photo by Dino Perrucci

There was a cosmic burst of fabulously superlative country music when Marty Stuart and Daniel Donato collided June 20 in suburban Dayton, Ohio. 

The third of three co-headlining joints found the musicians each playing sets of about 75 minutes before a wildly enthusiastic, Saturday-night audience gathered at the Rose Music Center. 

Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives and Donato’s Cosmic Country are both rooted in country music; however, those roots also feed the surf, folk and bluegrass of Stuart, the rock ‘n’ roll of both musicians’ songbooks and Donato’s jam-based psychedelia. That it was all Americana at its core was evident in the Grateful Dead, Band and Billy Strings music played during setbreak. 

The fabulous Stuart was as superlative as Donato was cosmic and closed his set of hillbilly rock with “Hillbilly Rock,” thus setting the table for Donato’s hillbilly rock. 

Coming on stage with keyboardist Nathan Aronowitz, bassist Will McGee and drummer Will Clark at 9:45 PM, Donato used the nightcap to roll out such originals as “About the Angels” and covers like Merle Haggard’s “Honky Tonk Night Time Man” under a pulsating onslaught of lights that filled the space between the musicians spread across the bandstand and reached to the back rows of the Rose. 

Opening with “Cosmic Country Gardens,” Donato quickly took the opportunity to show off his lightning-fast licks. The instrumental seemed like a late-set piece as Donato introduced the band and let each member take a short turn in the literal and figurative spotlight. 

“Big Iron” combined old-school country aesthetic with new-fangled cosmic treatment. The Marty Robbins song went a long way toward explaining Donato’s influences in the man who wrote the song, the Grateful Dead who covered it and the Phil Lesh & Friends collaborative under whom he studied. 

The guitarist thus played a long solo to stretch the song out in Leshian style. This eventually, and effortlessly, segued into Donato’s wordless, loose-but-tight and outside-the-Outlaws’-lines rendering of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Lost in the moment, McGee placed his cowboy hat on the headstock of his double bass, while Donato knocked his own to the floor. Clark dominated with pounding drums that allowed Donato to experiment with multiple effects and tones over the wide-open spaces of Cosmic Country. 

Things floated back to Earth with “Better Deal Blues” before rocketing back to the cosmos on “Along the Trail.” 

Stuart was up first, taking the stage at 8 sharp with guitarist Kenny Vaughan, drummer Harry Stinson and bassist Chris Scruggs and launching into the raucous instrumental “La Tingo Tango.” The following “Tear the Woodpile Down” blazed as brightly as the sinking sun and probably would have been just as blinding if performed after dark.

The all-daylight show included solo material from each of the FabSupes’ individual catalogs and electric and acoustic segments that garnered a handful of standing ovations from the audience that stood for all of Donato’s set. Vaughan played a Rickenbacker guitar on the Byrdsian “Time Don’t Wait” and mimicked a train on “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” his playing flashier than the sparkles on his axes and the sequins on his bandmates’ stage clothes. 

“The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’” and “Tomahawk” found Stuart, all in black with a thick shock of white hair, making his electric guitar sound like pedal steel and proved the musicians, who remained in close proximity on stage, were just as close in the music. 

Stuart switched to mandolin, Stinson to brushed snare and Scruggs to double bass and the quartet gathered around one mic for “Long Black Veil” and perhaps the perfect arrangement of “Wild Horses,” which rolled out as half-Stones, half-Superlatives music as three-part harmony wafted through the venue.