As you've no doubt heard - or experienced first-hand yourself - it snowed in Atlanta this week, grinding the city to a gridlocked halt and cooping a large segment of the population up in their homes for several days. It finally thawed out by Friday to the point where you could safely drive around, and last night was the first weekend night that people could get out and socialize - to eat, drink, and be merry - since the shitstorm snowstorm hit.
Everyone celebrates in their own way, and several people celebrated by going to the always reliable Earl for an evening of live music.
Atlanta's Book Club opened. Book Club are normally a six- or seven-piece outfit with diverse instrumentation (pedal steel, cello, harmonium, melodica, guitar, banjo, etc.), but for some reason, they performed as a trio last night. It might have been the lingering effects of the weather, band members still unable to drive out of their neighborhoods, but frontman Robbie Horlick mentioned something about "some people" not getting "the message."
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| The full Book Club performing at The Earl |
In any event, although it was interesting to hear their songs broken down into a simple guitar-bass-and-harmonium format, the Earl audience was still too excited about finally getting out of their houses for a night, and were mostly all (loudly) chattering away back by the bar and the merch table, ignoring the music on stage.
So imagine this: if the audience was too excited to finally be out of the house to pay any attention to a local favorite, how much attention do you think they gave to an out-of-town folk singer? If you guessed "zero" you weren't quite correct - your humble narrator tried to hang in and listen over the roar of the crowd, so the answer was at least "one," although it probably felt like zero to the performer, Asheville's PJ Bond. He actually was pretty interesting and sounded at times something like an early, Guitar Town-era Steve Earle, but even with an electric guitarist accompanying him, he still didn't manage to win over the crowd. He's a professional and I'm sure used to such things - "the show must go on" and all that - but it was pitiful when even his stage banter comparing sex to pizza was ignored by the crowd.
I wasn't sure what to expect from Birmingham's Maria Taylor, one half of the fine band Azure Ray, but I certainly wasn't expecting a two-drum sonic assault - with Maria on one of the drum kits - to open her set. But it was the kick-in-the-ass the audience needed to finally pay some attention to the stage and it worked - she totally won the crowd over.
Maria is a fine vocalist and from the very start of the set her voice could be clearly heard over the instruments, but she's also a multi-instrumentalist. She proceeded from the drum kit to electric guitar to a Roland electric keyboard, and then back to electric guitar and ended her set where she started, at the drums. She could turn on a dime from chanteuse to riot grrrl to troubadour, and one of the cooler moments occurred near the end of her set, when tour-mate PJ Bond walked onto the stage in the middle of a song, unceremoniously pulled the jack out of her guitar even as she was playing and plugged it into his, and Maria, nonplussed as always, kept singing as she went over to the drum set, still singing, and brought the set to a thunderous climax.
Birmingham was as hard hit as Atlanta by the recent snow, and Maria mentioned that today was also her first day out of the house since the storm hit, and she wasn't even sure that she would be able to make it to Atlanta at all. But since it was such a fun set, I'm glad that the weather cooperated and that she made it after all, and that the audience finally stopped chatting and taking selfies and such, and paid some attention to the fine music coming from the stage.
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