I was dancing. Well, I was moving. I’m not sure you can accurately describe what I was doing as dancing. There were a lot of folks around me that were much more betterer at dancing than I was at this moment. It wasn’t because the music wasn’t rocking, I haven’t heard such a direct assault on my earways since the Propagandhi show. For three guys with homemade instruments, these guys knew how to get the most out of them.
And that is probably why I wasn’t “dancing,” I was too distracted by the sound and energy coming from the stage a few feet in front of me. Specifically Doug Dicharry’s spoons, electric spoons being amplified were being beaten into his leg in a way that made me cringe a bit for how sore it must be after the show. But there he was throwing it all down with nothing more than some amplification and two spoons. The triplets he was pulling off by running them across his fingers just about blew my mind.
As my jaw was dropping, the drunken, unwashed hippies that surround me were either jumping up and down out of rhythm or stopping to take a drink from their beer they kept spilling everywhere or to pull out their phone and snap a photo of the spectacle that was unfolding in front of them.
I didn’t take any photos. My phone never left my pocket. There were only a few moments when the idea even crossed my mind, but then the music would drag me away and I would forget about trying to capture the moment with some shitty picture that would end up in an auto-upload cloud service and be forgotten. Nope, I just kept rocking back and forth reveling in the sound.
Full disclosure: I have a bit of a thing, you could say, for traditional American instruments. It might be directly linked to my beard, but a banjo being well-plucked or a washboard being rhythmically beat is about all I need to enjoy a band. I had misgivings about returning to Springdale for the second night as the first had ended with some weird instrumental band that I could go without ever listening to again. Not that their music was particularly bad, or that the musicians couldn’t play, it just had no flavor. The tempo of every song was similar and the vocalist ended every song with the same phrase that was so unnoteworthy that I can’t remember what it was.
I like music that doesn’t necessarily abide by the rules.
After riding the Goose Saturday morning, it would have taken little to no encouragement to get me to do nothing more than laze in bed for the rest of the day. We did a descent amount of that and then starting looking at the acts for the night. At first, I wasn’t interested. Then KB pointed out that the closing group had a guy that played the washboard. I quickly found out he also played the spoons, trombone, drum and mandolin.
Ok. I’m in.
They finished the show with Black Betty.
Did I mention he “plays” the telephone as well?
And just as jolting and impulsive as the entire show had been, the finishing song pushed the crowd to a frenzy as the jumping was as infectious as the driving beat. They finished up and those in attendance were left questioning what exactly they had just experienced and why it was that they were so stoked on it.
Mudstomp. It’s not a genre I was aware even existed, but it’s already dear to my cold, black heart.
P. L. and R.
