It’s my birthday, yo, and when I saw Old Crow coming to Charlotte on the Birthday Eve, I told Sweet Nic, who promptly secured my present. As my friend Craig who writes Not Enough Concerts (seriously, if you like music, check out his blog) continues to inspire me to do this better, consider this my homage to this inspiration.
As most good nights start with us, they start with Chips and Salsa at locally famous Tres Amigos. It’s one of the few places where I’m regular enough to have a regular. We eat leisurely and cruise uptown. It’s CIAA week–the last one, as the conference leaves for a more hospitable host city next year–so we get uptown early to avoid the traffic and parking issues. With extra time to relish, we head to Amelie’s for a Russian Tea, some sweets, and some sweet conversation.
The Knight Theater is a short walk across Tryon, and we have enough time to get merch, walk it back to the car, and settle in. It’s a plush, intimate theater where Nic played in Charlotte Concert Band and we’ve seen Darth Vader conduct the CSO here.. Our seats are thirteen rows from the stage, but there’s not really a bad seat in the house.
Birds or Chicago opened the show. Never heard of them. At first look, they seem a sparse outfit. Steve Dawson’s mad licks on the guitar and JT Nero on acoustic frame Allison Russell’s breathtaking voice that she compliments with a banjo or a uke and sometimes a clarinet. The first song is so sparse that it is literally Dawson lightly picking a meandering tone while Nero and Russell stomp and clap while singing. The instrumentals vary throughout the seven-song set, highlighted by “Quasheba, Quasheba”, which Russell wrote while collaborating with Rhiannon Giddons on Songs of Our Native Daughters and Dawson switches to an electric dobro, and “American Flowers”, a rolling folksy pastiche of working-class anecdotes with an uplifting chorus. Dawson gets into melodic territory that sounds like Paul Simon on Rhythm of the Saints, and soon the band gets the crowd to sing along in the chorus, no small feat for a warm-up act in a theater with comfy chairs that the audience is reluctant to rise from at times.
Set break. Off to the loo. I beat long lines by heading out early, accidentally run into two of my colleagues, all of us sitting within 15 feet of each other. Back at my seat, we discover the couple on the row beside us had kids who graduated from the Park. Small world of coincidence.
The lights go down and the main event starts. Before we go into this torrid state affairs, I must admit that I thought briefly about Craig’s habit of bringing a notepad and scribbling notes. It might have helped, but it may still have been too much for this show. This is the fifth time I’ve seen Old Crow, and I recommend their shows to anyone who’s interested in Americana and Southern music. But what blows me away every time is the instrumentation. Four of the principle members of the band routinely rotate from fiddle to mandolin to banjo to open banjo to harmonica to guitar to steel guitar to dobro to piano with nary of hint of letdown. Constant in this exchange is a comical banter with the audience in which its obvious that Ketch Secor, the ringleader of the show, knows the names of a hundred small towns in the fifty mile radius, and is unafraid to make jokes about your MeeMaw keeping her underwear on or what South Carolinians do when they cross the border, so that the constant experience is an ebb and flow of beautiful music and guttural chuckles.
If you’ve seen the Ken Burns documentary on country music, you’ve likely seen Ketch and the band. It’s obvious that their show is steeped in this dichotomy of country music: stories of plain and everyday life teetering twixt the gritty, drunkenness of a barn dance and the button-up formality of high-brow audiences in their Sunday best. The audience is a bit of the latter, more reserved than the outdoor crowds we’ve I’ve seen Old Crow play.
Ketch opens with a blaring harmonica into “Tell it to Me” (“take the corn whiskey, let the cocaine be”) before a roadie comes behind him, takes the harmonica and hands him a fiddle so the band can go straight into “Alabama High Test.” Old Crow might have more songs about drugs than any band I know. They’re brutal in their narration, unapologetic and–at times–unflattering. They don’t glorify it, but they also don’t back away from stories about people who find themselves in uncomfortable places.
A couple of people get up and start dancing, but the majority of the crowd stays in their comfortable seats, so much that the one woman dancing two rows ahead seems solitary, undoubtedly whispered about in hushed tones throughout. Moving more into newer music from Volunteer, we switch a few instruments, and the band moves to crowd around Joe’s dobro solo on “Child of the Mississippi” before the band covers Alvin Robinson’s “Down Home Girl.” I swear, I hadn’t heard this song until last week. I didn’t know the Stones used to cover it. But any song that starts with telling the girl that her perfume smells like turnip greens and that her kisses taste like pork and beans might have to make it into the Bluegrass Club’s rotation soon.
Next, the band says they’re going to strip down, which gets a woot from the crowd and another MeeMaw joke from Ketch. It means we’re getting acoustic, and Jerry Pentecost, the new percussionist, hops from behind the drum set and throws on a washboard, which gets me more excited than I like to admit in polite company. The transition gives Ketch the opening to introduce the band by commenting on the relative shine (or lack thereof) of their footwear. They then break into a more old-time acoustic portion of the show. Robert trades his guitar for a fiddle, and he and Fetch get nose to nose burning the whole stage–awash in orange light–to the ground. I can’t place the first song, but then they move into “Brave Boys” off of their 2014 album Remedy. Over the course of the show, we watch the band morph in and out of different alignments in seamless transition.
But the crowd is too polite, and in moving back to the full set, Ketch introduces the ¾ Waltzy “Sweet Amarillo” by imploring people to get up and clog the aisles. Finally, the lady two rows in front of me won’t be by herself. The aisles are small, but Nic agrees to dance with me, in that I spin her around until she’s a bit dizzy. We swirl and laugh in each others’ arms, singing the song the band wrote after Bob Dylan gave them the fragment of a half-written draft. (“Like water from a rock to rhyme armadillo three different times,” says Ketch.) The song ends. Some people linger in the aisles. Cory goes to the piano, and they begin to make jokes about Knights’ Stadium, improvising a baseball organ. We sit down and look for the water bottle under the seats, and can’t find it, so I run out to the bar to get another where people are complaining that the bar is closing early. I get back in as the band is finishing “The Good Stuff,” a good-natured, comedic riff on public drunkenness.
It’s starting to get lively. We’re in North Carolina, but they pull out “Tennessee Bound.” The crowd is more consistently in the aisles. Jerry’s out from behind the drum set again and they joke that they’ve covered every theme in country music and play around like they’re forgetting one. The band yells: “Incarceration”; red and blue lights flood the stage, and the raunchy harmonica signals the start of “Brushy Mountain Conjugal Trailer,” a song that is exactly what it sounds like, a song about a prisoner trying to get laid before he gets executed. Jerry leans back over his head, crosses his arms, and starts smashing the high hats. The crowd is up and rolicking. From here, the band goes back to the stacks to pull some old country, including a bluesey song that Ketch swears is on the documentary that I’ve never heard.
Then it slows down “Crazy Eyes.” It starts with Ketch on a haunting acoustic guitar rift, a story about a homeless man down on his luck, hitting rock bottom, looking for any relief. A few in the crowd mistakenly woot and cheer at line “I would be all right/if I could just get high.” It’s not a call to party; it’s a plea of help. It’s the only song I don’t applaud all night, only because it always leaves me so sad at the end that cheering seems the wrong reaction. Beautiful. Poignant. Good music doesn’t always lift you up. Sometimes it lays bare some hard truths.
Staying in the sad section of the show, Ketch claims you can’t play in North Carolina and not play Hank Williams.. I’m not sure that’s true, as Hank has his museums in Alabama. He claims you can’t fool North Carolinians about country music. I’m not sure any of us think this is true. I think it may be “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, but they break into “Lovesick Blues”, and all I can think about is the kid who became a viral sensation yodeling this song in a Walmart. Ketch seems to be having a lot of fun yodeling about being blue.
The homelessness and heartbreak portion of the show now over, it is time to strip down again. Jerry’s back on the washboard. The whole band crowds around a single mike and tries it old school. Ketch compliments Duke Power’s investment in the acoustics of the theater while throwing shade on their environmental record. Six band members all around an old-school mike seems a throwback to a bygone day before each player could cavort around the stage with their own wirelessly-miked instrument, but seems a sweet artifact before we roll back into the show. Ketch intros “Caroline”, which he claims he wrote back when the band was just getting started.
Continuing back though their catalogue, Cory goes back to the piano and Ketch calls JT and Allison from Birds back on stage and go into “CC Rider.” Most recordings I’ve heard Old Crow do of this sounds like a creaking, folksy duet, but Russell’s powerful voice changes that dynamic, finishing up the song with dueling banjo’s-type call and response between Ketch’s harmonica and Russell’s clarinet. They kneel to the stage to pull the volume down on the band until they are virtually alone on the stage, rising again, raising the volume into a rounding chorale.
The next intro makes me lean to Nic that this is one of my favorite. “I Hear Them All:” a folksy, 60ish empathetic anthem of the pain of the common man that flows seamlessly both in music and in tone into Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and back again. Some people know the song. Some people start to sing along. But like a Charlotte crowd at any event, some people start checking their watches and some people start trying to leave to beat the traffic.
We are near the end. Then comes the moment you’ve all been waiting for. That other half-written Dylan song that they re-purposed. Robert hits the opening A chord, Ketch begins the fiddle solo, and everyone starts to rise for the sing-a-long. “Wagon Wheel”. If you don’t know any other Old Crow song, you know this one, and faithful as the sunrise, they close the show with it. Everyone sings along while the band drops vocals and listens. And even though I’ve seen them close with it every time, it’s so fun to join in the song with the band. “Wagon Wheel” finished, the band also breaks into the customary closing of “Cocaine Habit” in which they make up lyrics and introduce the members of the band one last time for individual cheers. Like they’re watching the ending credits of a film, people actually start leaving.
The band bows and says good night; the house lights are still down, but people are leaving like they’ve never been to a concert before. By the time, the band re-emerges, the whole beside me has exited. The truth is, you probably shouldn’t have Old Crow play in NC and not have them play “Doc’s Day”, the autobiographical tale of how they met Doc Watson while busking the streets in Boone and he gave them an invite to Merlefest. The rest, as they say, is history. It’s a fun, jaunty tune that ironically tells of how they sold their drumset to become more of an old-time stringband while Jerry whales on a marching band snare.
Ketch’s bow is nearly in shreds, strings flopping around. He tells MeeMaw to get ready ‘cause he’s about to come on over.” They talk about where they’re going next: “To Bojangles,” says Ketch. “For some fluffy ass biscuits.” He then pulls an 80s organ refrain off his harmonica: Dire Strait’s “Walk of Life.” It comes out of nowhereI’m enraptured, but some others shrug and head for the exits. The last people in our row, including some lady who tromped Nic’s feet, head out before the first verse is over.
Good. All the more dancing room for the rest of us fools. The band takes another emphatc bow to an adoring crowd and exit stage right as the lights come up on old fans and new converts alike. Can’t wait until the Show rolls back into town again.
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