Concert review: Grace Potter at Maggie Valley Festival Grounds
In this age of rampant misinformation, honest advertising is more impactful than ever.
The approach applies to live music as well, and was put into action May 7 at the Maggie Valley Festival Grounds when The Grey Eagle’s billing of Grace Potter proved surprisingly true.
Whereas the affable rocker’s last two Asheville-area shows — the Warren Haynes Christmas Jam in December 2018 and The Orange Peel in January 2020 — were marketed as “Grace Potter” gigs and featured accompaniment by her full band, this time the same moniker produced Grace Potter and only Grace Potter — a welcome curveball and a comparably enjoyable experience.
The Grey Eagle’s first drive-in show since a frosty mid-November evening with St. Paul and the Broken Bones, the night was chillier than usual for May and, perhaps due to the extra hour of daylight, bereft of a projection screen beside the stage. Unfazed by the low spring temperatures — she lives in Vermont, after all — Potter tapped into her seemingly bottomless well of energy and delivered a performance that, thanks to her animated personality and the technicians’ expert outdoor sound work, didn’t require video accompaniment.
Wrapped in a green garment that she comically revealed to be her bathrobe, Potter also claimed not to have written a set list, and instead turned to the audience for requests. Honoring those shouted suggestions occasionally required lyrical backup assistance from her iPad screen — a “cheat” that the 37-year-old Potter said was OK for 75-year-old Neil Young, yet didn’t feel quite right for her just yet — but otherwise, it was evident that she’d kept her stage skills sharp over the past year, which saw her play more live shows than most touring artists.
Starting on guitar, Potter set the professional yet playful tone early with the captivating “Every Heartbeat,” followed by a surprise verse of Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance.” The variety show that followed saw her move between a trio of instruments, sticking to guitar for such gems as “Your Girl,” “Stop the Bus,” and her Kenny Chesney duet, “You and Tequila,” and switching to Wurlitzer for a creative twist on the bouncy “Medicine.” And, since it’s not truly a Grace Potter show without a Flying V song or two, she donned the throwback instrument and treated the crowd to “Joey.”
As fans intermittently showed their appreciation with car horn honking throughout the night, Potter kept the humorous, humanizing anecdotes coming. Around the halfway mark, she acknowledged how good it felt to be back with concertgoers, and goofily compared herself to the turkey in the kitchen at Thanksgiving around which everyone gathers.
In the build-up to her biggest original hits, Potter payed homage to WNC native Warren Haynes, whom she noted she dearly misses, with an especially soulful Wurlitzer rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman,” which they memorably performed with Jim James at the aforementioned Christmas Jam. And a few songs later, she honored the late John Prine with a stirring cover of “Angel from Montgomery,” which she identified as her most influential song alongside Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”
As darkness descended, Potter ramped up the variety, hopping to keys for “Big White Gate,” Flying V for “Nothing But the Water,” and again to keys for a quick chorus of The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman,” which segued nicely to the power anthem ”Release” from her most recent album, 2019’s Daylight.
Still hitting upper-register vocal wails well over an hour into the set, Potter headed into the home stretch with a guitar medley of “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” “The Lion, The Beast, The Beat,” and a full take on her still greatest hit, “Paris (Ooh La La).” All that was left was the ideal capper: a Flying-V-charged “Stars,” appropriately under a clear, sparkly sky, whose evolution from light to dark seemed to inspire her all evening — no band necessary.
Following that successful start to its 2021 Drive-In Concert series, The Grey Eagle has three shows in Maggie Valley over the next week: Galactic featuring Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph on Sunday, May 23; moe. on Thursday, May 27; and Big Something and Too Many Zooz on Friday, May 28, each of which begins at 7 p.m. Additionally, Elle King plays a socially distanced, pod-style show at Paint Rock Farm in Hot Springs on Saturday, June 5, at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit thegreyeagle.com.
(Photos: John A. Zara)
