I thoroughly enjoyed Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds at Barclay’s Center last Friday. So much so that I called up guitarist Laur Joamets to discuss the show and the band. I’ve gotten to know Laur since I reached out to him on social media a couple years ago after being so impressed by his playing. I am really looking forward to his solo album, Foreign Feathers, which will be out at the end of next month. Stay tuned for more on that.
This article was commissioned by Live for Live Music, where I will be contributing regularly. You can see that here. Read my earlier feature interview with Laur here. Share this post if you enjoy it, and please subscribe while you’re here!
Photo by Charley Crespo
I’m not sure whether or not Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds are a jam band, but they are definitely the best jamming band on the road right now. That fact was underlined by their performance last Friday, October 16 at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.
The Dark Clouds came out promptly at 8:00 PM, lit into “Long White Line” with nary a word and basically didn’t stop playing for three hours, with every song segueing into the next via extended jams. The studio version of their setlist clocks in at 2:15, or 45 minutes less than they played.
“We play as long as the curfew allows,” says guitarist Laur Joamets, who spent the night leaning on a stool, his left leg in a walking boot thanks to a hairline fracture of the fibula.
Sturgill Simpson was a rising star when he stopped touring in 2021. He returned three years later under a new name, Johnny Blue Skies. The name was ambiguous, but the music was not. Over the course of two albums, 2024’s Passage du Desir and last March’s Mutiny After Midnight, and the tours that have followed, the band featuring Joamets, bassist Kevin Black, keyboardist/saxophonist Robbie Crowell and drummer Miles Miller have returned to being a formidable, hard-hitting quintet.
In Brooklyn, the band’s relentless, dynamic performance was thorough and career-spanning, including “Sitting Here Without You” from Simpson’s 2013 debut High Top Mountain and seven songs from Mutiny. The sound was remarkably crisp and separate, like listening to an excellent, very loud stereo, giving each instrument room to breathe and stand out. Kudos to sound man Chris Mitchell.
One could hear the clear separation between Joamets and Simpson’s guitars. The latter mostly played a red Gibson 335, with hard-driving rhythm that sometimes pounded like Roy Clark backing Al Green. The two guitarists played beautifully together, sometimes in unison, sometimes in a push and pull or call and response.
“We just listen to each other,” says Joamets. “Stu is a great guitarist. There was a track on the last album where i had layered so many guitars and I really thought they were done, that there was nothing left to add, but Stu came up with a part that was so necessary and very percussive. I was wowed by his ability to hear something missing and lay it down. That’s just how we work. We try to finish and complete what the other guy is playing.”
An hour into the show, Simpson switched to a Les Paul without the music pausing, for a few songs, and his playing became heavier and less funk-driven. “He’s more aggressive and plays bigger chords on that guitar, which is tuned to some sort of mountain Open G that I think Stu made up himself,” says Joamets. “It serves a similar purpose to Keith Richards’ Open G thing, but it’s totally original to him.”
Joamets says that the jamming transitions, which create a musical suite, developed during the Passage du Desir tour. “We never really had a conversation about it,” he says. “It just started happening.” They are aided by their in-ear monitors and the fact that Simpson and Miller have microphones that can connect directly to the band, helping guide each other.
The setlists, which change every night, are usually written by Simpson or Miller. They all get them about an hour before the show, then meet up in the warmup room.
“Those transitions are super necessary to rehearse, especially for the rhythm section,” says Joamets. “I honestly don’t know how Miles and Kevin do it, because they steer the ship. I can always just sit out for a second, but they don’t have that luxury. Miles is probably the most musical drummer that I know of. He’s a great songwriter and singer and plays most of the instruments on his solo albums [Mr. Runaway, 2025 and Solid Gold, 2023]. He’s a very intentional player – there’s a reason for everything he does, and he plays music, not drums.”
Some of the transitions develop into full songs. In Brooklyn, in between “Brace For Impact” and “Welcome to Earth,” two songs from 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, they played Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Ramble Tamble,” which Joamets says they sort of stumbled into during a soundcheck rehearsal.
“That jam was developing and Stu just asked, ‘What are we doing with this? It sounds familiar,’” Joamets says. “Someone said ‘Ramble Tamble’ and, bam, we were playing it. Who doesn’t love CCR?”
The setlist in Brooklyn was on point, moving from outlaw country to funky dance grooves, deep blues with echoes of Gov’t Mule, psychedelic rock that evoked Pink Floyd and headbanging metal. It felt seamless and whole to me, so I asked Joamets if it felt as good to him.
“Yeah,” he said. “But the thing about setlists is they reveal themselves on stage and it’s totally subjective how good or bad they are. I enjoy the fact that they’re different every night. As my friend Audley Freed (currently playing with Sheryl Crow) says, you can’t be objective about what’s happening on stage because you’re so in the moment.”
But, he adds, the group is in such a strong, consistent groove together that the floor is high. When a band is hitting the note together like that, there are no bad nights; they start with good and get better from there.
They do a mean cover of Nirvana’s In Bloom”
“If you play that long together, you establish almost a telepathy,” says Joamets, whose debut solo album Foreign Feathers will be released in late November. “The band gets so tight that things can just happen.”
Just about anyone seeing Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds on this tour understands what he means, certainly anyone who was in Brooklyn. My friend Janine, a music fanatic who goes to more shows than anyone I know and was riding the rail at Barclays, texted me an hour into the show.
“I am BLOWN AWAY. Where do we put him?”
“Wrong question,” I responded. ““Don’t think about that. He just is what he is.”
Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third straight book to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.