Fresh off the “GD60” Grateful Dead anniversary celebrations in San Francisco over the previous weekend, Billy Strings started the next leg of his extensive touring schedule in Milwaukee on Friday. Although the bluegrass superstar made a name for himself partially via Dead covers as his star began to rise, he stopped incorporating their songs in his repertoire a few years ago. That hasn’t stopped the jam band crowd from continuing to flock to his shows, though. Jamming with Phish last year surely helped his cause, and on his recent tour of Australia, he was spotted in the studio with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.
Yet even on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s passing, Strings stuck to his guns at the Fiserv Forum, playing two sets of his own originals and an unpredictable assortment of other roots-music covers for an appreciative crowd. The upper bowl of the arena was curtained off, giving the appearance of a nearly sold-out crowd, a significant step up from his last Milwaukee appearance at the Riverside in 2021. Another change: the addition of fiddler Alex Hargreaves, who made an immediate impact during the instrumental “Malfunction Junction” opener. Each member of the quintet proved dazzling in his own right at some point or other in the show, but most often when the spotlight wasn’t on Strings himself, the fiddle became the natural focal point.
Next, the band rolled out three tunes from Strings’ second Billboard chart-topping album, 2021’s Renewal. “The Fire On My Tongue” continued in fairly traditional bluegrass form, and then “Heartbeat Of America” showcased Billy’s first electric flourish of the night. Although he plays only acoustic guitars, they’re channeled through an array of effects as extensive as any shoegazer, and the way Strings oscillates between acoustic and electric sounds—sometimes mid-shred—is a truly unique approach. His amplified guitar moans in the latter section of “Heartbeat” combined with the fiddle in a way that blew away the studio version.
While the band is adept at group improv, as most modern bluegrass outfits are, such excursions weren’t the norm Friday. Despite his moniker, Strings is as much a troubadour as an instrumentalist, picking out great stories from the vast scope of Americana, as well as writing his own. One of the bigger surprises in the setlist was a cover of “Ghost Train” by Bad Livers, an Austin band from the ‘90s who were similarly based in roots music yet impossible to nail down to a single genre. It was only the second time Strings had played it live. The band then expertly wove its way seamlessly into Johnny Horton’s “Ole Slew-Foot” as if the two songs were meant to be fused together.
Following a mellower interlude of “Stratosphere Blues/I Believe in You” (featuring Strings on a double-neck acoustic) and “In The Clear,” the first set closed with “Seven Weeks In Country,” off the 2024 album Highway Prayers, and this was an impressive foray from a progressive bluegrass jam into an aggressive guitar-led showcase. This was also a great opportunity to show off the brand new lighting setup, courtesy of Saxton Waller. Waller handled lights for jam-tronica pioneers STS9 for 17 years before leaving the fold in 2016. Friday was his debut as Strings’ lighting director and fans were bubbling about the new setup of diamond-shaped units behind the stage even before the show started. It was a tasteful display, a bit scaled back from STS9’s glory days perhaps, but effective and inventive.
To begin the second set, the band (minus Hargreaves) encircled a single mic and performed “Richard Petty” a cappella, then the full ensemble took on the Bill Monroe staple “My Sweet Blue-Eyed Darlin’” to longtime fans’ delight. A lengthy rambling jam in 6/8 ensued with Strings’ guitar work thrilling the crowd as the music coalesced into a beloved song: Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald.” They performed all six epic verses and a nifty electric jam in the middle, with Billy’s voice sounding uncannily like Gordon’s. (He’d covered Lightfoot at his last Milwaukee gig as well, both songs naturally featuring Wisconsin references.)
This emotional surge would be difficult to surpass for the remainder of the show, but there were still plenty of highlights. “Fire Line” wowed the crowd with a dizzying guitar/fiddle duel, and when the song had basically ended, an atmospheric stretch of improv developed into “End Of The Rainbow,” a Frank Wakefield song that Strings covers regularly, that was rendered especially memorable thanks to Waller’s vivid visual approach and one of banjoist Billy Failing’s most impressive solos. Then there was a three-song segue suite, with the wide-ranging instrumental “Pyramid Country” taking us to experimental realms no other bluegrass band could reach (and a tease of the Inspector Gadget theme), and wrapping up with a fierce take on the traditional “John Hardy,” a fan favorite that brought the house down.
After this, the band members all stepped back and basked in the well-earned crowd roar for a minute. They didn’t leave the stage, but “How Mountain Girls Can Love” was the de facto encore, a quick traditional sendoff before curfew. It was Strings’ first Milwaukee-area appearance where he didn’t play “Dust In A Baggie” or any of his earliest material, perhaps distancing himself from the silliness of his younger, less sober self. Judging by this crowd’s response, those oldies weren’t missed one bit.