With beer in hand, I dodged through the mass of costumed college kids. There were ghosts and ghouls and Rod Blagojevich-Spooky! This was the home stretch on the weekend that tried to kill me. My mind was nearly shattered by lack of sleep, my body all but permanently crippled. I just needed to snap a few pictures and listen to some music and I could reward myself with a nice nap. Not a bad life, all in all.
The music at this years Halloween bash at the Canopy Club was jam band heavy. Cornmeal and Zmick played their improvisational and mostly instrumental based songs, while the Wood Brothers and Mathien were precise in their sets. Walking through the crowd, I heard many opinions on whether the Wood Brothers or Cornmeal should have been the closing act, but once the music started everyone just danced.
In between acts, I could walk around and admire the costumes, ranging from the uninspired to the creative to the creepy. One girl told me she was a monarch. A lady zombie tried to cut my head off with a machete (I swear, whoever keeps arming these zombies . . .). So many more were weird and uncomfortable to look at. Guy in gimp clothes, I’m averting my eyes from you.
Mathien, from Chicago, opened the night with their funk rock with a soft electronic background and persistent bass. Their songs are fairly pop-y, but damn catchy, and the singer, Chris Mathien, never missed his mark vocally.
The Wood Brothers played the main stage. The brothers joked throughout their set while still maintaining their sense of class, which is hard to do while wearing fake mustaches. They vibrated the stage, not just with their own sound, but also with the energy coming off the audience
Jam bands need some catch to stick out from every other jam band. Zmick deals a little too much in the classic guitar-heavy jam sound. There wasn’t enough ebb and flow to it to keep my attention for long. I went back and found the bar littered with quarters, tips I assume, and three deep with college kids. Then to the main stage to find a good spot for Cornmeal, where snapped a few pictures of costumes along the way.
Cornmeal started out their set with a lot of bluegrass, a lot of fiddle and those drone-y vocals, but soon shifted fully to jam. They left behind their edge, their bit that drew me in. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I was losing interest.
After sitting for a spell, I got a
second wind and ran into the crowd snapping pictures. I looked over and security was waving me over. “You can’t take pictures,” he told me. “Yes I can,” I said. I have total coverage; I had been taking pictures all night. He said the owner specifically told him that no one could take pictures at the show. As Cornmeal’s last note died away I thought, “I’m sure that’s true, sir, I’m sure that’s true.”