs by Jimi Hendrix, the Pixies, Radiohead and even myself: for his solo vocal spot Dave sang "Luminous Rose" from Globe of Frogs. It flashed on me that these two were actually 1980s indie kids who had mutated into something older and deeper. Most impressed, I managed to talk to them after the show. We exchanged phone numbers and potted histories. A few months later, after I’d been filming my cameo in Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate in New York, they invited me down to Nashville to see their newly-renovated Woodland Studios.

I arrived on a dark January evening. We went for sushi in one of Nashville’s then three or four high-quality restaurants, and over the shrimp tempura we let the Bob Dylan genie out of his bottle. A two-hour discussion of the various Bobs and their merits was followed by three hours in their studio in which we played as many Basement Tapes songs together as we could. Dave taped some but sadly not all of this. It was a late night. It was amazing! Dylan is an ocean in which many of us swim, never to reach dry land. Playing his songs with my new friends led me to uncork some of my latest creations, and by the end of the weekend we had recorded half of what was to became my next album, Spooked.

Playing with Gill and Dave was - and still is - a heavenly experience. For me it’s like being the filler in an exquisite sandwich, with their vocals and guitars either side of mine. They are a sublime organism: their voices and instruments move seamlessly together across the landscapes they evoke. They’re generous players, too: they make room for other musicians in their performance, adapting to include the newcomer - in this case, me.

I had no conscious intention of making a record with Gill and Dave when I went down to Nashville - indeed, as a new fan I was quite in awe of them. Nonetheless, finding myself in their sandwich drew more material out of me, and another visit in Spring 2004 yielded the whole album. It was a joy to make.

A pattern was set up. Whenever our orbits intersected we would get together and play: Dylan songs, my songs, songs of theirs still under construction. We’ve been doing this for 20 years or more now, with a break for Covid. Ten years ago my wife Emma and I moved to Nashville, and the ritual continued, with Gill and Dave now our neighbours. This is one of the reasons I feel at home here. It’s a rare joy to be able to hoot with geniuses, and they’re right on our doorstep.

Fast forward to Winnipeg, last Sunday lunch time. Gillian, Dave and I are standing in a row onstage in front of several hundred people who are simmering in the Manitoba sun. Paul Kowert, their intermittent upright bass player, stands just behind us. Paul seems to know everything before you play it, whatever it is: not unlike the legendary Jon Brion in Los Angeles. We’ve had 10 minutes rehearsal together in a nearby tent, but no serious discussion of what we’re going to play.

We open the set with my song "Television" which I’d recorded with them back in 2004. I hear their voices either side of mine, keeping me in tune. My guitar seems to play itself and the words take wing from my mouth, floating across the meadow like phantom dragonflies. Dave’s liquid guitar strings bubbles of music floating after them. Then, to my left, he takes us through "Midnight Train" of which I am able to hang onto the caboose. Phew! What’s up next? “Put your capo to the third fret,” advises Dave. I put my capo to the third fret. Off we go. The crowd roars as Gill sings the first line:

I was thinking that night about Elvis

The day that he died

"Elvis Presley Blues’!" I know this one well - sang it myself last time I played The Bottom Line in New York, at Halloween 2003. Tom Jones knows it too; it’s great to have something in common with Tom Jones.

Yes, I know the song; nonetheless, playing along on someone else’s material onstage takes concentration - I can’t just leave everything to the Instinct Fairy and noodle.

Following this, I launch into the Grateful Dead’s "Candyman," which the three of us have played a few times together over the millennia. It’s got soul tattooed all over its scrawny biceps; a song so deliciously sad I could eat it. Sometimes I shuffle through the San Francisco back streets between Haight and Stanyan in search of my own ghost who went there seeking older ghosts. "Candyman" exhumes so many old feelings.

I’m happy to leave the guitar solos to Dave, who is able to get more volume out of a guitar played into a microphone than I am. This is going well until I realize I have no memory of the first two lines of the last verse. Perhaps they aren’t that memorable? So I improvise some lyrics about a dead emperor.

Dave then unleashes "Sweet Tooth" (itself a re-write of an older Candyman song) and this nearly throws me off the bronco: such demented energy, so many climaxes only to reveal another verse. Dave rises up on his toes like a demon meerkat when he gets excited onstage, and I notice this happening here. The crowd bays and whoops after every instrumental round.

Not long after that, Gill launches into "Everything Is Free," a fave from the Revelator album. It’s a reflective song, ruefully embracing the Great Decline; I can see the chord changes coming from a long way off. My role here is not to overplay, but to sometimes complement Dave’s lead guitar, sometimes bolster Gill’s rhythm. I realized years ago, watching them in Golden Gate Park, that the pair of them are essentially a two-person jam band. Seeing hippie kids Dead-dancing to their instrumental sections confirmed this. If Dave is Jerry and Gill is Phil, that makes me Bob Weir…

We turn in a stately version of my song "Chinese Bones" and an intricate new one of theirs "Hashtag". They played me early prototypes of this round at their house way back in time, before the pandemic, even. I think. All is proceeding well until, towards the end of the show, a grasshopper in my brain persuades me to start playing Dylan’s "Too Much of Nothing". Dylan cut several versions of this in the Basement Tapes sessions - unfortunately none of us, me included, can figure out which version we’re supposed to be playing. But Dave’s guitar meanders agreeably over the surface of the song like a quizzical water-beetle, and the audience applauds benignly.

We finish strong, as my gym instructor is wont to say, with Dave uncorking "Wharf Rat" by the Dead (I’m not familiar with it but it’s rich in A9th chords) and Gill taking the lead vocal on Grace Slick’s "White Rabbit" which is printed in my DNA so an easy finale.

“Feed your head!!!!" we all chant like a public health warning.

Note to self: nourish your reptile brain and water the hypothalamus while you’re about it. And do something about that grasshopper…

And we’re done: “Thank you and good afternoon, everybody!” The audience stands, claps and hollers: they loved it. We have completed a 75-minute show without either set-list or band practice: and with very few bum notes - yaysville!

I flew home to Nashville next day, whilst the other two drove back here in approximately 17 hours straight. They love nothing quite as much as a very long drive through bare terrain. If they carry on performing long enough, I can picture them cheerfully motoring across Mars.