The Night I Saw 12 Men with Beards and 1 Man Who Could Sing Straight into my Soul |

Johnny Flynn at the Rickshaw Stop: just a man and his guitar in a venue with a foosball table and skee-ball lanes.

He said about two words, something along the lines of a mumbled British “Hello” and then went straight into the rich ballad: The Ghost of O’Donahue. The lyrics themselves seemed to echo my bewildered state of mind standing right up there in the front row.

“This is the calendar, these are the dates. You know you’ll be. You won’t know what you’ll see. The routes might change so all that remains is the pull from place to place.”

Johnny Flynn is a member of that folk ‘cult’ in the UK that includes former tour mates Mumford and Sons and Laura Marling. His final gig on his brief American Tour was the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco.

I made a kind of lone pilgrimage to this intimate venue. The journey by train to the spray painted doorstep of the Stop felt necessary. I feel like if I had driven I wouldn’t have been in that solitary mellow, nomadic mood that comes out so eloquently in Flynn’s lyrics.

I opened the door of the Stop and stepped inside without any large men pulling me back through the door although the venue wasn’t technically open yet. I saw Flynn sitting on a bench in the corner of the room with one of his tour mates. Sweet, nostalgic sounds emanated softly from the fiddle and guitar where they sat and played their instruments. I realized I probably wasn’t supposed to be there and I walked out. I regretted it immediately. I should have asked to go on tour with him.

Outside the venue there were girls in flowery dresses and men with beards, exactly what I expected out of a Johnny Flynn concert. I heard one girl voice a stylistic thought I had had 2 hours earlier: “I dressed as hipster as I could”.

The managers of the place finally opened up the doors after and hour and a half of waiting outside in the San Francisco cold. I got up to the bouncer and after showing him my ID he told me to put my hands together. Naturally, I put my hands behind my back thinking that this was one of those venues that have you arrested if you try to get in and your under 21, but he just wanted to mark X’s on my hands so that I wouldn’t be allowed at the bar inside. He then asked if there was a bottle in my bag and I said “No…tea”. At that point I knew I was tired and dazed from the cold.

I got inside and welcomed the warm, dark aesthetic of the place with hanging fairy lights strung across the ceiling. About thirty minutes later, after marking my spot at the foot of the stage, the opening act came on.

The Melodic was one of the more spirited opening bands I have ever had the pleasure of seeing, the masterful lighting design and smoke machine added to that hypnotized take-away (which goes for Johnny’s performance too). This three-man and one-woman band was sweet and indie, animated and folky. The range of their limited set, though, wasn’t just reminiscent of an acoustic Of Monsters and Men sound (‘Hold On’), but also Johnny Cash, at least in the eclectic epic ‘Ode to Victor Jara’. The feet-tapping beat of the drum, the wheezy soulfulness of the melodicas, and the upbeat strum of the guitar-ukulele all made for an intriguing and romantic world of sound.

The Melodic consists of an energetic group of musicians who were great at keeping up the crowd’s energy. Johnny Flynn’s quiet, yet penetrating, stage presence, although powerful in its own right, almost seemed unseasoned compared to the opening band’s witty banter. Johnny, in fact, literally played second fiddle for The Melodic’s ‘Come Outside’ before taking the stage a couple songs later.

Flynn is a musician in a very serious way; there are the kinds of ‘cool’ musicians that don’t like costume changes and fireworks on stage (although those attractions can definitely create a great concert atmosphere), and then, a few more notches below, there strums and sings Johnny.

With lines like “I’m cold in your head, but you’re burning in mine” from ‘The Lady is Risen’ and “A Friday dinner, a fish-drunk sinner” from ‘Lost and Found’, Flynn’s poetic range really sings. His voice and his guitar are all that is needed and is all that’s given.

People love him, though. The whole crowd was swaying and a good number of the older crowd was singing the words right along with Johnny. I know I’m listening to something good when a wrinkled old woman who looks like she had done the whole Woodstock thing is singing, smiling and swaying to a 30 year old British kid’s tunes. Seeing that, especially when the lyrics from ‘Bottom of the Sea Blues’ came up, “My age is my condition, my love is my intent”, made my heart swell.

From the soft lullaby of ‘Einstein’s Idea’ to the powerful duet with his slightly off pitch, yet engaging, audience during ‘The Water’ (something he would normally sing with Laura Marling), Flynn kept us all at attention, enthralled with the sound of music. I was on the verge of tears, both joyous and lamenting, when, after having confirmed that this was the last song of his last show in America, he played ‘Wayne Rooney’ for the encore.

“If I know better, I don’t know better.” There’s a kind of cyclical nothingness to those words that make me think about Kerouac’s Banana King.

Towards the end of the show, after a brief and playful oration about his own vulnerability and British self-deprecating sensibility, Johnny looked fleetingly to where I stood, then out into the enraptured audience, and spoke:

“I’m gonna make you vulnerable”.

Well, Johnny, you did. You sure did.

Johnny Flynn played at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on Monday 3 Feb 2014. Photos by Justine Beed, S Scott, and Ruby Perez