Last Friday and Saturday, the parking lot was packed, and lined in the back with RVs and camper vans surrounded by tailgaters all waiting to see the biggest thing in bluegrass.
Billy Strings first landed in the Bay area with shows at Safety Harbor Music Center and Gasparilla Music Festival, and while 31-year-old's demeanor and stage presence don’t scream “rockstar,” everything else around him does.
Over two nights, Strings and a four-piece band played to 11,000 fans as they kicked off a spring tour of arenas and amphitheaters. And while his followers don’t trade friendship bracelets a la Swifties, their devotion is almost as deep (and have a fantastic fan site to help make sense of it all).
On Friday night, they passed blunts (and threw plenty onstage), shared backstage catering (shout out to the guy who brought out egg rolls), and hung onto every note Strings & co. played in an epic three-hour set that bridged the gap between bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe and what the century-old genre might look and feel like in the streaming era.
Strings opened the show with Monroe rarity “My Florida Sunshine” and a medley that featured “Big Mon” by the “Father of Bluegrass.”
After a run through “Secrets”—where he changed a lyric from “1,000 miles” to “5,000 miles,” perhaps in a nod to how far reaching his sound is seven years after his debut full-length—Strings acknowledged the 5,000 fans for letting the band get warmed up.
“Thanks for letting us get that rust off. We’ve been off the road for five weeks—that’s not like us,” he said.
At first, the notion of “shaking rust off” was laughable.
Bluegrass is already a highly-technical, difficult, music to wrap your head around, but in Strings’ hands, it feels like clay, with Strings shaping sound and song structure to his liking whether he’s playing a Stanley Brothers standard (“Stone Walls and Steel Bars”) or kneading in prog-rock flourishes, funk and distorted guitar solos (“Fire Line”).
His baritone vocal was warm all the way through the set, and especially on a medley of Doc and Merle Watson’ “She Makes My Love Come Rolling Down” and Strings’ “Hide And Seek” that ended the first set.
But if Strings and his band—fiddler Alex Hargreaves, Billy Failing on banjo, stand-up bassist Royal Masat, and Jarrod Walker on mandolin—were rusty in the first set, they were completely on fire to close out the show after a 20-minute break.
Photo by Yvonne Gouglelet
Jarrod Walker plays Yuengling Center in Tampa, Florida on April 12, 2024.
Strings was leg-kicking on Chris Henry & The Hardcore Grass’ “West Dakota Rose,” which found Walker—who told the crowd he was accepted into the University of South Florida before opting to attend Middle Tennessee State University—taking on vocals (Walker’s brother was in Henry’s band). He also made room for Failing on a cover of Flatt & Scruggs' “Down The Road,” and brought the show to its first big crescendo pm “Wargasm,” before laying his prowess bare on a solo acoustic performance fiddle tune medley and his own outlaw song, “Catch and Release.”
And while watching Strings’ band members join in to harmonize on new songs (“Richard Petty”) and traditionals (“Feast Here Tonight (Rabbit In A Log)” was goosebump-inducing, the best part of a performance from Strings is taking a step back to see how he’s changing the game for bluegrass.
His setup, at its core, is five guys in a line playing traditional music, but at Yuengling Center last Friday, those five guys each had their own floor pod, with pedals lined up perfectly, and an LED light to illuminate them. The arena ceiling was lit up like a nightclub, and the big LED display behind the band was something you’d see at a festival. At times, the show felt like a shoegaze concert.
Strings might be playing music that’s a century old, but he’s a time-travelling, genre-bending, once-in-generational talent cleverly reinventing the game right before our eyes.
