Friday, 2 October
It’s the first weekend of “Rocktober” in the Bay Area, and the music scene is blowing up with the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, plus jamgrass guitar phenom Billy Strings returning for two shows across the Bay at Oakland Arena on 2nd and 3rd October. Either event could be plenty for most people, but music fanatics may race from the Park to Oakland on Friday evening, since the Strings shows serve as unofficial “Outside the Park” shows to complement the beloved free festival.
Catching Billy Strings after already seeing Sierra Hull, Los Lobos, My Morning Jacket, and a bit of Molly Tuttle‘s set makes for quite a big day in the Bay. Word has spread that the Saturday show will be Strings’ 34th birthday, which suggests some extra festivities could be in store. Then there’s the speculation that Strings could also sit in with friends like Jesse Welles and/or Robert Plant at the festival on Sunday.
Oakland Arena is filling up as showtime nears on Friday at 8:00 pm. The sides of the upper levels of the vast arena where the Grateful Dead played numerous shows in the 1980s and 1990s are curtained off, so it’s not quite the same capacity. Yet the capacity for these two sold-out shows is probably still in the 12,000-14,000 range, quite impressive for what is ostensibly a bluegrass band.
Yet Billy Strings is not your typical bluegrass picker. His band features standard bluegrass instrumentation—acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass—but the music incorporates elements of rock, metal, blues, and psychedelia, growing the fanbase far beyond what was ever thought possible for the bluegrass genre. As a result, Strings has played larger venues on each succeeding tour and has now entered arena rock territory.
He’s also guest-starred with marquee rock acts ranging from Phish, Tool, Widespread Panic, Dead & Company, and the String Cheese Incident to a recent appearance with Pearl Jam at the Ohana Festival in Southern California just the previous weekend. This followed sitting in with Bob Dylan last year for “All Along the Watchtower” on the Outlaw Festival Tour.
The first set ignites early on with the title track from 2017’s Turmoil & Tinfoil, as Strings leads the quartet right into the deep end on a signature song about learning “How to fly on broken wings”. The psychedelic light show kicks in, augmenting what becomes a smoking 20-minute jam as bassist Royal Masat, banjo player Billy Failing, mandolinist Jarrod Walker, and fiddler Alex Hargreaves lock in with Strings to ride a big wave.
Masat looks particularly fashionable in white pants and white sunglasses to complement his Phil Lesh tie-dye shirt. It turns out Masat is such a fashionista that there’s an Instagram page devoted to his nightly stylings. Strings tears it up on his acoustic as if he’s shredding on an electric guitar, which is his trademark. The crowd is lit and loving it, as Oakland Arena quickly comes to feel like a great venue for this band.
“How good is it to be back in the land of Oak? Me and the boys are all keyed up,” Strings says after the jam concludes. “I Wish I Wanted To” from his new album So Much for Goodbyes shifts gears into a charmingly laid-back tune about “growing restless in my mind” as “it’s hard to give a damn / When you ain’t got a damn to lose.” Another standout moment comes with “The Saint Louis Blues”, a jazzy blues standard dating way back to 1914. It’s a slower number, but there’s a resonant sense of connection across time and space.
“Malfunction Junction” from 2024’s Highway Prayers is an instrumental highlight, with a dazzling display of chemistry as the musicians each take turns leading the way. “Seven Weeks in County” closes the set with one of the upbeat, bluesy jamgrass tunes Billy Strings excels on, shredding in climactic fashion.
A festive vibe hangs in the air and carries into the second set. A big jam on Billy Failing’s “So Many Miles” features his banjo, with plenty of picking to spark dance party action. “Remember to Cry” is an upbeat gem from So Much for Goodbyes that seems to tap into the emotion of Strings paying homage to his mother, who passed on suddenly last year.
“Bluegrass music, it’s what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Billy comments, before leading the band into another new tune that sparks an immediate reaction. “I Like Train Songs” has that special vibe of a retro-yet-fresh sound that comes from a great player taking a classic form and putting his own stamp on it. The audience is loving this one, as Strings sings “I’m on a choo-choo rollin’, Never comin’ back / On the choo-choo rollin’ / That’s my kind of track.”
A special treat comes with a bustout of the classic “Midnight Moonlight”, cranking up the vibe since the Peter Rowan song was first recorded while he was a member of Old & In the Way, the bluegrass supergroup from the 1970s that also included Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. Some local fans got to see Rowan himself perform the song just the previous Sunday afternoon at the Mill Valley Block Party in Marin County, adding an extra level here.
The song sparks one of the night’s best jams with sensational fiddle soloing from Hargreaves, while Billy Strings sort of acts as a conductor. It’s later reported that the song had a 485-show gap since Strings last performed it, making it one of the year’s biggest covers.
The vibe is high in the parking lot afterwards, where fans have set up a “Shakedown Street” style vending scene reminiscent of the Grateful Dead shows here in the 1990s. It’s not nearly as big as that legendary scene, but there’s a full aisle of booths and tents vending food, drinks, and all kinds of hippie apparel. Unique T-shirts include one that says “Billy Mother Fucking Strings” in a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer logo format, and an “Illinois ANTIFA” shirt featuring the Blues Brothers.
Saturday, 3 October
Night two promises even more musical fireworks for Billy Strings’ birthday, as anticipation builds. Some fans are again rolling over from the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, where the Saturday lineup featured an acoustic set from Hot Tuna. Seeing San Francisco music legends like Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady perform before coming over to catch Billy Strings again is truly surreal, especially with a great jam on “Good Shephard” from Jefferson Aeroplane’s classic 1969 Volunteers album.
Billy acknowledges his birthday early on, stirring up the festive sentiment. He and the band are dialed in for another hot set, which surges down the stretch when he mentions his birthday again. “I’m 34, I’m a big boy now,” he says in self-deprecating fashion, perhaps alluding to how hobbits from Middle-earth are said to come of age at 33—a saga Strings paid tribute to with his 2022 Halloween show in Asheville, which featured a Lord of the Rings theme.
Here he adds that he’s happy to be with everyone “in this beautiful place where lots of legendary shit has gone down.” He says they’re going to try to add to that with a dear friend, who turns out to be local bass player extraordinaire Les Claypool.
The crowd roars as Claypool comes out with an acoustic bass and talks about recently hanging with Billy in Nashville, where they took a ride in Billy’s green 1972 Chevelle, which made him a bit nervous as a passenger because of how fast Billy was tooling around. This leads to a sensational performance of a Primus classic, renamed for the occasion as “Billy Was a Race Car Driver”. The song is transmogrified into the jamgrass format, making it a great vehicle for banjo, mando, and upright bass solos before Strings tears it up while Claypool slaps the low end.
Another Primus song follows with “Over the Falls”, a bluesier number that features more jamgrassy interplay mixed with darker Primus overtones. It turns out to be more of an interlude before a mega jam on “All Fall Down”, a tune from folk musician John Hartford that Strings has popularized in recent years. The song starts at a bluesy simmer, with Billy Strings singing over tight syncopation, then builds layer by layer into a masterpiece theatre jam with fantastic interplay between Les and Billy before Strings rips melty-hot psychedelic riffage. It’s a dazzling sequence that indeed becomes an instant classic moment in Oakland Arena lore.
How do you elevate the vibe in the second set after jamming with Les Claypool to close out the first set? By opening with the Grateful Dead’s “Cassidy” in tribute to the late, great Bobby Weir, who is still sorely missed after passing on in January. It’s also a timely tribute to the song’s late co-writer, John Perry Barlow, who shares a birthday with Billy on 3 October. It’s all the feels here as Billy and the boys deliver a shimmering take on the ode to letting your life proceed by its own design.
Billy Strings rips a melodic solo before an ambient jamspace leads to his own “Thirst Mutilator”, a fan fave jam vehicle from his eponymous 2016 debut EP that in turn leads to a vibrant take on Bill Monroe‘s “On and On”. Another heartfelt moment follows when Billy tells a tale of spotting a deer with a crooked leg by the lake he lives close to, saying he figured the deer wouldn’t last long, but was surprised to keep seeing it for years. He relates how this inspired him to write “Broken Doe”, saying it taught him to believe that “No matter how busted we are, you can make it.” There’s a bluesy, mystical vibe as he sings, “They don’t know what we know, about being broken.”
The Merle Travis/Doc Watson classic “Natural Born Gambling Man” is another upbeat highlight, as is “The Streamlined Cannon Ball” with smoking banjo and fiddle solos. “Meet Me at the Creek” draws instant cheers, a high-octane tune that leads to the set’s deepest jam. The quintet gets into a tight pocket before Billy rips like hot lava on an incendiary jam. The dynamics here are a prime example of what elevates this group beyond the standard jamgrass format to a transcendent psych-rock sound in a higher dimension.
Set closer, “Must Be Seven” leads back to a “Meet Me at the Creek” reprise, a move the Grateful Dead were known for, and it feels like a fitting way to close at the Dead’s old stomping grounds. “My name is Bill, it’s been a thrill, thank you,” Strings says at the end to a well-earned standing ovation. The hoped-for guest appearance on Sunday at the Hardly Strictly Music Festival in San Francisco doesn’t materialize. Still, fans get sensational sets from William Tyler, Jesse Welles, Robert Plant, and the Third Mind. What a weekend.
What’s next when you’re sitting on top of the world as one of the hottest artists in the music business? For Billy Strings, it’s continuing to push the envelope. He’s got another big Halloween show scheduled in Baltimore with a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe theme. He’ll play a pair of shows with the Trey Anastasio Band in Worcester, Massachusetts, in November to benefit Trey’s Divided Sky Foundation (which funds a drug rehab centre in Vermont).
Then there’s the buzz building around an album collaboration with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, which could threaten to break the internet and be one of the hottest tickets of 2027 if they play some shows together. It seems the sky is the limit for Billy Strings, a testament to the ongoing metaphysical power of guitar-driven music.