W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

Lee Bains III Is Done Playing Dead

I haven’t had the opportunity to see Lee play live since well before Covid (I’m pretty sure the last time was at Asbury Park’s beloved Saint back in 2018), so I was super stoked when his Done Playing Dead Tour was announced back in February and more importantly would be passing through New York at Ridgewood, Queens’ very own Bar Freda, an independent DIY venue which I’d not been to previously.

I immediately knew that the evening was going to be a blast when during sound check, Lee began noodling the riff to “Opelika” off of his and The Glory Fire’s debut album, There Is A Bomb In Gilead. Bomb just so happens to be one of my favorite albums of the past 20(ish) years. Alas, this tour is just Lee on his own with neither of the Williamson brothers joining him on the road this go around. LB3, however, has a whole bunch of pre-recorded backing tracks to accompany him and while it doesn’t make up for the lack of Blake and Adam and their on stage antics, it most definitely worked just fine.

As anyone who knows Lee, already knows, he’s passionate and very vocal about his politics. Right out of the gate, he started off with a very anti Musk rant and proceeded to dedicate “The Company Man” off of 2014’s Dereconstructed album…”don’t ever trust a company man”. Bains would proceed to preface nearly every song of the night with some sort of political, historical or human rights diatribe. And while, I know lots of people don’t want to be preached to when they are out for a night of rock and roll music, those are not the people who go to see Lee Bains III play, and if they somehow end up at one of his shows not knowing this, well, that’s just too bad for them.

Rocking out with just his electric guitar and his pre-recorded backup music, Lee managed an ideal ballance of rage and tenderness. He wears his feelings about the world front and center, making no attempt to sugar coat any of them. He told a story about visiting the Tenement Museum that afternoon with his wife and how he learned how the Jewish women of the Lower East Side took on the beef industry for price gouging kosher meat and WON. He then segued this into a vignette about his beloved neighborhood of South Birmingham and how important community is. How grass roots movements are all about community, about different people from differnt walks of life getting together and working together to make a better world for everyone. And then he blasted right into “Nail My Feet To The Southside Of Town”.

As powerful and bombastic as his electric songs were, I do have to say that my two favorite moments of the evening were when Lee pulled out his acoustic guitar and walked off of the stage (actually not much more than a platform) and first did a fantasticly moving version of “There Is A Bomb In Gilead”, which he prefaced with a correlation between what is going on today in Gaza and Israel with the biblical story of Gilead (which he notes that as a young child always thought the book was refering to a ‘bomb” rather than a “balm”). The other highlight of the evening was during the requested song, “Rednecks”, a tender finger picked balad that almost comes across as a Jason Isbell tune on Lee’s 2022 release, Old Time Folks. What made the tune resonate so incredibly on Friday night at Bar Freda was the impromptu sing along from the crowd with the chorus of “don’t go against yourself” as Lee performed an almost tent revival call and response with all of us in the crowd. Lee with his gospel-like “Please Don’t Go” answered from the crowd with our “don’t go against yourself”.

Closing out the evening, we got a missive how we all needed to wrestle back the true meaing of “good old boy” from the likes of Donald Trump and his cronies. The original meaning of the phrase depicted strong, unpretentious, loyal, trustworthy, hard working people. Bains would go on to say that Trump has hoodwinked way too many people into thinking that he was all of those things, but “Trump sure ain’t none of them”. And then the conclusion of the eveing’s music with a kick ass performance of “Good Old Boy” from the Youth Detention album that had me thinking for the first time ever that this 2017 tune could have been a Rage Against the Machine song with its vitriolic rage and animus to the establishment political class. But then again, none of this should have been a surprise.

All in all, LB3 didn’t put on an exesively long set, but is was imensely powerful, moving and though provoking. Oh and it was a fucking raging rock and roll show to boot.