Bluesman Kenny Wayne Shepherd brings 25 years of 'Trouble' to Greensburg

The Palace Theatre is in the sweet spot of venues where blues guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd likes to play.

“There’s something to be said for playing to 20-, 30-, 50,000 people that is an experience unto itself, but there’s something to be said for playing the more intimate venues,” Shepherd said. “For the fans, the smaller, the better. For us, the sweet spot is between 1,000 and 5,000, because you can still feel like you’re directly connected to the audience and they can feel like they’re directly connected to you.”

The Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band will connect with the audience in the 1,369-seat Greensburg theater at 8 p.m. Friday, during a stop on the “Trouble Is … 25th Anniversary Tour.”

The tour is part of a yearlong celebration, including the tour and new music and video content, marking the 1997 release of the 20-year-old Shepherd’s landmark sophomore album.

Following Shepherd’s platinum-selling debut, “Ledbetter Heights,” it was the first record bearing his band’s name.

“For us, it was a monumental album,” Shepherd said. “For some people, this record was the way they first discovered my band.

“It sold millions of copies and it still holds the record for being the longest-running number one album in the history of the blues charts,” he said. “When (the single) ‘Blue on Black’ came out, it set the record for the longest consecutive weeks on the Billboard rock charts.”

The album was certified Gold in 1998 by the Recording Industry Association of America, and certified Platinum in 1999.

“That’s a lot of accomplishments for a record, and we acquired a lot of new fans because of it,” Shepherd said. “It’s really played an important role in my career and in the lives of people who connected with it. We thought it would be cool to acknowledge that.”

The tour marks the first time the band has played the album in its entirety live on stage. The order of the songs is switched up for a better listening experience, Shepherd said. Some are faithful to the recorded version, others lend themselves to some improvisation.

”The album is around an hour’s worth of music, but our shows are typically longer than that, so we play the whole album and then we go off,” Shepherd said. “Then we come back out for what’s essentially an encore, but the encore is almost another set of music.”

The second half of the show is devoted to the band’s more recent output.

”I’m betting there will be some people in the audience who haven’t seen us in some years, so we want to give them a taste of what we’ve been up to since they last saw us,” Shepherd said.

More blues

In addition to the “Trouble Is …” tour and some 45th-birthday shows, Shepherd also is curating and performing in the inaugural Backroad Blues Festival, a series of six August shows in venues from Rhode Island south to Virginia.

The self-taught guitarist who first took the stage himself at 13 said he’s taking it upon himself to spread the gospel of the blues.

“When I was a kid, some of my fondest memories were attending certain blues festivals that were like a touring package with the biggest names in blues at the time,” he said. “I had some amazing experiences seeing people like B.B. King, Joe Cocker, Etta James, Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I felt there wasn’t anyone out there doing that on a touring level right now, so I decided that we needed to bring that to the fans.”

The tour will feature Buddy Guy, whom Shepherd called “the modern-day king of the blues,” and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, an emerging blues artist and recent Grammy Award-winner.

“My goal is to bring the best blues talent in different styles out there to the audiences,” he said. “The goal is to grow it and make it an annual thing, to include everybody from the ladies of the blues to the up-and-comers to the well-established blues artists.”

Another goal is to make the blues accessible to listeners of all ages.

“What’s great is that the festival atmosphere provides an opportunity for the whole family to come out. You see multi-generations of fans showing up,” Shepherd said. “My dad turned me on to all kinds of music. He worked in radio and there was always music going on around the house. It was all different kinds, but I latched on to the blues at a very young age.

“I think it was because of the emotion put into the music and not just the message of the lyrics — the raw emotion of the music, I feel, is something that anybody can identify with.”

Shepherd will be on stage at The Palace with a slate of “top-shelf musicians,” including drummer Chris Layton, who played with Stevie Ray Vaughn; bassist Kevin McCormick, who has played with Melissa Ethridge, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills & Nash; trumpet player Mark Pender, who played in Conan O’Brien’s television band and with Bruce Springsteen; saxophonist Joe Sublett, who has played with Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Ray Vaughn; and keyboard player Joe Krown, who played with blues legend Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown.

Shepherd shares lead vocals with Noah Hunt.

The “Trouble Is …” show was originally scheduled for August 2020 at The Palace. Tickets to the original date will be honored. For new ticket purchases, from $49.75 to $69.75, call 724-836-8000 or visit thepalacetheatre.org.