The evening will also feature sets by Willie Nelson, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Margo Price and more on Sunday, Oct. 21.
After pinging around on the East Coast for eight gigs, the Outlaw Music Festival Tour will finish off its run at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Sunday, Oct. 21.
Now in its third year, the annual jaunt, which is carefully mapped out and curated with country music icon Willie Nelson at the helm, has featured a rotating roster of talent including appearances by Van Morrison, Neil Young, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Brandi Carlile, Terra Lightfoot, Greensky Bluegrass, The Common Heart and more. Of course, each night is capped by Willie Nelson & Family.
The final stop in L. A. will bring together outlaw country fans and Deadheads as Nelson has invited his longtime friend, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead to join the outing as well as Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Particle Kid and Nelson’s 29-year-old son, Lukas Nelson, with his band Promise of the Real.
“This tour is just legendary,” Lukas Nelson said in a phone interview. “Having Neil Young and Van Morrison, Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson and last year we had Sheryl Crow and Chris Stapleton.… It’s a whole crew of Americana out in force with dad sort of being the corral guy. It’s a really cool festival and I hope it keeps going for a long time.”
Nelson said the best part of being on the Outlaw Music Festival Tour, is just getting to hang out backstage. All of the artists get together, swap stories, have dinner and maybe partake in a little of Willie’s Reserve, the elder Nelson’s very own line of marijuana products that celebrate his love of cannabis and the cannabis culture. There will definitely be Willie’s Reserve representation on site in L. A. since the company has about 100 growers in California, Nelson said.
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real basically formed when Nelson met drummer Anthony LoGerfo at a Young concert in Los Angeles and the pair started jamming together at LoGerfo’s Seal Beach home. Since then the band has released four albums and has been Young’s official backing band since 2015. It just recently dropped its “Forget About Georgia” EP on Sept. 7, however the band hasn’t played much off of it live other than the title track, but Nelson is considering debuting the cover of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” for the Hollywood Bowl crowd.
“I always loved that whole record, ‘Hunky Dory,’ and that song, I feel like it is relevant to the times and honestly, I just started playing it on piano and we hit record and sort of built the rest of the track around that,” he said. “My friend Dave came in and played piano better than I was, but we kept the original vocal tracks and it just came together sort of randomly. But that song, I’ve always just felt like it was one of the greatest songs ever written.”
Though Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real have been super busy, he said there’s a brand new album pretty much in the can that could be released as early as next spring.
“I have some friends coming in to sing backgrounds on it and my buddy Doyle Bramhall will be on it,” he said. “We’ll get Neil (Young) to play a bit and we’ll probably get dad and my brothers in there a lot, too. We have The McCrary Sisters doing some incredible backgrounds. We have all of these guests and we’ve picked the 12 or 13 songs that will be on it so I just need to get it over to Jim Scott to mix it after we get these finishing touches.”
After playing the inaugural Desert Trip during Young’s set at the Empire Polo Club in Indio in 2016, Nelson was approached by actor Bradley Cooper, who had a special request for him. He wanted him to help him write music for a remake of the film “A Star is Born,” which Cooper was writing, directing, producing and starring in alongside pop songstress Lady Gaga. Nelson, Cooper and Gaga got together in the studio with the band and began cranking out original content. The film hit theaters on Oct. 5 and is already raking in box office dollars and generating a ton of positive buzz with 90 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. .
“They were really cool people and they’re so good at what they do,” Nelson said. “It was cool to see them cross over into something — her doing the acting thing and him doing the singing thing — it was really an inspiring process to be part of and, you know, and people are loving it so that inspiration is kind of contagious.”
Part of the film, probably a solid 10 minutes, was shot at the Empire Polo Club in Indio during both the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which Lady Gaga headlined, and Stagecoach Country Music Festival in 2017. Not only did Nelson get to help curate the music, he and his band also got to pretty much play themselves as Cooper’s backing band in the film.
“I was just doing what I do and I didn’t even have to say anything in the film,” he said with a laugh. “I just had to be on stage and play guitar in the party scenes. So, all I had to do was be in a band, which I know how to do with Promise of the Real and my brothers were there, too. It was fun to do that and to see us up there on the screen… I like that.”
Nelson said Woody Harrelson has been a longtime friend of the family and one of his best friends is actor Luke Wilson, so if he ever needed any tips on crossing over into acting, he feels like he’s in pretty good hands. He also said he was blown away by watching Gaga transform on the screen in “A Star is Born.”
“I did ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in high school and I was Lysander in that Shakespeare play,” he said. “I was maybe 14 or 15 years old, but I’ve had my mom burn all remaining evidence of that, but it did happen. Maybe one day it might happen again, you never know.”
With: Willie Nelson & Family, Phil Lesh & Friends, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real and Particle Kid
When: 5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21
Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles
Tickets: $45-$280
Information: 800-745-3000 or Ticketmaster.
