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."
The lesson here is not just how large those mid-to-late-'90s Radiohead albums loom in the rock landscape, but also how good those songs sound with horn sections.
That's funny—both of those bands started playing those songs at the Square Room's Sound Off competition back in the winter. Each month, at each installment of the contest, the bands had to play a song by a particular artist—that month it was Radiohead.
I guess the kids dig it, because they're still playin' em.