Remember the first Bonnaroo when the schedule for the event fit nicely on one page? Those days are long gone as the 2010 edition of Bonnaroo features six main stages
Last year, Gillian Welch’s longtime musical collaborator Dave Rawlings released his first solo album A Friend Of A Friend under the clever moniker – Dave Rawlings Machine. The album, which
The first annual Hangout Beach Music and Arts Festival has come to a close in Gulf Shores, AL after a tumultuous final day that saw the fairgrounds evacuated for two
Back in May ’96, before Phish’s Clifford Ball – which is often credited as a pre-cursor to the current festival explosion, Deadhead Heaven brought a variety of Dead-inspired bands from
Last night, Phish returned to late night for the first time in six years to tackle Loving Cup as part of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’s Stones Week. The band
Last fall, Levon Helm, the former drummer for The Band, was forced into vocal rest after doctors found a non-cancerous lesion on his vocal chords. While the docs kept us
Earlier this spring, we reported that Jay Lane was leaving his gig as part of the two-headed drum attack in Furthur to rejoin Primus to reform the band’s original lineup
The summer concert season is quickly approaching and there’s no clearer sign of its pending arrival than the lineup announcements for NYC’s Central Park SummerStage and Celebrate Brooklyn! at the
Widespread Panic, Washington DC, April 21
The more time I spend with Widespread Panic’s forthcoming Dirty Side Down, the more it sounds to me like the most comfortable album Panic’s recorded in a decade. If it’s taken this long for Panic to finish a document that feels lovingly stitched together, not “assembled,” and truest to their live mojo, so be it –- for me, it’s taken almost as long for Panic the live band to be as reliable as they once were.
No, it’s not that I haven’t had epic, soul-nourishing Widespread experiences in the post-Houser era of the band, it’s just that it’s taken a long time to be able to depend on them again. Catching the band early in the tour in mid-April, the second of two nights in the capital’s lovely Warner Theater, was affirmative. To JB, Jimmy, JoJo, Dave, Sunny and Todd: I’m buying.
It was a haphazard show with some marvelous moments – part of Panic’s appeal, oddly, are the groovy, ragged edges that contrast the fiery peaks and soulful zeniths – and it was enough to keep me convinced. It’s not a “the band is back” type of feeling, either; Panic never went away and recovered pretty quickly, all told, from a personnel tragedy that would have derailed, or at least neutered, a lesser band. It’s more that I’m not convinced Panic’s best days are in the rearview mirror. They have miles to go, mountains to climb. Nearly 25 years in, that’s pretty impressive.
READ ON for more from Chad on WSP in Washington D.C….
On May 11, The National will release their highly anticipated fifth studio album High Violet – which is currently streaming on the New York Times website. As a way of
