My son turned me onto a singer, songwriter and musician named Barns Courtney a few years ago. I loved several of his songs, but when I listened to the entire collection on my music app, I thought his voice was interestingly unpredictable. He would go up really high and down low, kind of too low for his range. Sometimes he had to go through all kinds of machinations to reach his note. But there was so much heart and passion behind the singing that I kept listening.
Courtney came to the Paradise Rock Club in Boston this month, October. My son was at school and he didn’t want to travel back to town so my husband and I attended.
I didn’t know what to expect. I couldn’t figure out if we were going to have a hard rockin’ time, or if we were in for a kind of light rock folk concert. I watched a few of his videos, but didn’t get a feel for what he was really about. When he and the band finally appeared, after quite a long wait, it was absolute rock magic. His voice was rock steady and the range was perfect.
He came out to Fun Never Ends. Courtney jumped onto the stage with his head banging, his dyed platinum hair was flying all over the place singing, “Put on your sneakers. (Oh oh.) Blow up the speakers. (Yea yea.) All you pleasure seekers.” His red and black leather jacket covered his bare chest and he wore several necklaces, one almost matched mine, which was a large silver heart. He played his guitar so effortlessly and sang so effortlessly with all of us, “Oh the fun never ends/Yeah in the morning/Your sweat is pouring, Oh, you’re so fucking boring/Told you so.” He was intense and crisp and he put all of his energy into the performance. That was just the first song, but it continued all night. And, of course, there were those beautiful, perfectly-shaped teeth in that perfectly-shaped beautiful face
About three songs into it, right before Hobo Rocket he said, I” wasn’t sure if you would show up. It’s been a long time.” Three years to be exact. Courtney had had a trauma whereby his record company canceled his record while he was on tour, and then he just kind of disappeared.
Mid-way through the concert he jumped onto people to do a little crowd surfing. I could almost touch his hair, but decided not to push it since I don’t know him very well and it just felt kind of wrong. He doesn’t know me and here I am touching his head. Weird. The woman behind us had been to the concert the night before and said her girlfriend touched his penis when he was being tossed around. Weirder.
One sombering event happened, which was that Mr. Courtney threw a drumstick very hard from the stage and it hit one of the girls next to us on the lip, and she started bleeding. A group of her girlfriends took her out of the concert and they didn’t come back.
Again, he said something curious when we were singing along with Hollow which was, “you know all the words.” His voice was questioning. Incredulous.
At the very end of the evening, right before the lights came up, he came out and said, “I don’t usually do encores,” and sang Hard to Be Alone. All of us sang along and each word was drawn out, sung as loud as possible and filled with emotion. It was a fantastic way to end the concert.
The opening band for Barns Courtney was the very young and talented Baxter Hall Trio, featuring Baxter Hall, a local boy from Millis via Jamaica Plain, Lukas Bratsos (drums and vocals) and Mike Jones (bass). They played some original rocking music that sounded great, but Mr. Hall didn’t move around a lot. He moved around enough to not be boring, but to be fair it felt as if he was working hard to try to make all of the elements of the set come together, which it did really well. They were one of the best opening bands I’ve seen lately.
Based on my research, I believe Mr. Hall has played with, or taught by, one of the top guitarists in the blues, jazz and swing world, Duke Robillard. As background, Mr. Robillard has been making music since 1967 as founder of Roomful of Blues in the early 1970s. He replaced Jimmy Vaughan in the Fabulous Thunderbirds in the 1990s and was a core member of the New Guitar Summit through the 2000s. Even though he’s had a long career he’s still very vital as his newest project for Stony Plain Records is an album called They Called It Rhythm & Blues released in 2022. Robillard has won the W.C. Handy Award as Best Blues Guitarist an astounding four times, and been nominated for two Best Blues Album Grammy Awards. He is credited with taking the blues to a new level for multiple generations of blues guitarists. So, to have Mr. Robillard as a friend and teacher isn’t too shabby.
The entire evening was, basically, a gift of music from both Mr. Courtney and Mr. Hall who gave us 110%. And discovering Mr. Robillard was the cherry on top of the sundae — we’re going to see him in November.
betty blatt 
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