Written by James Killen
While many of my fellow Houstonians were lined up early in the morning for Black Friday sales, I was puttering around the house and biding my time until show time for Jeff Plankenhorn’s 7PM performance at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck. He was accompanied this evening by Jon Notarthomas on acoustic guitar.
It was to be a very laid back evening with the Plank doing some acoustic puttering of his own, visiting his own compositions along with a few covers of folks like Matt the Electrician and Stephen Bruton. He also spent a good deal of time sharing stories of times shared with Ray Wylie Hubbard and developing his own slide guitar creation called “the plank”.
The set list included “Home Again” from a compilation honoring Middle East war vets, the simple slide tune, “Trip Around the Sun” and the last song on his last CD, Soulslide, “Walking in the Sun”. Notarthomas added some tasty licks to Plankenhorn’s performance throughout the evening. The pair visited Plankenhorn favorites like “Mary Magdalene”, “Teresa” and the Subdudes sounding “Trouble Find Me”. Jeff ended the evening with “Mystified”, a composition that he wrote with Eliza Gilkyson and Ellis Paul.
The evening could have been described as a laid back series of great slide oriented guitar playing interspersed with some pretty heavy namedropping. What actually becomes apparent is that Jeff Plankenhorn is a name that we can get used to being dropped by these other artists that have been collaborating with him over the last few years.
Jeff Plankenhorn will be back in the Houston area on January 20th, gracing the stage at the Barnes House Concert series. Bill and Deanna always host a great evening of music and fellowship on the Northwest side of town.