Green Leaf Rustlers – From Within Marin
Silver Arrow – Out Now
A funny thing happened on the way to releasing From Within Marin by the Green Leaf Rustlers. Chris Robinson reunited with his brother, Rich Robinson, and recorded a new Black Crowes album, then decided to tour with them. The result was that the other Rustlers, Barry Sless, Greg Loiacono, Pete Sears, and John Molo were left in the lurch. Even though according to Robinson, “Green Leaf Rustlers are a Marin County hippie hayride, rockin’ and rollin’ through our favourite classic cosmic country covers and keeping the good people dancing the night away under star-filled western skies.”
Yet such an admission couldn’t keep them from being a bump on the road to a new Black Crowes tour. After all, they rarely left their home base in Northern California. Now with the Crowes back in action, we’re left to listen to this live set recorded by Betty Cantor Jackson (whose Grateful Dead soundboard recordings from the seventies are legendary) and wonder about what might have been. The Rustlers are all great players in their own right and their choice of covers include Gram Parsons, J.J. Cale, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones, Townes Van Zandt, and Bob Dylan.
Opening the set is their take on Parson’s Big Mouth Blues, with the twin guitars of Sless and Loiacono setting this hippie hayride on fire, filling the speakers with incendiary licks and twin leads. While they don’t play any Dead covers, much of their sound comes directly out of that playbook, which isn’t a bad thing when the jamming soars so high. Taking No Expectations to a different dimension, the playing is languid and lovely with guitar licks hitting all the right notes.
Taking on Folsom Prison Blues they create a hybrid virtually unrecognizable from the original. Over the course of almost ten minutes, the riffing is hot and heavy, covering a number of seismic shifts before blasting off into stratospheres Johnny Cash could only imagine. Digging into the Zimmerman blues, their take on Positively 4th Street deliciously goes in directions that Dylan and the Dead never examined during their days on the road together.
Boogieing with the best of them, Green Leaf Rustlers show why they are an uncontrollable force of nature. While they may have only been sighted in Northern California and Alaska, for those who have been lucky enough to see them, the memories will last a lifetime. For the rest of us, at least we have From Within Marin.
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