Gov’t Mule Bewitch Trieste on the Final Leg of the European “Peace… Like A River” Tour (2023)
Performing: Gov’t Mule
Date: Tuesday, 21 November 2023
Location: Trieste / Politeama Rossetti / Italy
Gov’t Mule are simply one of those bands. Bands sworn to the old-school — to an analog sonic vocabulary. Few like them are left. A raw, stocky blues rock sound that bets most of its expression on the ferocity of extended jam moments, where blues, jazz, psychedelic rock, funk, reggae… all reach out and clasp hands — and a concert like this is guaranteed to launch you toward feelings that have no equal.
The band has been active since the mid-nineties, and its central figure remains the steadfast blues rock guitar virtuoso and vocalist Warren Haynes. In mid-June of this year they dropped their 13th studio album, »Peace… Like A River«. They spent September and October on a North American tour, then tacked on a handful of European dates in November. The very last of those — the one in Trieste — was, for fans of this legendary southern rock and jam outfit based in Slovenia, nothing short of a godsend. Word was the band would play in two sets with an intermission, totalling three hours of concert spectacle. Tempting.
Gov’t Mule are a quartet. Alongside Haynes, the only other original member in the current lineup is drummer Michael Abt; Danny Louis has been handling Hammond and electric keyboards for over 20 years and occasionally picks up an electric guitar, a trombone, or a trumpet; and rounding things out this year is newly integrated bassist Kevin Scott.
With Haynes, what you see is what you get — no smoke and mirrors. Gov’t Mule are a strictly live band, and the way they tackle material onstage is nothing short of astonishing, especially when you factor in how incredibly tight they are. Their musicianship is endlessly fascinating and never stops impressing, and what makes it even more remarkable is that they have to have a massive repertoire at their fingertips — because they build their setlists on the fly during tours, responding to what their audiences want. You won’t catch the same setlist twice on an entire tour. It goes even further than that — you couldn’t even say any two setlists are remotely similar. Which means if you’re a devoted fan, you pretty much have to go to every show on a given tour. Every concert is its own unique, one-of-a-kind experience. Now, the Trieste show was a slightly scaled-back affair — the band played a single set with the obligatory encore, but even so the whole thing ran for two hours and a good twenty minutes. All in one stretch.
Just a few moments into the opening Mule, it was clear that this final »Peace… Like A River« tour date in Trieste was going to be a ferocious concert experience, packed to the brim with intensity. The quartet locked in an exceptional rhythmic groove almost instantly, with Haynes weaving his phrasing into it and Louis layering on the Hammond. As for Haynes’s voice — it’s still completely faithful to him, working with sovereign confidence. His vocal color frequently calls Joe Bonamassa to mind, and at moments even a young David Gilmour — from the pre-Dark Side of the Moon era. The guitarist stays true to that fat, snarling Gibson LP tone. While Gov’t Mule were still teasing the crowd with opener Mule and another cut from the debut, Rockin’ Horse, the third song delivered the first of several extraordinarily long embedded jams. The artwork from the band’s second album »Dose« (1998) appeared in the background, and the band launched into Game Face, weaving in Mountain Jam — and neither Haynes nor the crew were in any hurry to leave. The charged atmosphere got a proper jolt with a Beatles moment: the band played an adapted She Said She Said (still from »Dose«), which flowed into Tomorrow Never Knows, with Haynes absolutely nailing the psychedelic vocal inflection of John Lennon in the latter.
The first portion of the set covered early-period material, capped off by another Dose classic, Birth of the Mule. This gave way to a section built around more recent stuff, centered on three tracks from the new album »Peace… Like A River« and the title track of the previous one, »Revolution Come, Revolution Go«. Gov’t Mule are a band that teases you with the expressiveness of their jams. They dive in with incredible depth, and at moments look so absorbed it’s as if they’re mid-trance — yet they’re always completely locked in. They know exactly where they are at every second. This part of the show had all the instrumentalists playfully bouncing ideas off a given motif with exceptional interplay, which only kept confirming just how perfectly calibrated and in-sync this crew is. Funky, kinetic grooves — occasionally offset by moments of real softness — were in no short supply, and bassist Kevin Scott put the exclamation point on things with a solo passage inside Revolution Come, Revolution Go. A delightful detour into reggae territory came courtesy of the new track The River Only Flows One Way, where Louis also brought out the trombone.
But the peak came in the closing stretch, when the band welded four songs into a single unbroken jam, each flowing into the next. They opened with Trane from the debut album, let their psychedelic side run loose along the way, and closed it out with a nod to the Grateful Dead and a St. Stephen passage. Then came the melancholic yet ferociously gripping Time To Confess, where Haynes once again fascinated in the role of unified vocal and guitar commander. It’s incredible how deftly he navigates each situation and how cunningly inventive he is at every turn — whether he’s parceling out transitions with bluesy fills or hammering through a rapid chord sequence that hits just as hard. And every one of those moments is unique. The man is seasoned, chiseled, loaded with experience and everything else that’s a prerequisite before you can call someone a world-class performer. But layered on top of all that is this in-the-moment instinct of pure inspiration that drives Haynes onstage — and that’s exactly what keeps surprising the listener, keeps them hooked, and refuses to let them go.
When Scott dug into a jangling, aggressive bass line and Haynes was still tuning his guitar, it didn’t look like things were about to become what they did. But the sequence of events dictated exactly that. Tom Waits’s Goin’ Out West, in Gov’t Mule’s hands laced with mischief and a thick boogie feel, sent the adrenaline levels in the room through the roof. And for the finale, another marriage of reggae and blues — an adaptation of Al Green’s I’m a Ram, with Haynes’s wah-wah adding its own seasoning. Final bomb! Right hook! And with that, the band left the stage.
But they came back for the obligatory encore. Haynes chose to play one of the songs he had written for The Allman Brothers Blues Band. It was the magnificent Soulshine, which melted every heart in the room for good. The audience knew this one well, and the packed venue (just a handful of seats empty during the show) thundered back to life for another ten minutes with the band.
What more can you say after a hypnotic encounter like that with the magnificent Gov’t Mule? A concert drenched in emotion and energy that’s near-impossible to match. Haynes is an ace of his own kind. He remains surrounded by an outstanding musical crew. The band plays at full throttle, stays incredibly well-oiled and tight, and is as a result astonishingly convincing on stage. When the Trieste show wrapped up, plenty of people were already wondering — myself included, I’ll admit — when and where they’d next get to catch on stage that authenticity, that raw, heartfelt openness that defines everything Warren Haynes and his Gov’t Mule lay out there for you. Here’s hoping the guys make it back to Europe soon!
Author: Edita Klemen & Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Mule
2. Rocking Horse
3. Game Face / Mountain Jam / Game Face
4. She Said She Said / Tomorrow Never Knows (orig. The Beatles)
5. Birth of the Mule
6. Same as It Ever Was
7. The River Only Flows One Way
8. Revolution Come, Revolution Go
9. Gone Too Long
10. Trane / Rumble / Sex Machine / St. Stephen Jam
11. Time to Confess
12. Goin’ Out West (orig. Tom Waits)
13. I’m a Ram (orig. Al Green)
—encore—
14. Soulshine (orig. The Allman Brothers Band)
