It’s a Friday night here on 4th October, and a new autumn tradition in the Bay Area is taking shape. Greensky Bluegrass are at the Fillmore, and tonight’s performance will feature a collaboration with local keyboard phenom Holly Bowling for the fourth year in a row. This follows sensational team-ups with Bowling at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater for a Halloween weekend show in 2022 and Oakland’s Fox Theater in November of 2023 and 2021.
This evening’s show is billed as a Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival “Out of the Park” show, one of the weekend’s extra club shows by artists also playing the annual free festival in Golden Gate Park. The festival is a long-running local tradition, with proceeds from the “Out of the Park” shows to benefit Sweet Relief’s San Francisco Bay Area Fund. It’s a great cause to support the regional music community, and the Fillmore is filling up since Greensky with Holly Bowling has become a local fan favorite event.
Bowling earned a reputation as a compelling virtuoso on her own with solo piano arrangements of Phish and Grateful Dead songs, then showed she could also jam out anytime, anywhere in acclaimed appearances with Phil Lesh & Friends and in a four-year tenure with the sensational yet criminally underrated and unjustly short-lived rock’n’ roll band known as Ghost Light.
Bowling also fits right in with her friends in Greensky Bluegrass, a Michigan-based group that is less of a traditional bluegrass band and more of a psychedelic rock jamgrass hybrid. “I still don’t know what bluegrass is, which is why we’re not very bluegrass-y, because we’re just kind of doing our thing,” mandolin player, vocalist, and de facto band leader Paul Hoffman told the Smokey Mountain News in an interview last year. “I love playing bluegrass, but it’s not about the bluegrass as much as it’s about this acoustic ensemble thing — the challenge is to be a heavy metal band with a banjo.”
Calling it heavy metal might be a stretch, but Greensky Bluegrass’ soaring jams with bluesy psych-rock qualities have wowed US audiences. This has included selling out multiple nights at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheater, another venue where Bowling sat in this summer. Greensky Bluegrass’ magical jam factor also seems to elevate to the next dimension when Bowling is on board to expand the quintet into a six-piece unit with her unique sonic alchemy. She toured with the band in the fall of 2021, resulting in one of the group’s Courage From the Road live albums, and then recorded with them on their latest studio release, The Iceland Sessions (an EP recorded in 2023 and released this past spring.)
The vibe is lit from the start here at the Fillmore as Greensky Bluegrass come out rocking with a sustained energy level. “In Control” is an early highlight as Hoffman sings a soulful tune about not losing control, with Bowling adding some melodic piano to elevate the sound. “Last Winter in Copper Country” features the first extended exploration, with the group moving into a tightly syncopated jam that impresses with how the instruments all mesh together. Anders Beck on dobro, Michael Arlen Bont on banjo, Dave Bruzza on guitar, and Mike Devol on upright bass are all dialed in as they sync with Hoffman’s mandolin and Bowling’s piano to form a sonic collective that seems to operate by group telepathy.
“Born Again” from The Iceland Sessions is an uplifting gem with a short but sweet piano solo, while the stringed instruments shine with a crisp melodic clarity. “Grow Together” from 2022’s Stress Dreams is another highlight, with Hoffman singing an optimistic and romantic number about growing old together. Some stellar instrumental interplay here generates sparks, with Beck and Bowling as a dynamic duo on a smoking psychedelic jam that wins a big wave of cheers across the room. “Distracted” is another winner from The Iceland Sessions with an upbeat intro as the song jumps right into the deep end before a dazzling solo from Bowling that captivates the Fillmore. A hot jam on “Worried About the Weather” closes out the first set with a blast as Greensky Bluegrass fire on all cylinders.
When the group return for the second set, Hoffman informs the audience that it’s the 13-year anniversary of the release of their 2011 album Handguns, the group’s fourth album that served as a breakthrough to larger recognition. “We were messing around, and this happened,” he says as an introduction to “Bring Out Your Dead”. There’s a cinematic Old West vibe, with Hoffman sounding like an outlaw or perhaps a deputy of sorts, along with some fierce bluesy slide work from Beck. “Windshield” from 2014’s If Sorrows Swim wins a cheer of recognition as the opening notes ring out. Hoffman sings a mournful tale of heartache and sleepless nights, yet there’s a bluesy catharsis as he lets it all out with what feels like a soulful redemption.
“Who Is Frederico?” mixes things up with a funky Latin-esque groove, where Bowling stars again with her dynamic piano runs. “Solstice” is the longest track on The Iceland Sessions EP and it gets a great workout here. The song launches at a galloping pace and soars in a hard-rocking fashion as Hoffman sings of small victories amid great setbacks around the darkness of the winter solstice. A psychedelic breakdown with the guitars builds back up with some more of Bowling’s dazzling piano runs, igniting a wicked jam before Arlen Bont steps up with some nimble banjo runs to keep it going further.
“Don’t Lie” from Handguns provides a climactic peak to the show, a heartfelt track with Hoffman singing of how he hasn’t left the house in three days. It clocks in at just over five minutes on the studio recording but has evolved into one of Greensky’s classic jam vehicles. There’s a 24-minute version with Bowling on the group’s Courage for the Road |Winter 2020 live release, and tonight’s performance will reach a similar length.
There’s some dynamic interplay between all the stringed instruments on the extended intro jam that reflects some Grateful Dead influence, then some other 1970s classic rock influences, with Bowling adding keyboard psychedelia that elevates the whole sound. Bowling is like an Olympic athlete on the piano here, ripping off a series of electrifying melodic runs that are boosted higher still by the support of the Greensky strings on a killer jam for a crowd-pleasing finish.
It’s been more than three hours of ecstatic union here at the Fillmore, and Greensky Bluegrass cap it off with a raucous “Man Smart (Women Smarter)” encore. It feels like a strategic way to end the night, with a Grateful Dead classic for this crazy election season that finds a woman from the Bay Area aiming to become the first female President going up against the fascism of Donald Trump and his seditious cronies. “That’s right, the women are smarter. The women are smarter than the men today.”
Greensky Bluegrass co-headline the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park the following afternoon with one of the closing sets. It’s a beautiful day when the quintet (sans Bowling) hit the Swan Stage at 5:55pm, after an earlier heatwave. There’s also a heady vibe in the air following a magnificent set at the adjacent Towers of Gold Stage in the previous time slot from Madison Cunningham & Andrew Bird, performing their ingeniously re-arranged covers of songs from the legendary 1974 Buckingham/Nicks album.
It’s like a bonus set to compliment the Fillmore show as Greensky opens with the poignant “Past My Prime” from 2016’s Shouted, Written Down & Quoted album. When Hoffman sings of ambition haunting his dreams while reaching for grander things, it feels like an ode to all the musicians in the audience who never made it to the big time like this. “Courage for the Road” from 2019’s All My Money album re-ignites the musical energy from Friday night, an upbeat tune with some smoking banjo from Arlen Bont that fits the Hardly Strictly vibe so well.
The energy level in the audience isn’t quite what it was at the Fillmore, which would be hard to replicate here on a Saturday afternoon at a free festival. But it’s a great combo opportunity to be able to catch Greensky Bluegrass in their element on a Friday night at rock’s most sacred sonic temple, then again the next day in Golden Gate Park, where the psychedelic rock counterculture also had so many seminal moments in the 1960s. Only in San Francisco!
