Johnny Blue Skies Pushes the Limit in ATX Tour Kickoff

“We have a hard curfew about 30 seconds from now,” Sturgill Simpson announced at the 3 hour and 14 minute mark of his epic Friday night set at the Moody Center. Bringing the over 10-minute jam of “Situation” to an abrupt close, he conceded, “That wasn’t the finisher we hoped for.” 

Regardless, Simpson’s alter ego Johnny Blue Skies and his band the Dark Clouds could hardly have given the sold out crowd more as the quintet kicked off their Mutiny for the Masses tour behind the freshly released Mutiny After Midnight LP. True to the new album’s ethos (and the giant disco ball hovering high above the stage), Simpson and crew leaned all-in on the dirty disco and funk grooves that characterize the Kentucky chameleon’s current muse. 

Opener “Make America Fuk Again” set the tone promptly at 8pm, not only in counterculture revolutionary attitude but in a 15-minute funk breakdown as the disco ball splattered blue and red lights across the stadium. The ball was about the only accessory of note for the otherwise stripped-down stage, with the band tightly packed together underneath two gigantic dueling skeleton banners that hearkened the Grateful Dead enough to foreshadow the utterly relentless jam session to follow.   

Elements of Simpson’s 2024 ACL headlining set still played into the current sound as the outfit sliced their extended grooves with enough Southern rock choogle and Allman Brothers guitar licks from Laur “Little Joe” Joamets to meld older material, like “Best Clockmaker on Mars” and “A Good Look,” with JBS’s “Excited Delirium.” Likewise, Robbie Crowell’s keys and sax helped blend the gorgeous hazy wash of Passage Du Desir’s “Jupiter’s Faerie” with throwbacks “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” and “It Ain’t All Flowers” in a mix that set up the new cut “Venus” as the disco ball dropped low over the stage.  

The second act of the setlist kicked off with the band’s cover of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” reigniting the disco glow for “Everyone Is Welcome” and the driving “Right Kind of Dream.” “All Said and Done” flowed with an almost Pink Floyd prog swirl before “Long White Line,” from Simpson’s breakout Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, got the crowd singing along.  

Simpson remained largely head-down in his own guitar. His first real acknowledgement of the crowd coming about two hours in, as “Call to Arms” gave way to the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” when he snarled, “Ain’t you glad you pay all them taxes? Bombs ain’t gonna build themselves.” The following blast of “Ain’t That a Bitch” hit like a dance floor rebellion, Simpson’s brand of long-building revolution overflowing from SOUND & FURY to propulsive, unleashed catharsis. 

The latter third of the show began to flag a bit more as the disco ball lights gave way and Simpson leaned deeper into his crooked country drawl with “Life of Sin” and “One for the Road.” The artist hasn’t seemed to fully figure out how to mix his early Outlaw country phases into the various evolutions of his sound that have followed – especially Mutiny’s funked fireworks – but Friday night evidenced that his fans are rightly willing to follow the songwriter through his various stylistic turns. In fact, it’s an interesting feature of current Americana artists and audiences: a refreshing openness to embrace expansive divergence á la Tyler Childers and S.G. Goodman. There apparently are no lanes on Kentucky roads.   

As Simpson acknowledged before launching into the inadvertently penultimate “Scooter Blues”: “That was a lot of miles and a lot of years, and I was a much younger and more angry man. I’m finding myself riding a different wave these days.” 

All of the pearl snaps and ball caps grooving to Johnny Blue Skies throughout the Moody Center suggested his fans are along for the ride as well. And Austin served as the perfect place for JBS to be “still working on the sound” – one could only conclude that Simpson’s eclectic jams would have killed it at the Armadillo World Headquarters.

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