The Eastern at Wild on Waiheke – April 1, 2023

The Eastern were due to play at this Waiheke venue back over Auckland Anniversary Weekend but as leader Adam McGrath remarked before the show, once Elton John cancelled the night of the Flood there was no shame in calling it off.

It will take more than a long, long time for the Rocket Man to return but here, two months later, The Eastern have made good on their postponement.

This is a new venue to me, despite being an island resident. It’s a large basement with a bar. Seems a bit bunker-like at first but with some lighting and music, suddenly there’s more atmosphere.

Opening song I Aint Got No Home in This World is a cover. Adam offers it for his friend Robin. Crikey that’s me. How did he know I love Woody Guthrie songs? He’s a man of many friends and who knows many things. A man of the people. The song sets the tone for the set: A band with roots in Americana, but a resolutely kiwi focus. A band who sing of the places we know. Te Awamutu, Rakiura and Christchurch. Road songs, songs of working people, songs from the heart.

I’d messaged Adam in advance seeking a setlist. We don’t do a setlist, brother. We just play what we play.  And play they certainly do. Loose and lively are two words that come to mind. Loose enough to allow requests, spill whiskies, re-string guitars mid-song. Lively enough to keep a crowd dancing.

Tonight The Eastern are a four-piece. Adam on acoustic guitar and harmonica,  Frankie Daly on keyboard, Chrissy Jackson on fiddle and Glenn aka Warlock on electric guitar. The absence of banjo player and fellow songwriter Jess Shanks is felt.  Adam is resolutely central to tonight’s version of the band. He has the passion of Bruce Springsteen, the heart of Woody Guthrie and the grit of Shane McGowan. 

The songs in an Eastern set are stitched together by Adam’s banter. Part irony, part autobiography, part social commentary. Always engaging. A bug just flew into my throat. I’m still here. That’s the sort of death-defying act you can expect at our shows.

Heart like a Train off their 2011 Arrows album builds momentum. Adam’s ‘brother from another mother’ Luca on sound is acknowledged. Everyone is a brother or a friend. It’s that sort of show. As he walks into the crowd he could be a Southern preacher. Compassion threads through everything. Look after each other in these times he says.

“We’ve got a reviewer here from highly prestigious publication called the 13^th Floor”, he says, so I want that reviewer to write that the audience rocked the fuck out.”

He sings and plays with intensity and breaks another guitar string.  Could have been George Thorogood for a moment.

Joy abounds, even as songs with a sobering message are delivered like Don’t Trouble Trouble till Trouble Troubles You. I look around. Big smiles abound.

On what must be one of the longer titles in the archive of kiwi music (Shadow in the Story of the Shoulder of the road on the Highway to Te Awamutu), we hear of a homeless man in the doorway of a sushi shop oblivious to Bryan Adams on the radio, for whom the summer of ’69 was long-forgotten. Small details, yet part of the big picture. Then a song about a man called Friday, named so because his father was called Thursday. McGrath is a documentarian.  A voice that’s both weary and righteous as someone commented.

The evening ends with a cover of  The Band’s The Weight. Local support Solomon Cole Band join in.

I walk out into the rain thinking:  is there a more unrelentingly hardworking folk band in this land? Who else sings of the sinews of what holds us together as a society and which, at times, threatens to pull us apart? Who else has sung on the wrecked post-quake street corners of Christchurch. Or been the first to play in flood-ravaged Hawkes Bay.

National treasures.

Robin Kearns

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