The Devil Makes Three plays fast songs about death and whiskey

Lost Dog Street Band performs.

On February 2 at the Concord Music Hall in Chicago, two bluegrass bands sang about death, drugs, alcohol, love, and sin. Opening up for The Devil Makes Three was the Lost Dog Street Band, made up of Benjamin Tod, a neck-tattooed guitarist and vocalist, and Ashley Mae, a similarly well-tattooed fiddle player who wore a cowboy hat and strapped a knife to her side. The husband and wife combo proclaim on their website that they dedicated themselves to the “tradition of the American troubadour — hopping trains and hitchhiking across the country” to create songs with a sense of tragic storytelling.

Mae and Tod played their original material, and a Townes Van Zandt (one of their songwriting heroes) cover. Musically, the band was decent, but not altogether super memorable or fantastic. Cliches like “circumstance has shot us down like September doves” (on “September Doves”) filled their slow-tempo, traditional bluegrass songs. Tod bragged that he came up with the line “I’m always empty, don’t you know me, by the time I get to you,” while drunk and high in an Ohio basement, on the song “Terrible and True.” Surprisingly, the band had an extremely dedicated fan base, and many people said they came primarily to see Lost Dog. Many “yahoo’s!” erupted during the kind of bluegrass you could easily imagine the pair playing on the porch of the farm they are homesteading in Kentucky.

The Devil Makes Three performs at Concord Music Hall.

From the start of their set, The Devil Makes Three proved a strong contrast to the one-dimensional troubadour act, playing faster and sharper, with a more professional polish. Many of the tracks were dance-friendly, and the floor reverberated with the stomping of feet from the flannel- and beard-heavy crowd. “The Bullet,” a high energy song they opened with, tells about a man nearly drinking himself to death. Pete Bernhard, the group’s primary songwriter, stood center stage with a plain guitar, while Lucia Turino played upright bass and Cooper McBean switched from an old beat-up tenor banjo to guitar, depending on the song. All three members provided vocals on songs that fit their style, and at times they came together in perfect harmony. The Devil was also accompanied by a long-haired fiddle player and a drummer for several of their tracks, though the core band remains Bernhard, Turino and McBean. On “Gracefully Facedown,” a crowd favorite, the band sung “Lately things ain’t been going my way / Consequently I’ve been drinking nearly every day…Well now I’ve been having a hard time / Walking a straight line / Seeing two of every single neon sign / Well now you’ll find me downtown / Gracefully face down / Just wishing I could feel all right.” Drinking to escape problems is a constant theme in The Devil Makes Three’s work, and the crowd swayed with a jolly energy to “Old No. 7,” a song about a boy who grew up poor and rough so that “now [he] just wander[s] through a real bad dream / Feelin’ like [he’s] coming apart at the seams,” and dreams of drinking Jack Daniel’s Whiskey in heaven.

While the band came out with new material in 2016 and 2018, with Redemption and Ruin and Chains are Broken respectively, they mostly stuck to older material. Their latest album Chains are Broken adds more electric instrumentation than previous albums, though it lacks some of the riotous energy from records like The Devil Makes Three (2007) and Do Wrong Right (2009). Lyrics on songs like Chains are Broken detail the story of a band getting older and wiser, of a group that used to go out drinking looking for a fight, but now have had their chains broken, to set themselves free. The band certainly still has an edge of thrill-seeking bad intentions, perhaps carried over from their days opening up for punk rock bands, and the band in all black sung on “Bad Idea” from their latest album “Bait inside the bear trap/ Somebody’s going to lose a limb./ Washing up like wreckage/ Why don’t you go ruin him?… Bad idea/ You know I had to do it/ Another bad idea/ All over again.” The latest studio material results in a more polished, relaxing sound and more profound songwriting, but the band seems to know their older albums are what makes them a fantastic live show. Overall, they seem to be balancing their transitional life stage with maturity, while holding onto the part of themselves that wakes up downtown, “gracefully face down,” and that fans have grown to love. Their studio material should continue to evolve, but never lose its edge if the band wants to keep what has grown to be a loyal following since forming in Santa Cruz in 2002. Whiskey and pills have been good to the Devil.

Article by Jack Austin