Larkin Poe Brings Down the House and Sets It on Fire
Poor Reba McEntire. While she was playing the 18,000-seat Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee March 17, Larkin Poe was shaking the foundation of venerable old Turner Hall Ballroom across the street with their turbocharged electric blues.
I picture the Queen of Country stopping in the middle of “Fancy” and ordering a roadie to go over there and tell them to keep it down, for cripes sake.
It. Was. Loud. These two sisters of the South – literal sisters, Rebecca and Megan Lovell, Knoxville born, Georgia raised, Nashville residing – somehow produce as big a sound with lap steel and electric guitar as southern rock royalty did with their iconic three-guitar attack.
This is Delta blues, strapped to a rocket ship.
The band roared through its catalog, wisely leaning heavily on their latest, strongest album, Blood Harmony.
The band was clearly having a grand old time, the crowd vibing along with them. By the second song, Rebecca was hopscotching across the stage to the pogo-stick beat of party anthem “Kicking the Blues” while Megan bent over an intense lap steel solo.
Rebecca and Megan intertwined guitar parts on the sizzling “Summertime Sunset,” a tale about the most classic of all rock subjects, a hot woman. “My baby is a killer,” Rebecca sings. “She's such a stunner / It hurts to watch too long / Like a summertime sunset.”
“Preachin’ Blues,” a punched up cover of blues pioneer Son House’s “Preachin’ the Blues” (recorded almost a century ago for Paramount Records, which was based just up the road from Milwaukee in Grafton), is a heavy-bottomed stomp in Larkin Poe’s hands.
Elsewhere, Larkin Poe evoked some of the hardest-rocking rock in the rock canon. “Holy Ghost Fire” echoes Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” strongly in the intro and subtly throughout. Mid-set highlight “Blue Ridge Mountains” might have rocked hardest of all, bringing to mind Led Zeppelin. But Zep could never boast sisterly harmonies over the top of growling guitars.
The sole ballad of the evening, “Might as Well Be Me,” led straight into a thunderous “Bad Spell,” presented in full rock show style with screaming guitars and flashing spotlights. “Boy, you cast a bad spell / A bad spell over me / You got me ringing like a doorbell / You got me buzzing like a yellow bee.”
The protagonist of “Wanted Woman / AC/DC” is wanted in both senses of the word, an outlaw desired by all. Rebecca swaggered, demanding and gleefully receiving adoration from the crowd. The fans didn’t need any encouragement – they were fully in her spell.
“Georgia Off My Mind” might be Larkin Poe’s most autobiographical and best song. They sing of taking that road from Georgia to Nashville, a journey not just of miles but of career. They sing of missing home but driven to find success: “I hate the way you look / Gettin' smaller in my rearview / Rollin' up the road to Music City, Lord / To sing my hometown blues.”
And: “Now that my wheels are turnin' / Now that we've said goodbye / I'm trading my sweet and lonesome past / For a rhinestone-studded sky.”
They’re a long way from home now, after “18 years of touring together,” Rebecca pointed out. But home, and the south, are never far from mind. They sing in “Blue Ridge Mountains” of “drinking sweet tea” and “I gotta get back to my home / Among the ferns and dogwood trees / That's the dirt where I was grown.”
In “Southern Comfort,” they sing of kudzu and “I'm a little nobody from the middle of nowhere / Gotta get home, I know I will, cause / I'm missing that southern comfort.”
And they cite their last wishes in “Back Down South”: “When my race is run / Hear that angel sound / May the good Lord show me mercy / Send me back down south.”
The sisters busted out some swag for the encore – “Deep Stays Down,” with its spooky, plucked Delta blues riff – wearing Larkin Poe tour t-shirts. At song’s end, Rebecca took hers off and tossed it into the crowd while the band threw drumsticks, guitar picks and St. Patrick’s Day beads to the gleeful recorded sound of Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”
They departed the stage and our ears began their recovery to the crooning of “My Way.” Appropriate: Larkin Poe mines the classic foundations of rock, blast-furnacing the blues into a concoction all their own.
Doing it their way.