Results tagged “Knoxville” from Live Like This

Wednesday was a good night for music in Knoxville, from Abigail Washburn wrapping up her residency at Relix to the Discordian Society's rollicking jams at Pres Pub and Liturgy's screeching, pummeling black metal at Pilot Light. Here's a little of what we saw.

Wandered into the Preservation Pub sort of randomly late Friday and caught the latter chunk of a really good set by Asheville's Discordian Society. Yes they're a jam band or a groove band or whatever, but they actually really jam and groove. My problem with a lot of post-Dead groove stuff is that the noodliness tends to extend to the rhythm sections and the song structures generally. The great first-wave jam bands (thinking not just of the Dead, but Country Joe, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fort Mudge Memorial Dump) were built on mad R&B vamps and tight turns that provided the fuel for the spaces in between, which could be filled in by guitars or organs or whatever. The Discordian guys are much more in the mold of those bands than they are like Widespread Panic or whatever jam band it was that made you decide you hate jam bands. They're deliberately silly in the manner of a lot of classic psychedelia, but the precision of their playing belies the good-time goofball vibe. These guys have practiced. And the bass/guitar/drums/keys/sax lineup gives them a lot of room to work with.

So the verdict on Thursday night's Neil Young show at the Civic Auditorium is: Dude rocks. In a relatively brief but still generous-seeming 17-song solo performance, the 64-year-old hippie/sage/ecofreak/grungefather hit on a bunch of obvious career highlights ("Helpless," "Down by the River," "Ohio," "After the Gold Rush"). But nearly half the set list was unreleased, much of it apparently slated for his forthcoming album. The unfamiliar tunes weren't for the most part up to the level of the classics--because, c'mon, not many songs by anyone are up to the level of Young's best work--but his engagement with both the old and new material was forceful and, for the most part, compelling. Switching between acoustic and electric guitars, piano, and (for "After the Gold Rush") a pump organ, Young barely spoke to the crowd but seemed fully immersed in the songs. And, especially on the electric numbers, he immersed the crowd in them, too. He finished the set with back to back renditions of "Cortez the Killer" and "Cinnamon Girl" that filled the auditorium with giant waves of gorgeous fuzz guitar. Then, after a one-song encore (the plaintive "Walk With Me"), he tipped his hat and waved goodbye. 

If there was any question what counts as "classic rock" in 2010, two Knoxville bands answered it decisively Thursday night: Radiohead. In their Market-Square-filling, crowd-pleasing set at Sundown in the City, Aftah Party (who opened for Tonic) found the inherent funk lurking in "Just" (which, if you have as much trouble remembering Radiohead song titles as I do, is the one that goes, "You do it to yourself/Just you/You and no one else..."). Many hours later, long after the Sundown crowd had dispersed but just a few hundred feet from the Sundown stage, Grandpa's Stash rocked the Preservation Pub with their trombone-driven rendition of "Paranoid Android."