There is a steadiness and reliability to The Jayhawks’ music—melodic, often wistful, with jangly guitar, keening harmonies, and a solid beat. While frontman Gary Louris is fiddling more with his guitar’s effects panels, there was no worry that their show at DC’s Lincoln Theatre Saturday would explode into any kind of frenzy—except the kind triggered by intense nostalgia. A lot of their songs have a real lasting power.
It could owe to a loyal audience that is, like the band 30 years older, that Louris had to pretty much suggest that people could get up from their theater seats and move around in the encore. Which is a bit like Jeb Bush saying, “Please clap” at a campaign stop.
But for all its intense personnel changes and acrimony that has chiefly resulted in the permanent departure of Mark Olson who co-wrote most of the songs in the early days, nothing much gets the group rattled these days. Even when the Vari-Lites briefly freaked out during the second song, flipping around and finally plunging the theater into darkness, band members merely smiled and shrugged. “That fits perfectly with the next song, in fact,” Louris said, before going into the planned “Stumbling Through the Dark.”
Musically, the band is solid as ever. Louris began the show with a big snarling guitar workout to introduce “Waiting for the Sun.” He and Chet Lyster seemed to switch off on each song on which one was playing acoustic and the other electric. Lyster also turned to pedal steel at key moments.
Aside from Louris, bassist Marc Perlman is the only other member who has been with the band since the beginning. Karen Grotberg seemed subdued on keyboards, most often building establishing piano-like figures for the guitars to launch. She sang fewer harmonies than one expected.
Alternately, drummer Tim O’Reagan sang more; with harmonies on almost every song. More crucially, his own “Tampa to Tulsa”—with opening duo Folk Uke on backing vocals—provided an important change of pace from total dominance of Louris songs and lead vocals.
That was among the casualties of Olson leaving the band—no more tight harmonies with Louris, no more of his trading lead vocals, and crucially, no more of his songs, from “Over My Shoulder” to “Take Me With You (When You Go),” though “Blue” was too good to drop. Louris’ own commentary on news of the breakup comes in a scalding “Lies in Black and White” on the new album, which wasn’t part of the live set.
It’s good to see The Jayhawks forging on—on a field they helped create for alt-country that followed them in the ’90s. Many of the songs on their new Paging Mr. Proust have the same reliable melodicism and wistfulness, which is good since fully a third of the show was from the new work, released in April. But it might as well been a Louris solo band by now. Indeed, by the encore it was with Louris alone on stage to sing “Settled Down Like Rain.”
A nice addition to the show was having Folk Uke around, not only to crack jokes and sing randy little tunes in pristine mountain harmonies, but to add backing vocals a couple of times in the main set.
And for the uninitiated, when the half of the team who identified herself only as Cathy introduced a song “with lyrics written by grandfather and music by Wilco” they could figure out in the middle of “California Stars” that she was indeed a Guthrie—daughter of Arlo, granddaughter of Woody, whose partner Amy had her own impressive lineage—daughter of Willie Nelson.
As the harmonizing Folk Uke, they had already established themselves in their set as a force to be reckoned with on their own.
