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Avett Brothers

  • by peter blackstock
Photo by Daniel Coston/www.danielcostonphotography.com

The Avett Brothers find themselves in an unusual situation at the dawning of 2009. Much of the country has just been through an extraordinarily difficult year. The music industry is morphing into an entirely different animal, with the value of recorded works continuing its spectacular no...

Bottle Rockets

The Bottle Rockets actually began playing together in 1992, but their first album came out in 1993, so the fifteenth-anniversary celebration they conducted this year seems reasonable enough. Given that singer-guitarist Brian Henneman and drummer Mark Ortmann have played together for more than 25 years, and that they are the only two Bottle Rockets to appear on every a...

Bon Iver

Fresh from a David Letterman appearance and just hours after Madison's biggest snowstorm of the season, Bon Iver spread a blanket of flannel mysticism over a sold-out crowd of nearly a thousand at the Barrymore Theater. The boys from the back roads of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, reveled to be on a stage in their home state after months on the road, including eight weeks ov...

Ben Sollee

Every once in awhile you're at a show and there's a feeling in the air that goes beyond the sensations brought on by the whiskey you've been kicking back as you wait ages for the acts to finally come onstage. It's a feeling like change, but it goes beyond that. Hope is the best word to describe the subtle crackle in the air that runs through the crowd on such a night....

Proclivities/Prabir & the Substitutes

It's saying quite a lot that the two bands onstage were almost overshadowed by the dance moves of an audience member. Thanks to two hours of spirited playing and affable demeanor, the Proclivities and Prabir & the Substitutes never let "Tiffany" steal the show. Proclivities lead vocalist/guitarist Matt Douglas kept one eye on the lady in red while crooning his way thr...

Punch Brothers

When Chris Thile said goodbye to Nickel Creek last year, it was hard to know exactly what the mandolin virtuoso had in mind for his next move. But it was fair to expect that it would be something ambitious. Thile, after all, has been defying convention since he was a pre-teen mandolin champion, later leading Nickel Creek to genre-defying heights as the band occasional...

Drive-By Truckers/Hold Steady

You can make yourself dizzy thinking of ways the Drive-By Truckers and the Hold Steady are similar, because each reason will ring untrue. It just may be that the only thing connecting these bands is their audience: you know, the beer-slugging collegiate types now suffering adulthood who appreciate the underdog passion of both bands, even if their most dire concern the...

John Doe & Kathleen Edwards

At the conclusion of John Doe and Kathleen Edwards' November 8 performance at Carnegie Hall's elegant Zankel Hall in New York, the duo stepped in front of the microphones and monitors they had been using all set, walked to the edge of the stage, and – unaided by anything more technologically sophisticated than the room's acoustically accommodating architecture – sang ...

Vic Chesnutt & Elf Power

Does Vic Chesnutt apologize wherever he goes? Or was there some embarrassment last time he came to town? At the brink of launching their set, Chesnutt signaled for Elf Power to hold back as he riffed, solo, a musical apology: "Hello, everybody. It's good to be here, again. Last time I got too drunk. Sorry." Bemused chuckles riffled through the gathering of fans as, wi...

N.C. Rocks For Change Concert

If you were a Barack Obama fan – or, heck, even if you were a John McCain fan who simply loves good independent music – you could've done a lot worse than to find yourself on the Graham Terrace patio next to Morehead Planetarium on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill Saturday morning.To close out a two-week stretch of early voting in the state (the ...

CMT Alan Jackson Tribute Taping

There was a party here in Nashville in mid-August marking Alan Jackson's 50th birthday, and also his reaching the major milestone of 50 million albums sold. Granted that when it comes to discussions of even relatively contemporary country music, some seem content to reverse the old Elvis Presley hits package title and presume 50 million fans must be wrong. But there i...

Laika & the Cosmonauts/Los Straitjackets

"I hope you will enjoy that we will play songs from our twenty-year career," Matti Pitsinki said in his adorable Finnish accent. "I guess you know we will be quitting on November 1 in Austin."That comment inspired the only negative response for anything offered in this three-hour double-bill, as the not-bad-for-a-school-night crowd in suburban Virginia roundly booed t...

Nick Lowe

Nick Lowe was his dapper, dry-witted self on his first visit to Cleveland in more than a decade. Lowe, who taped an upcoming episode of Austin City Limits last week and appeared on A Prairie Home Companion over the weekend, explained that he wasn't "on tour" per se, and consequently offered to play material from his entire catalogue. He made good on that promise, and ...

Silver Jews

Two years ago, David Berman made his Silver Jews a live act after a decade in which that prospect was deemed highly implausible. Berman looked fairly terrified during the band's 2006 Seattle set, but there was something endearing about watching a wobbly colt taking its first, clumsy steps. "This is our 95th show," Berman announced during this performance, his second s...

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Sunday

If the entire weekend didn't already belong to festival sponsor Warren Hellman, he certainly staked a reasonable claim to Sunday morning. By 11 a.m., the small hillside in front of the Porch Stage was filled with folks eager to see what the benefactor of this grand annual bash could do with a banjo. I suspect more than a few of them also just wanted to spend some time...

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Sunday Extra

Music festivals are not intimate.A lot of my favorite music, and probably yours too, isn't designed to overpower a din. Songs that work beautifully on record or in a theater setting don't always play well in an environment of porta-potties, funnel cake and wagons full of beer. And when most of the audience can't see the performer's face, how much subtlety can the arti...

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Saturday

The Arrow Stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass sits in Speedway Meadow at a kind of crossroads between the main Banjo Stage and the more remote Star and Rooster stages. At noon on Saturday, people traversing the now-worn path to the food and beverage vendors and to the bigger-name acts could not help but be drawn in by a set of sounds and sights quite new to this event....

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival: Friday

Crews were still assembling scaffolding and sound boards at a few of the stages in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park at 10:30 Friday morning when 13-year-old phenom fiddler Ruby Jane stepped out onto the Star Stage and kicked off the eighth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. "Get rhythm/When you sing the blues," she sang into the mike, and judging by the wild d...

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Friday Extra

I wonder what feeling Robert Plant gets when he looks to the west and sings to an ocean these days. Last evening in Golden Gate Park, he faced a sea of humanity, a parting of eucalyptus trees, an overcast ceiling pregnant with rain, and the verging Pacific. To his immediate south stood T Bone Burnett, variously wielding a baritone guitar or a more traditional one; to ...

Austin City Limits Music Festival

There were times during the seventh annual Austin City Limits Music Festival when I wondered, really wondered, what the hell I was doing there. Most of the bands I could conceivably want to see were bands I had seen before, in multiple settings, and I didn't have to breathe acres of dust, stand for hours in enhanced interrogation positions, or roam a wilderness of law...

Barcelona Accio Musical

Thousands thronged Las Ramblas and strolled the ancient blind alleys among the sepulchral stone walls of the Barri Gotic as the final night of the Barcelona Accio Musical (BAM) played out on the eve of the citywide Merce holiday. Every language could be heard on the streets, and nearly every genre could be found on the stages.Now in its 13th year, BAM has grown to six...

Sin City All-Stars' Tribute To Glen Campbell

Among the highlights of this year's Americana Music Association festival was a pair of events involving Glen Campbell, who was the subject of both a documentary film screening at the Country Music Hall of Fame on Saturday afternoon and a tribute show at the Cannery Ballroom on Saturday evening. At both events, Campbell himself made an appearance, doing an interview at...

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ND#10 July-Aug 1997 {Whiskeytown}
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