Barn Dance Review - June 1997

From: Ted Samsel (tejas@INFI.NET)
Subject: Capital City Barn Dance #3

Assuming my usual parking spot in front of Edgar Allen Poe's former abode, I took a stroll though Shockoe Bottom to refresh my recall of a recently published account of Richmond during the War of Northron Aggro. I wandered into a bar to refresh myself, but the barkeeps were enamoured with a video hockey game and were rather slow in attending to my liquid needs. I eventually got a beer and found myself to be hungry. I left and eventually fell into Chetti's for some steamers & beer. My physical needs thus assuaged, I then meandered to the portals of the Flood Zone and found entrance. I still am not sure if the FZ is the infamous "Castle Thunder", the Confederate calaboose administered by Gen'l Winder and his posse of Bawlmer gutter trash "plug uglies" and other sorts of police characters...

I was plumb tickled to find that the program for the current Capital City Barn Dance included a crafts page for the kids. Had I but known, I could have brought crayons and colored in the smiling visage of Hexter the Possum.

BABY YOU KNOW, hailing from Regensburg, Bavaria, started the evening's round of musical entertainment. I wasn't sure what to expect, having seen several Euro-country bands bin the past, back in Austin. Sometimes the Euros perceive American cultural offerings in a rather odd light, but these guys didn't. I was expecting them to be holzschlagers, a sort of Alpine hillbilly of the sort that gives both hillbillies & Bavarians a bad name.. example: REDNEX..not German, but Scandinavian... modeling their act on Barney Google (with the goo-goo-googly eyes). After their stint on stage, I cornered Erhard, the leader and songwriter. I wanted to know if he wrote the songs auf deutsch before translating them into English. He has a mastery of the language and the band members seem to readily absorb the country music idiom in a seamless fashion.

A demi-CRACKER came on stage next. The anticipated act, John Bob Luzin, as I recall, was ill or otherwise indisposed this evening. I'm not sure if the lineup was all-CRACKER, but they arrived on stage sans David Lowery, treating the audience to a batch of numbers that could adequately serve for honkytonk two-steppin' purposes. However, Richmond audiences being Richmond audiences, few in the crowd took them up on this. Eventually Lowery came on stage and played and sang on a few numbers with the band. Wes Freed demonstrated his language aptitude by singing the SHINER SONG (beloved anthem of the Texas honyock) in Czech with the band. Had but I brought my diatonic accordion... well, the mind just reels! Lowery behaved himself pretty well, he didn't fire anyone onstage, this time. However, he neglected to allow me to ask a question or two. Nothing about music, of course. Just something to do with Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, MASON & DIXON. He's supposed to be some stripe of hard-core pynchon-o-phile but I wasn't able to get through his attendants and retinue. Oh well, maybe next time.

THE DROVERS were cornball. And that's a good thing! It's about time that corn became a perennial in its own right on the Richmond scene. Their hillbilly jive from the radidio days of yore was a welcome gift, full of obligatory yeehaugh and hooraw. They rounded the evening out with a clutch of songs ranging from NEVER BEAT YOUR WIFE ON A SUNDAY to paeans celebrating the joys and vicissitudes of the moonshinin' bidness.

The Flood Zone is to be commended for their toning-down of the security. None of them seemed to be waiting for disorder to unfurl its ugly old self. I nearly brought my kids, but they were too involved in end-of-school festivities and other mania. Media coverage advertising this event seemed to be much broader in scope than for the second CCBD, thus the crowd was substantially larger. And would you believe it? Local on-air personalities Wylie Southworth and Jennie Jussell (WXGI) were spotted at this fandangle as well.