After 30 years, the Mavericks remain tight
30-year country veterans tight as ever during Windspear dance fest
Looking back in time at 30 years of the Mavericks — the stated purpose of Wednesday night’s show at the Winspear — there were two moments which felt the most honest, dancing back to back.
One was the band’s accordion player, Michael Guerra, whooping and hooting as he led a polka/ Norteno medley, including Roll Out the Barrel. The nearly soldout concert hall had on all four tiers by now ascended into a sort of midnight wedding vibe, plastic wine cups rolling down the aisles, the odd grandmother nearly asleep in the corner — with a conservative sort of mosh pit up front, where most everyone danced in binary movements like lizards trying to keep their feet from burning on the desert sand.
That led into the band’s chipper Rolling Along, which, as lead singer Raul Malo noted with a grin, is “a little song about smoking weed.” At this point such an endorsement in pretty well any concert from Cat Stevens to Snoop Dogg would summon a familiar green skunk to our noses, but the Boomer-y crowd was high with a different sort of vibe, including numerous packs of blond ladies taking turns soloing their moves and laughing their heads off.
Most recently the Mavericks played here at Interstellar Rodeo in that stunning year headlined by ultra-current Courtney Barnett — but tonight the House that Francis Built felt way more like a drunken afternoon at Big Valley Jamboree.
Like a certain smuggler’s hunk of junk stuck to the side of an Imperial Star Destroyer, the Mavericks were always just slightly to the side of the sun blocking wave of dingdong, early-’90s hot country they rolled into the plastic seat festivals with.
A little too cool and dignified, their greatest hits always sounded more like something you’d hear on scratchy vinyl than off a CD sitting on the floor of your Ford F-150 beside the buckshot and empties.
Indeed, after a venue-appropriate intro of Offenbach’s cancan Infernal Galop, the nine-piece band opened up with the swingin’ All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down, Malo’s co-write with NRBQ’S Al Anderson, during which basically the entire band, one by one, horns and accordion and keyboards and all, got a personal moment to stretch out and introduce themselves to the cruise ship ballroom audience.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, corniness and all, down to the rather Mexican-american desert glam the entire band was decked out in under a giant skull with guitars poking out of its eye sockets.
The tango-able Come Unto Me was next, guitarist Eddie Perez getting low as his fingers did their magic, leading into the also-danceable Easy As It Seems — and hats off to the security staff at Winspear for being so truly chill about letting anyone abandon their seats for the floor. It really was no more threatening than a Lawrence Welk love-in, and There Goes My Heart was much appreciated.
Malo noted, “I promise all of you that got up and danced that everyone else will join you by the end of the night. Happens every time.
“Resistance,” he said, laughing, “is futile.”
The band was (as always) super tight, including Malo’s signature voice, which moves purposefully everywhere between Jimmy Dean, Roy Orbison and, listening to Loving You as we did live, Patsy Cline in its own way.
“We’re out celebrating 30 years,” he noted. “We really appreciate the fans; we really don’t make it easy on you. You tell your friends you’re going to see the Mavericks. ‘Who? What kind of music do they play? Oh, s---!’
“After 30 years,” he said more seriously, “if no one shows up there really is no point.”
The Mavs played covers including Blue Moon (Rodgers & Hart), Oh What a Thrill (Jesse Winchester) and Freddy Fender’s slow and melodic I’ll Be There Before the Next Teardrop Falls, Malo shifting the lyrics to Mexican Spanish, his sparkle paisley suit jacket glittering under the ever-shifting lights which his sunglasses deflected the entire show.
Malo told a tale of driving around with his father on the streets of Miami as a kid, joking, “Where all the big country stars come from,” the band hopping from Tex-mex to country to Norteno with its historical German-import accordion backbone, as the singer switched between playing electric and an acoustic so finger-eroded it has an extra hollow in it above the sound hole. More soloing on All Night Long, which twisted into Let the Sun Shine In, then Back in Your Arms Again took us to the encore.
It was great to see Edmonton’s Mike Plume as an opening act, delivering the funniest line of the night: “Saskatchewan. Easy to draw, hard to spell.” Opening with My Old Friend, Plume’s music was very much about place, so let’s just give a shout-out to his former home Bonnyville: home of enthusiastic RCMP traffic enforcement and a hunched grizzly brandishing not one, but two chainsaws along Hwy. 28.
Speaking of numbers, Plume ended his passionate set with not one but four songs with maple syrup nationalism for blood, giving love to everything from hockey to Stompin’ Tom to our soldiers slaughtered in war.
Back to the Mavs, for the encore they pulled out John Anderson’s Swingin’, Waylon’s Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way, and their own chipper As Long As There’s Loving Tonight before, presumably, rolling along again. No I Should Have Been True like at Interstellar, but so it goes.
Injecting the soul of the American southern border into mainstream country via its own complicated incessant atavism was a stroke of genius, but let’s face it, these guys obviously just love to play after 30 years on and off together, and reminded us all we should get out more wherever there’s music in the air, decent or devilishly otherwise.