A Hail of Hair and Hot Lamps: My Morning Jacket powers through a Tower Theater extravaganza

Photo by Josh Pelta-Heller | koalafoto.com

There’s often a marked shift in stage presence between opening and headlining bands, an amplification of the energy or the crowd command – or even more fundamentally the volume of the show – that tends to be testimony to the experience of the latter. Maybe they’ve been around longer. Maybe they’re just more comfortable up there.

Whatever it is, that transition was seamless on November 19th at the Tower Theater, between the headliners – Louisville psych-rock vets My Morning Jacket – and the band who opened for them that night, Timothy Showalter’s Strand Of Oaks. Newer local favorites, Showalter’s crew felt huge up there, immediate and intrepid, and demanded the full attention of the full audience of the sold-out show, powering through a short set that made a Philly crowd want to remember to hit up the merchandise table on the way out for a copy of their latest record.

And then, in a hail of hair and hot lamps, Yim Yames and co took their place, plunging into “Victory Dance” and playing as casually to the crowd as though they’d already been up there for a couple hours. James wears his sunglasses at night, and he wears his now-iconic black trenchcoat too, draped and hung open around the sampler hung from his neck.  Smiling through his beard and over his hollow-body at times like the hipster son of Guy Fawkes, James brought his Philly fans a little closer to Thanksgiving break for One Big Holiday.