Billy Strings kicks off summer tour in Milwaukee, signals a new era

A week after joining Dead & Company for the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary celebration in San Francisco, Billy Strings played Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, kicking off his summer tour.
The Dead spirit is alive and well with Strings, who blended his own bluegrass prowess into a 22-song show that stretched over two and a half hours.
Heavy on mind-bending jams but peppered with concise country songs, Strings’ set also included a rare performance of a song with Wisconsin ties: Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

On Aug. 1, Billy Strings joined Dead & Company for the kickoff of a three-night run at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in honor of the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, and what would have been Jerry Garcia’s 83rd birthday.

One week later in Milwaukee, it sank in that Strings — the 32-year-old Michigan native born William Lee Apostol — was no mere special guest or opening act.

A torch had been passed.

Tie-dyed shirts, and explicitly Grateful Dead tees, were spotted all over Fiserv Forum Aug. 8, for the kickoff of Strings’ summer tour. With Dead & Company — now with just two members of the Grateful Dead — winding down their live shows, the band’s fans, and a new generation of jam-band lovers, have anointed Strings heir apparent.

And with Wisconsin unable to catch any Phish shows for 2025 — and Dave Matthews Band, in a rare move, skipping over the market — for some Wisconsin live music fans, this was clearly the concert event of the year.

But it’s not merely Strings’ head-spinning dexterity and virtuosity on guitar that make him a superb successor. It’s also that, by being so deeply steeped in bluegrass, he’s jamming his own way.

And sometimes in Milwaukee, he wasn’t jamming at all.

For “Richard Petty,” which kicked off the second set, there weren’t even any instruments in play. Strings and three bandmates — Billy Failing on banjo, Royal Masat on stand-up bass, Jarrod Walker on mandolin — gathered around a single microphone, offering deep, rich four-part harmonies a cappella, doing their own spin on the Oak Ridge Boys.

And for anyone interested in a more concise approach to music (which likely wasn’t anyone at Fiserv Forum) there were more straightforward performances, like a four-minute take of “In the Morning Light” during the first set. The band still managed to squeeze in a solo, courtesy of Alex Hargreaves’ smitten fiddle, but the performance was an indication of Strings’ nourishing songwriting chops and sweet vocals, as he tenderly chimed lines like “I’m not sure that I deserve the love that I receive/But I give it all to her.”

Again gathered around the one mic, this time with Hargreaves, for a cover of “My Sweet Blue Eyed Darlin’,” Strings and the band showed their bluegrass bona fides, as Masat held down thick strums as the other instrumentalists swapped places to show their lightning-quick instrumental chops. It was impressive — every song was impressive — although Strings’ flatpicking style reached supernova status later in that second set near the end of a 13-minute version of “End of the Rainbow,” his head-spinning speed never smudging the piercing precision that made the solo soar.

The fact that he pulled that off was a feat in itself, but to bust out a solo like the one that came near the end of a complex performance that immediately followed another 13-minute, note-swirling scorcher in “Fire Line” was jaw-dropping. It also came deep into a rigorous, often relentless night of intricate instrumentation that touched on 22 songs over two sets across two hours and 34 minutes (not including a 26-minute intermission).

That included one dazzling extended jam after another that broke barriers — including some threats of breaking the sound barrier, given the speed of the playing — and pushed boundaries. A nine-minute “Ghost Train” — with Walker mimicking the rapid chug of a locomotive while the others strutted their stuff — was a definite highlight.

So was “While I’m Waiting Here,” during which Strings through his guitar offered both Appalachia-indebted picking and alien distortion that sounded like eerie radio transmissions from the Upside Down on “Stranger Things.”

But I’d say the tastiest jams of the night came during the 17-minute first-set finale of “Seven Weeks in County.” Through expert pedal work, Strings stretched his guitar from crisp and contemplative country riffing; to spacious, arena-rock grandeur (The Edge on “With Or Without You” came to mind); to mind-bending, fuzzed-out, psychedelic snarls in the vein of Jimi Hendrix.

Expansive solos like that, and a one-night-only setlist, help Strings carry on the Grateful Dead tradition that makes each show its own one-of-a-kind adventure.

But there was something else Strings offered that endeared his Milwaukee fans even further: a stirring, note-cascading, 14-minute rendition of the Gordon Lightfoot classic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” about the tragic shipwreck north of Wisconsin in 1975. According to billybase.net, which tracks Strings’ setlists, he’s only performed that song four times; the crowd lit up (figuratively, after many had been lighting up all night literally) as Strings sang lines like “Coming back from some mill from Wisconsin” and “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay/If they’d put 15 more miles behind her.”

When Strings inevitably plays repeated shows at Wisconsin’s jam-band mecca, Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, that will be a good one to keep in his back pocket.

5 takeaways from Billy Strings’ Milwaukee concert at Fiserv Forum

When the lights dimmed and fans started cheering, a guy next to me screamed, “Billy, it’s me!” Pretty funny.

As fans made their way to the exits after the show the speakers played “Milwaukee Here I Come” by John Prine featuring Melba Montgomery. Nice touch.

The lower bowl looked packed for Strings’ tour kickoff, but it wasn’t a full house; the Fiserv Forum’s upper bowl was curtained off. Guessing he’ll be playing for even bigger audiences going forward, though.

After the show, several vendors were selling food and goods from tents set up in a parking lot next to Turner Hall Ballroom. A couple of people right in front of Turner were also inflating balloons with tanks, with several people standing around sucking the gas out of them.