Photos and Review by Ilya Mirman
Charlie Starr and company turned a Sunday afternoon on the shores of Webster Lake into a two-hour celebration of riffs, roots and a quarter-century spent doing things their own way.
There are bands that survive 25 years, and there are bands that somehow manage to make 25 years feel like momentum. Blackberry Smoke is firmly in the second camp.
On Sunday afternoon at Indian Ranch in Webster, Massachusetts, the Atlanta-born road warriors delivered nearly two hours of Southern rock, country, blues and old-school rock & roll that served less as a nostalgia trip than as a reminder of why the band has endured in the first place. Blackberry Smoke may be celebrating its 25th anniversary, but there was nothing ceremonial about the performance. This was still a working rock band — loose where it wanted to be, tight where it needed to be, and powered by one of the most distinctive frontmen in American roots music.
At the center, as always, was Charlie Starr, the singer, guitarist and chief songwriter whose easy Georgia drawl and seemingly bottomless reservoir of guitar licks have become Blackberry Smoke’s signature. Starr doesn’t need much theatricality. Give him a guitar, a microphone and a song with a good groove and he commands the stage almost casually, shifting from country storyteller to blues guitarist to full-throttle Southern rocker without ever making the transitions feel forced. Around him is a band built for exactly this kind of music: longtime guitarist and vocalist Paul Jackson, bassist and vocalist Richard Turner, keyboardist Brandon Still, multi-instrumentalist and guitarist Benji Shanks, and drummer Kent Aberle. Together they produce a sound that can be muscular one moment and spacious the next, with three guitars available to snarl, weave and converse while Still’s keyboards fill the spaces between them.
Indian Ranch, the wonderfully intimate amphitheater tucked along Webster Lake, was an especially natural setting for it. Blackberry Smoke’s music has always sounded best when there’s a little air around it — less arena spectacle than communal Saturday-night music, even when, as on this occasion, Saturday night happens to arrive on a Sunday afternoon.
The entrance set the tone. Bill Withers’ funky “Kissing My Love” rolled over the PA before the band came out swinging with “Like I Am,” followed quickly by “Good One Comin’ On.” It was a smart opening salvo: two songs that capture Blackberry Smoke’s gift for taking familiar ingredients — blues guitar, country phrasing, boogie rhythm and a little barroom swagger — and turning them into something instantly identifiable as their own.
From there, the set moved freely through the band’s catalog rather than treating the 25th anniversary as a chronological museum tour. “Payback’s a Bitch” hit with a slow, heavy strut, while the newer “Hammer and the Nail” sounded completely at home beside material written years earlier. That continuity is one of Blackberry Smoke’s strengths. Trends have come and gone around them, but Starr and company have spent a quarter-century refining essentially the same musical vocabulary instead of chasing whatever happened to be fashionable.
And it is a particularly rich vocabulary. “Bottom of This” carried the grit of early Blackberry Smoke. “Let It Burn” brought a flash of country-rock heat, while “Pretty Little Lie” reminded everyone just how efficiently Starr can write a hook. “Lonesome for a Livin’” leaned into the band’s country side, followed by “What Comes Naturally” and “Old Enough to Know,” giving the middle of the show a welcome stretch of storytelling and melody before the guitars began gathering force again. Then came “Waiting for the Thunder,” one of those Blackberry Smoke songs that seems engineered to grow larger onstage.
If Starr is the focal point, the pleasure of watching Blackberry Smoke is hearing how little wasted space there is around him. Jackson remains the ideal guitar foil, less interested in competing with Starr than in making the entire guitar attack bigger. Shanks adds another set of colors — guitar, slide and roots textures — while Richard Turner’s bass gives the music its deep, rolling foundation. Still is the band’s secret weapon, slipping organ and piano into the arrangements in ways that connect Blackberry Smoke as much to gospel, soul and honky-tonk as to the Southern-rock bands that inevitably appear in descriptions of their music. Behind it all, Aberle drives the songs with power while leaving them room to breathe.
That chemistry came into especially sharp focus during “Sleeping Dogs,” which opened into a “Midnight Special” interlude, one of several moments when the setlist became more of a suggestion than a boundary. That looseness continued with “Son of the Bourbon / I’ve Always Been Crazy,” followed by “Whatcha Know Good,” which tipped its hat to rock history with a “Stairway to Heaven” outro. Later, “Run Away From It All” picked up a snippet of John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.”
These little musical detours are part of Blackberry Smoke’s charm. They aren’t presented like clever quotations inserted for applause. They feel more like musicians speaking to one another in their shared language — the records, riffs and songs that made them want to play in the first place.
The late-set stretch was especially strong. “Woman in the Moon” gave way to “Ain’t Got the Blues,” before the unmistakable opening of “One Horse Town” brought one of Starr’s finest songs into focus. “One Horse Town” is Blackberry Smoke at its best: specific enough to feel lived-in, universal enough to belong to anyone who has ever wondered whether the place that made you might also be the place you need to leave. Starr sings songs like this without overselling them. He trusts the lyric, trusts the melody and trusts the audience to meet him halfway.
By the time the main set closed with “Run Away From It All,” Blackberry Smoke had touched nearly every part of its musical personality without the show ever feeling scattered. The encore offered one final reminder of where some of this music comes from. The band tore into ZZ Top’s “Thunderbird,” a perfectly chosen salute to another group that built a career on groove, guitars, personality and stubborn stylistic independence.
Then came “Ain’t Much Left of Me.” It was an ideal closer, expanded with an “Amazing Grace” introduction and a dash of Van Halen’s “Take Your Whiskey Home” — gospel, hard rock, Southern soul and honky-tonk rubbing shoulders in the same song. In other hands that mixture might feel improbable. With Blackberry Smoke, it makes perfect sense.
That may ultimately be the most impressive thing about this band after a quarter-century. Blackberry Smoke has never needed to decide exactly what it is. Country? Certainly. Southern rock? Absolutely. Blues? Plenty of it. Classic rock? Without question. But after 25 years, maybe the simplest description is the right one: Blackberry Smoke is a great American rock & roll band.
At Indian Ranch, Charlie Starr and his bandmates didn’t sound like musicians looking backward at a career. They sounded like six guys who still love playing this music together — and who have gotten exceptionally good at it.