Review: New guitar hero Billy Strings rocks Target Center

Billy Strings is an awfully cocky stage name for a young guitarist. But he is living up to his moniker.

Last year, Strings filled the Ohio State University football stadium for a concert. This year, he won his second Grammy in bluegrass. He also sold out Denver’s Ball Arena, where the NBA’s Nuggets and NHL’s Avalanche play, for three consecutive nights, and packed the 7,700-seat ExploreAsheville.com Arena in North Carolina for a whopping six nights.

On Saturday, the guitarist born William Apostol in Michigan 32 years ago headlined Target Center in Minneapolis for the first time.

It wasn’t Minnesota’s only taste of Strings this year. He will be back in Minneapolis for Farm Aid’s 40th anniversary on Sept. 20 at Huntington Bank Stadium along with Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and others.

Here are five takeaways from Strings’ Target Center concert:

He plays acoustic guitar in a drummer-less band. But his sound fills an arena with no problem. Strings can shred like no other on acoustic guitar, with his frenetic fingers flying across the fretboard augmented by an array of effects pedals to take the sounds into electrifying, psychedelic territory. And he can play subtly, too, like he’s at a bluegrass pick-a-thon or in a jazz club or at a flamenco recital.

Strings is the most expressive, versatile, stylish and showy young guitar hero I’ve experienced live since a young Derek Trucks with the Allman Brothers about 25 years ago.

But the biggest boost bluegrass received was way back in 1973 when Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia switched to banjo in the new bluegrass group Old & In the Way with fiddler Vassar Clements and mandolinist David Grisman, among others. They even recorded a bluegrassy reading of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” opening the ears and eyes of rock fans to bluegrass.

Strings is having a similar effect. Moreover, his voice reflects the high, lonesome DNA of classic bluegrass more so than Garcia’s pipes did, as well as a soulfulness from the Chris Stapleton school.

Not surprisingly, Strings drew a Target Center audience ranging in age from 20 to 60.

T-shirts in the crowd saluted everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Coldplay, with plenty of shout-outs to the various incarnations of the Grateful Dead.

Strings, an extrovert who lives in Nashville, has played with everyone from metal mainstays Tool to jam-band favorites Phish to genre-hopping megastar Post Malone.

With Strings, bluegrass never felt so cosmic. And an arena with 8,000 folks dancing by themselves to a trippy light show proved it.

All four sidemen — bassist Royal Masat, banjoist Billy Failing, mandolinist Jarrod Walker and fiddler Alex Hargreaves — are accomplished pickers who had moments in the spotlight on Saturday. Noteworthy were Failing and Walker on “Turmoil & Tinfoil,” and each of the players on a smoking cover of Bad Livers’ “Pretty Daughter,” the spunky breakdown “Red Daisy” and a deeply soulful treatment of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

And the quintet manifested a mastery of vocal harmonies in the bluegrass tradition, as well.

One of the reasons Strings is so popular is that his repertoire is rangy and unpredictable. He’ll play anything from the Grateful Dead and the Beatles to traditional bluegrass tunes and jazz standards to originals, of course.

With Saturday’s concert being in Bob Dylan’s home state, Strings had to offer a double-time treatment of the bard’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” comically extending “bluuuuuuue” and dancing a little jig before segueing into a dark, jam-grassy reading of banjo man John Hartford’s “All Fall Down” that devolved into cosmic noodling with a distinctive rhythmic groove that compelled fans to bob up and down as one.

Springs is not afraid to delve into darkness, as evidenced by the murder ballad “My Alice” and the epic “Turmoil & Tinfoil.” In the latter, he sang “but I’ll try to keep on living/through the nauseating gloom” before the banjoist and mandolinist separately spiraled downward, and then the fiddler and guitarist in tandem raised spirits.

By the end of the night, it was obvious that Billy Strings is a unicorn with an apt moniker.