Review: After a marathon fall show, Sturgill Simpson settles in for an even longer run

As if the music industry wasn’t already at enough of a loss figuring out what to do with him, Sturgill Simpson confused things further by renaming himself Johnny Blue Skies for his latest album and the increasingly legendary tour to promote it.

With the second of three Twin Cities stops on that tour now in the bag, many of the Kentucky country rocker’s Minnesota fans who stuck with him through the pseudonym changeup might also be a bit confused now.

Tuesday’s sold-out performance at the Armory in Minneapolis — where he’s playing again Wednesday — followed a thrilling and focused, marathon-like tour stop last September at St. Paul’s Roy Wilkins Auditorium. The ol’ Wilkins had been sidelined as a concert venue for years because it was so bad, and yet Simpson and his band sounded soooooo good there.

Night 1 at the Armory also sounded great and was just as long. But it wasn’t nearly as well-rounded or as good as the Wilkins show.

As he did last fall, Simpson advised Tuesday’s 8,000 attendees the concert would clock in close to three hours. He even added a warning about folks passing out at previous shows.

“By all means, let the drugs kick in, but handle your” stuff, Simpson, 46, cracked.

That advisory actually rang truer than it should have. While Simpson dropped in bits of Grateful Dead-like playfulness at last year’s show, he leaned heavily into that relatively new side of his music Tuesday, offering up a lot of hazy, meandering, pass-the-dutchie-ready instrumental jamming.

Throughout the first hour of the set, songs like the show opener “Call to Arms” and “It Ain’t All Flowers” were stretched out, altered rhythmically and laced with heavy organ parts. He threw in a couple wigged-out cover songs early on, too, starting with a mystically soulful take on Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” — an impressive display of his baritone voice’s power. Then came a goofy, reggae-ized cover of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time.”

Yep, that Eddie Murphy. Remember that one?

Simpson was having fun muddying things up with his band; that much was clear. He continued playing around with arrangements of some of his most twanged-up older songs.

“Voices” and “Railroad of Sin” — both of which he remade once before on his excellent two-volume bluegrass LPs, “Cuttin’ Grass” — were recast again into organ-laced rockers that would’ve fit in somewhere between the Allman Brothers and Deep Purple on ‘70s FM radio.

Simpson did finally get around to sounding more country, at least for a while. About halfway through the set he lit into a heavily twanged-up “Mercury in Retrograde” (ironically a song that sounded rockier on record). That was followed by hard-scooting versions of “Time After All” and the way-oldie “Sitting Here Without You,” both of which sounded like the work of a revved-up ’70s Nashville session band and featured extra-lively fills by lead guitarist Laur Joamets.

Maybe the sharpest critique to make about Tuesday’s show is one you don’t often hear after a concert: Simpson did not play enough songs off his latest record — or Johnny Blue Skies’ new record, if you will.

The first song of the night from last year’s “Passage du Desir” did not come until an hour into the show, “If the Sun Never Rises Again.” He offered only two more after that, including a mellow-cool version of “Mint Tea” and the uplifting send-off “One for the Road.” The latter was saved as the set list’s penultimate song, a nice pairing with the similarly skyward-looking classic he once again covered for Minnesota fans to end the night, “Purple Rain.”

Of course, Tuesday’s concert needs to be taken in the context of Wednesday’s. Chances are Simpson intentionally saved many of the “Passage du Desir” songs and other favorites — maybe he wanted to preserve his voice, too — for the second night, which will undoubtedly be substantially different. Clearly, one thing that hasn’t changed along with Simpson’s stage name is how much he likes to keep changing things up.

Here’s the set list from Sturgill Simpson’s opening night at the Armory: