Loudmouth
Drive That Sucker Home!
So here it is, 12:30-ish am on my birthday and 8 am will be coming soon. Forty-two years on the rollercoaster of life, the past twenty-six in the A-U-G, the last sixteen making it LOKAL…keeping it LOUD!
It’s times like these, half asleep-partially buzzed, that a guy tends to look back and reminisce on special moments in his life. I myself, being like every other Joe Normal, am not exempt from such forceful daydreaming (if you can call it daydreaming at a bit past midnight) and with such great sleepy memories I would be remiss if I went to dreamland without sharing a few before offering up a few live music recommendations for the upcoming Master’s Week.
Many of my memories since I began showing my love for the Augusta music scene have involved my good buddy Fred McNeal. While there are surely some great stories I can tell about hanging out with Fred I will stick to the few that will keep either one of us from being sued or incarcerated. Maybe.
I can still remember the first Family Jewels gig. Tommy South’s house (well the Jewels drummer and I lived there as well). The idea was for Fred and I to chip in on a couple of kegs and have members of Idle Image play and then have Family Jewels make their debut. Well this place just happened to be at the end of a driveway behind what is now a Japanese eatery called Fujiyama on Washington Road. We passed out flyers to kids coming out of Westside the day before, turned in, and hoped for the best. Of course being the oldest, I was chosen to sit at the top of the driveway and collect admission which included all the draught beer you could drink. Yeah I know this sounds sorta bad and in a million ways, it probably was but hey, even I was still young at the time. So with a band playing on the huge front porch, a ton of kids getting into the “spirit” and me playing doorman, the cops showed up. Luckily for us, all that happened was that we were asked to take the party indoors. So we did. So just two songs into the Jewels inaugural set guess what. The cops showed up again! One kid had the balls to make a comment to the nature of “f**k the cops! They can’t come in without a search warrant”. Well guess the kid never considered that a bunch of kids drinking is about as much of a search warrant as a cop needs and so we were greeted with the presence of Richmond County’s finest who proceeded to ask the kid if he’d like to “come take a tour of my jailhouse?”. Oddly enough that kid was the only person from our little gathering to get to ride in a police car that evening. Even more odd, I think I heard later that he became a cop. For those interested, we were ratted out by a certain seafood shack right around the corner. Guess we were hoarding all of their drinking customers that night?!?!?!
At one of Family Jewels later gigs, an outdoor show at the Lake Olmstead Gazebo with one of Brian Panowichs (American Skin) early bands, Pano announced that the after party was at my house which amused me since I had moved out of Tommy South’s place and into a townhouse near Westside so of course I figured I’d go drop equipment off at our practice pad then go home leaving all the partiers at Tommy’s. Imagine my surprise when I arrived home to find a parking lot that held maybe eight cars filled with about twenty, one of which held a young troubadour leading about sixty kids in a rousing sing-a-long of Drivin n Cryins “Straight to Hell”. I can still remember going into that tiny townhouse and Jean yelling at me “they need to leave or come inside”. I looked around and thought “where the hell are we gonna fit everybody?”. Better make some more iced tea!
My dearest memory flowing around in my head this morning is of the first ever Lokal Loudness event. The Hurricane Andrew/Iniki Benefit in Grovetown. I was excited because it was slated to be a sort of Family Jewels reunion and my late friend Kevin Brown and I arrived extra early and hung out making jokes about what it would be like if Randy “Macho Man” Savage did commercials for Ronco products. “…and at no additional cost we’ll send you this set of Ginsu knives – OOOOOOOOH YEAAAAAAAH!”. It drizzled as band after band went on and just as the band right before we were supposed to go on were playing, the sky opened up. No Family Jewels reunion! The crowd was invited to enjoy the last couple of bands at one time hangout The Ranch and everyone had a blast so I guess, all’s well that ends well! Kevin was murdered just a couple of years later by a guy trying to rob the Dominos that used to be across from the front gate of the Augusta National. A few years later Ryan Henderson of the band 420 Outback gave me a VHS tape of an early show at the Lokal Loudness live teen spot “the Coffee Shoppe” and on it was footage from the beginning of that day in Grovetown with Kevin on it. That tape is one of my most precious possessions.
So now that you’ve had a chance to go back to memory lane with me, here are a few great live music choices for the upcoming ten or so days. I myself will be on a cruise ship chilling in the Bahamas and while I would like to say that I’m bummed to be missing all this local music yumminess…let’s just say I’ll get along just fine with my frozen alcoholic beverage and sea air!
Of course this great week of madness begins with First Friday which of course means live music on 10th street. FOR FREE! Enjoy tunes by The Vellotones, Livingroom Legends and Augusta Chronicle songwriting contest champs the Dew Hickies. Other great shows going on later in the night include:
Hello Lefty, The Cubists, The Never and Against the Grain at Sector 7G
Shotgun Opera with Crop Circle at the Playground
Angie Aparo, Jacob Johnson and John Krueger at Red Lion
Edison Project at the Cotton Patch
Columbia’s Hot Lava Monster at 1102 Bar & Grill’s back bar
Saturday welcomes even more great shows such as:
Stick to Your Guns, Winds of Plague, Impending Doom, Veil of Maya, The Classic Struggle and By the Sins at Sector 7G
Mojo & The Haeighties at the Red Lion Pub
The Cubists at the Soul Bar.
On Sunday Keith Gregory and John Kolbeck will be at the Cotton Patch plus Woody Wood and John Krueger will be at 1102. Start your week off Monday, April 7th with Liferuiner, A Well Thought Tragedy and Words in Red at Sector 7g, The Unmentionables at Somewhere in Augusta, or the Velcro Pygmies at the Country Club. On Tuesday John Kolbeck visits Somewhere in Augusta while James Heath will be at Joe’s Underground. Jim Perkins will be at Somewhere in Augusta on Wednesday while Shaun Piazza Band returns to the Soul Bar. On Thursday Grayson Hill will be at Somewhere in Augusta and Bayou Bleu rocks the Soul Bar. On Friday April, 11th come downtown for a second “Back Nine” First Friday with 10th street music from Jubba, Delta Nine, and Electric Voodoo. Stick around for:
Another Poorhouse Gypsy(Philo) & Dirty Sons of Ireland at the Playground.
Fletch & Folk Joe’s Underground
Chairleg, Necessary Evil, The Stain Remains, Dahlsim and Metal Ink at. Sector 7G
The next night Suns Collide rocks out the Playground, Blue Cotton plays at Somewhere in Augusta, Blue Flashing Light returns from China with a show at 1102 and of course make sure to attend the CD Joe Graves & the Dirty Left Hand CD release show at the Firehouse with music from DLH as well as the Dirty Sons of Ireland…
While all the tourists are gearing up to head home, end your week by checking out Sabo & Michael at Somewhere in Augusta. By the way, if you haven’t seen the new location of Somewhere in Augusta… Of course this is only a fraction of the live music happening over the next week and all you have to do is check out our calendar for even more options! When it comes down to it, there will definitely be something going on for even the most discriminating of music lovers. Just get out… and check it out! So make it LOKAL…keep it LOUD! And hold down the fort while I’m gone!
Stoney
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It’s such a shame that your birthday couldn’t end as good as it started. Promise me that someday we can join Fred for beer and I can hear some more of these stories!