Friday Jul 31, 2015
Friday, July 31, 7:30PM
Weesner Family Amphitheater – Minnesota Zoo
13000 Zoo Blvd
Apple Valley, MN 55124
Jerry Jeff has lived – and is living again – the troubadour’s life. Even when he was playing screaming cowboy rock ‘n’ roll to thousands of people, the solitary troubadour was always on the inside, looking out. Lots of musicians talk about the road; Jerry Jeff really is the kid who rode his thumb out of his hometown in upstate New York to such exotic destinations as Key West, he really did sing for pennies on New Orleans street corners, he really did strap his guitar on the back of a motorcycle and go busking across Canada, and he really did sing in the smoky cafes and folk clubs of Greenwich Village, all before he became a star.
In the early Seventies, Jerry Jeff moved to Austin, Texas and reinvented himself as a Lone Star country-rocker and became one of the arbiters of the internationally famous Austin musical community. Since then, he has celebrated the music of peers such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and served as a fountainhead and inspiration to younger musicians. A string of records for MCA and Elektra followed before Jerry Jeff formed his own independent record label, Tried & True Music, in 1986. Another series of increasingly autobiographical records followed under the Tried & True imprint. Even after all of that, Jerry Jeff still sees the world with a troubadour’s eyes. He has come full circle, back to his solitary singer-songwriter roots. You might say he was heading this way all along.