Well Day 2 of Arkansas' Riverfest almost didn't start. A storm rolled in just as I was driving in to downtown Little Rock. I decided I was going to brave it anyways and got about 8 steps away from the car when all the rain stopped. I made it just in time to see Shannon Wurst take the Acxiom/Miller Lite stage. Last week I went through all the Myspace pages of all of the Riverfest performers and was completely blown away with her sound. Her voice is amazing and is up there with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. I had never seen her live and did not know what to expect from her on stage. She brought along two of her sidekicks to complete the trio that goes by the name of Three Penny Acre. The whole set went really well and slowly drew a faithful audience. Wurst is from the Fayetteville area and apparently plays several nights a week in Oklahoma and NW Arkansas. Unfortunately for the people of Little Rock it looks like she hardly plays down here at all. Her Riverfest outing was the only scheduled Central Arkansas performance for the whole summer. I stuck around a little bit afterwards to buy her cd but the band didn't return to the stage to sell me one. I highly recommend checking her out if you are into the whole Iris Dement, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris sound. Quite honestly I think she may be the best local performer I have heard and I can only hope that someone discovers her quick.
http://www.shannonwurst.com
Our second stop was off to the Triple-S Alarm stage to listen to another Arkansas group, Sean Rock and the Toltecs. For a local band they were also relatively impressive. They played a lot of songs that closely resembled some of Steve Earle's earlier stuff. They weren't anything to write home about but were far better than your average bar band. We had to cut our trip to the Triple-S stage short after getting harassed by Johnny...
Johnny....
He quite honestly could have an entire blog entry devoted to himself. To sum things up, and to try to be polite (he really was a seemingly nice guy), this guy had about 5 teeth, bulging red eyes, and thin scraggly black hair. He opened up to us by sharing a story about how a week before he had been severely beaten up by a group of thugs that wanted his many bottles of some sort of doctor prescribed pain killers. He also shared that he had been in a motorcycle wreck, had 26 reconstructive surgeries on his arms and legs, been run over by a Hay Tractor and pushed off a 3 story building. He also invited one of his friends over to our conversation... His friend was a 7 foot tall older black guy dressed in what looked like a bright purple bath robe that covered him from head to toe. The guy was also carrying a bright pink leather bag stuffed with petitions he was trying to get signed for more college degrees in our education system. Johnny continued to share a story about how the previous day he lost another tooth that was bugging him and found $100 in a McDonalds parking lot all within 30 minutes of each other. Divine Intervention or the Tooth Fairy, I'll let you be the judge. Anyways, they both seemed like pretty pleasant people but we had already heard Johnny's stories twice and he was about to start into a third round. I decided to politely excuse myself from the conversation and left the Triple-S stage area.
We eventually made it back to the NLR side of the river and dropped in on the Ted Ludwig Trio playing the Arkansas Music Tent. I like jazz music and all but I have never quite been able to get into the trio sound, especially if no one is singing. Ted Ludwig played some phenomenal jazz stuff on an old hollow body electric guitar and was backed by a pretty solid upright bass player and drummer. The only problem was that after about 3 songs everything started to sound the same. There really just wasn't enough instrumentation to get a real solid sound. It was essentially just one super long guitar solo after another. Ted couldn't comp at all because no one else was there to take the lead. If they had just brought along a keyboardist, sax player, or trumpet player it would have taken there group from a B rating to an A.
My Dad and I decided that $11 for a Gyro and fries was pretty ridiculous and ate at the Salty Parrot in NLR. The food was sub-par but it was nice to sit down. The floating restaurant thing they have there is pretty cool but a little too colorful for my taste. It might be a cool place to check out on a night they have a band playing.
We eventually made it back over to the Triple-S stage to get ready for Jonny Lang. Voodoo Village was still playing and pretty much brought the 3 day festival to its lowest point. With two great bands playing Friday night and Robert Earl Keen playing Sunday Night it looks like this weekends music quality trend resembles an upside down bell curve. Voodoo Village didn't sound like anything you can't hear stuck on-hold from any customer service hot line. Several "this sounds like elevator music" jokes later the band took a turn for the worse. I dare anyone to find a more fitting rock bottom for the 3 day festival than what happened next. The lead singer/saxophone player had already been playing completely out of tune for the previous couple songs and was about to raise the hair of even the most seasoned concert goer. He picked up a tenor saxophone and his dreaded soprano saxophone and actually tried to play them both at the same time. Yes... one hand on each instrument and two mouthpieces in his mouth. What came out quite honestly made Jim Carrey's "You wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world" routine sound like angel's singing. That was enough for me and we decided to walk around a bit more until Jonny Lang was schedule to come on.
The night didn't get much better and Jonny Lang's road crew experienced enough technical difficulties to make his scheduled start about 40 minutes late. The crowd started to get pretty restless around 9:50 considering he was supposed to go on at 9:15. I have a feeling the crew rushed him on stage because when he ultimately did start, both guitars were not even audible. His voice sounded extremely weak and all you could hear were a ton of bass and drum feedback. After a few songs and several frantic looks to the crew on the side of the stage, they eventually got dialed in. All and all I just don't think I am particularly into the whole new-soul / glorified-R&B genre. I actually like John Mayer quite a bit but I think that's just because he is a phenomenal guitar player. Jonny Lang played a few good songs but nothing really floored me. The crowd was definitely responsive and the band fed off of the crowd's energy quite well.
Overall, it's interesting that two local Arkansas bands have been far better than any of the national, and highly overpaid acts. I'm beginning to think that Little Rock should have a mini Riverfest sometime during the year with just local bands.
I am however looking forward to Robert Earl Keen tomorrow night. After Merle Haggard canceled and was replaced by Sawyer Brown I am hoping that REK will save the weekend.
-T
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