Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses hit my radar back in October 2007 when I saw them as an opening act at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY. I was perched up front, stage left. After an impressive set, the guys in the band started unloading their gear right in front of me. I felt obliged to help them carry a snare drum and amp. One of their roadies laughed, admonishing “Man, that ain’t even right.”
It’s been over two years since I was an unofficial part-time roadie for the band, and a hell of a lot has changed. They’ve released a well-received second album and have a third in the works (Junky Star) due to be released September 7, 2010. They’re currently in the midst of the Country Throwdown tour and hitting big stages across the U.S. Oh, and they won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for “The Weary Kind” (co-written with T-Bone Burnett) off the "Crazy Heart" soundtrack. To say the last year or so has been kind would be a huge understatement.
As luck would have it, on Tuesday, Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses came to TT The Bear's to play a sold out show (capacity of 575) on a small ass stage. And I probably could have taken up my position as a roadie again if I really wanted to. Instead I chose to take a place towards the rear of the tiny room and intermingle with a crowd that was clearly unafraid to have a bunch of beers on a Tuesday night (and I have other people’s beer stains on my shirt to prove it). The band played for a solid 90+ minutes weaving their way through Mescalito, Roadhouse Sun and the upcoming Junky Star.
The set opened with a romping “Day is Done” and quickly picked up steam working through “Dollar A Day” and “Dylan’s Hard Rain” before introducing the crowd to a new tune named “Direction of the Wind,” which played like social commentary set to a jukehouse stomp. The new song went over well with the crowd, and the band didn’t let up, ripping through “Tell My Mother I Miss Her So,” “Sunrise,” “Bluebird” and “Hard Times” as most of the sold out crowd sung along word for word. With the crowd hanging on every note and lyric, Bingham seized the opportunity to unveil another song from Junky Star, “Depression,” an acoustic driven mid-tempo ballad lamenting, with the narrator saying he’d “rather lay down in a pine box than give my heart to this fuckin’ wasteland.” The band then followed with the political scorn of “Endless Ways,” showing us that Bingham has a hell of a lot more depth than some of the cookie-cutter pop twang artists he may occasionally share a bill with this summer.
Fans of "Crazy Heart" would not be disappointed, as all of the band left the stage with the exception of Bingham on acoustic guitar and multi-instrumentalist Corby Schaub on mandolin for a reading of “The Weary Kind.” While some hooted and hollered, others pleaded for silence with continuous hushes, so we could hear every nuance of Ryan Bingham’s most critically acclaimed work. Unfortunately, they had to compete with the thumping oontz-oontz of the teeny-bopper rave being held next-door at the Middle East. [Side Note: If there are any tapers out there, I implore you to sell this one of a kind country-techno mash-up bootleg to some overly enthusiastic hipsters. Hipsters, you know you’ll download this to your iDroid and tuck it into your skinny jeans in seconds flat.] Bingham then enlightened the crowd by telling us, “The best part of that movie was getting to smoke a joint with the Dude in a bowling alley.”
The band effortlessly worked their way through a couple more tunes before rolling into “South Side of Heaven” to close the set. After some coaxing from the loud--a rowdy and liquored up crowd--the band came back for a two-song encore and ended the evening with “Bread and Water” from their debut.
For the small crowd in attendance, we got to enjoy a band that has tasted critical success and has put some hard earned miles behind already road worn tunes. And I don’t think we’ll be seeing them in such a small joint again anytime soon. Not a bad way to spend a Tuesday night. And I didn’t even have to help carry an amp off the stage.
Marc Pinansky of Township (a Boston-based rock outfit) opened the evening playing solo acoustic, interweaving stories, rants and songs in an hour set for some very appreciative fans. The highlight of the set was Marc informing us about a song he had written for a lovely young lady of whom he was destined to meet and destined to have children with who would be destined to invent a time machine who would be destined to be at TT the Bear's the very night he was performing. I patiently waited for Marc’s hands to begin to fade away as his future son would hop on stage and assist him in a rip roaring take on Johnny B. Goode, thus preserving the space-time continuum and saving the universe from imminent destruction. Sadly, this didn’t happen. But at least the song and the rest of the set was enjoyable.
