What an awesome night! I'm still a little hungover. Old Crow Medicine Show played the Music Box in what's got to be one of the best concerts I've ever been to. OCMS is at the vanguard of what's been called "old-timey" or "Americana" music-- proto-bluegrass that Woody Guthrie (who's "Union Maid" they sang last night) would get excited about. In short, this is fiddlin', banjoin', slap your dobro kinda stuff and I sort of expected nobody to show.
Instead, the Henry Fonda was packed with hipsters and college kids for the band's first show of their new tour. OCMS's is sound comes at such a right angle to everything you usually hear that all your winsome skepticism winds up sloughing off in minutes. It's seems nearly impossible not to use the phrase "raise the roof", "knee-slappin'" or "barn-raising good time" to describe the crowd, but this wasn't a hokey country jamboree. The appeal of OCMS, beyond their undeniable talent as singers and performers is that they're engaging in a great (and mostly lost) tradition of folk songwriting. Not 'folk' as a genre, but 'folk' in the sense of songs that exist in the oral tradition, not expressions of the self, but of the community-- it's wonderfully ego free stuff. It also doesn't hurt that they sing about cocaine, murder, God, and Karl Rove (yeah, in the cocaine song).
I got drunk, stomped the floor, watched the college kids line dance, saw a peroxide blonde pixie fall into her boyfriends arms to a song about how whatever you want, "God's Got It" and joined the roar of the crowd when the band started playing, "I Hear Them All", a stunning protest song with the line: "I can hear the flowers growing in the rubble of the towers."
In rescuscitating our past, Old Crow Medicine Show feels like the start of something new.
*Sorry for not blogging for a while. My Dad was in the hospital, but is on the way to recovering. Thanks for understanding.
