John Garcia brought the songs of Kyuss back to Lawrence for one special night

May 19, 2024

Nick Spacek,

John Garcia. // photo by Nick Spacek

John Garcia
with Jared James Nichols, Telekinetic Yeti, Left Lane Cruiser, and Drifter
Liberty Hall
Friday, May 17

The crowd present when former Kyuss frontman John Garcia took the stage Friday night could’ve easily fit into the Bottleneck. Liberty Hall was not packed, even with the balcony closed off and the audience limited to the ground floor. It was a little disheartening to see an artist who’d not been through the area in years play to maybe a couple hundred folks, rather than a packed room.

However, I go to a lot of shows, and I can think of very few (maybe The Sadies last year and a couple others) where the crowd was so very there for the band playing. These were not dilettantes, but diehards who’d either been waiting decades to hear this music live again or simply hoping and praying that they would maybe, possibly get to hear these songs live, if ever.

Left Lane Cruiser’s guitarist said to me after their set that you could find a guitarist or whatever to play these songs, but Garcia himself was the one part you couldn’t recreate. He’s singular – one of those vocalists no matter with whom he’s performing, you know that voice instantly. There’s no one else who can sing these songs, except maybe the full force of nearly everyone in the audience, and even those not willing to risk their voices trying to hit those notes were banging their heads in perfect time and hitting every time change with a pointed finger or raised fist.

Magically good, all around. If you missed it, you missed out.

Jared James Nichols. // photo by Nick Spacek

Jared James Nichols is a little more BluesHammer than I usually dig. I for sure saw quite a few folks singing along from the very start of their set as well, as enjoying the guitar lines from songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” or “Norwegian Wood,” to say nothing of the raucous cheers which met playing the entirety of “War Pigs” to close their set.

It’s just not for me, though. My preferences run to straight hard rock or straight blues. Hard blues rock for me starts and ends with ZZ Top, and anything else has me tapping out pretty quickly. It got a little noodly early on, and while I’m all for some excursions into the musical aether, on Friday I wasn’t feeling the solos or repeated inquiries as to how Lawrence was feeling that night. I was fine. My feet were a little sore. Thanks for asking.

Telekinetic Yeti. // photo by Nick Spacek

Like I said when I saw them last summer, Dubuque doom duo Telekinetic Yeti make a lot more noise than you’d expect for two dudes. Within the confines of the Bottleneck, it had been aggressively big, but when allowed to fill the space of Liberty Hall, it became aggressively expansive. Those riffs and drum fills were very accordingly epic and, with an appropriate area in which to unleash them, Telekinetic Yeti’s songs got to embrace their full rockness. In a club, this is doom, but in a theater, it’s pure rock ‘n’ roll. For all the lurch, give, and pull, this shit gets groovy when it has the chance to do so, and it’s all the better for it.

Left Lane Cruiser. // photo by Nick Spacek

Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Left Lane Cruiser are the nasty blues duo you didn’t know you wanted to kick off your weekend. Their songs could easily soundtrack a music video shot at a strip club on a county road somewhere in the middle of nowhere or the drive home from such a place afterward at 2am. It’s a frantic, wilder descendant of Hasil Adkins and R.L. Burnside, fueled by a stack of Coors Light cans. A (far) less kitschy Jackyl. Their music is the epitome of a song that begins playing immediately after hearing the words, “What’d you call me, motherfucker?”

Drifter. // photo by Nick Spacek

A little over 15 years ago, I saw legendary experimental musical recluse Jandek play a church in downtown Austin. At the time, I remarked that if I’d walked outside afterward to discover the apocalypse had come during the show, I wouldn’t have been one bit surprised. That’s the way I feel every time I see Drifter play. It’s the sound of the end times, and their approach to heavy music is so incredibly layered, it seems as though trying to sum it up in a paragraph beyond, “Hey, you just kind of have to see them, but not so much see them as experience how the sound affects your body while they’re playing, because some stuff hits your ears and other stuff rattles your nervous system in a way that make you feel like you might be dying, but that fucking riff is sick” seems a little reductive.

Suffice it to say, the fact that the sun was still shining when their opening set ended was weird as hell.

All photos by Nick Spacek

James Garcia