About halfway through the evening, someone asked me what was going on. Looking around, it was a fair question. The municipal courtyard was full. Bee Lane was full. The dance floor was overflowing. People were standing shoulder-to-shoulder under storefronts and spilling out of restaurant patios. More than one person remarked that downtown felt busier than parts of Masters Week. The answer was simple. Anybody's Guess was playing. Strangely enough, despite years o

For reasons I didn't fully understand Thursday night, I kept thinking about The Village. Which is a strange thing to think about while listening to Puddle of Mudd in downtown Aiken. When The Village came out in 2004, I hated it. Not because it was a bad movie. I was mad because I thought I was getting a horror movie. The trailers promised monsters in the woods. Creepy creatures. A village trapped by fear. Instead, I got something entirely different. We'll come back to that. S

Last year, the Kenny George Band got squeezed into a corner downstairs at Electric Eats after weather forced Amp indoors. Looking back at the photos now, it’s honestly impressive they fit everybody in there at all, let alone Randy Borawski, who looked like the winner of the Powerball splurged on a stuffed grizzly bear for the corner of his 800 square foot studio apartment… after responsibly paying off his 2012 Prius first, of course. Kenny joked Thursday night they may hav

Karen Bunney missed Amp this week, leaving the historical documentation of Thursday night entirely in the hands of a guy sprinting back and forth between The Alley and a short-staffed Backyard. In hindsight, that may have been the most appropriate possible setup for a band called All The Things. Every time I stopped moving long enough to look up, something else was happening. Near the Bud Light Stage, kids danced in circles directly in front of the monitors while lon

Whiskey Run usually plays later in the Amp the Alley season, but this year they volunteered for the portion of the calendar where every Thursday forecast threatens some sort of Old Testament storm. Hard to believe we just escaped the “will it ever rain again?” season only to step directly into the “maybe we should start building an ark” season, but that’s South Carolina for you. The forecast spent most of the week looking rough enough to scare people into backup plans, but

If you saw Ethan Stallings Group last year, you probably walked away blown out by how different it sounded—and how good those guys are. This past week, you might’ve caught yourself asking who the new guy was. No bassist, Beaver on lead vocals, keys covering the low end—and the bigger shift is the set list. Songs people already know, choruses that hit without a runway, reactions that happen right away. It’s the same core of players with a key swap up front—and it chan

I used to get hired to shoot bar crawls on Broad Street in Augusta. They’d advertise them like a badge of honor—ten stops, twelve stops, as many bars as they could stack into one night. What they didn’t tell you was how much of that night you’d spend getting between them. You’d start down at Joe’s Underground, end up somewhere near Sky City, and in between… you walked. Not casually. Not conveniently. You covered ground. Long stretches where the music dropped off,

There were a few moments Thursday night where things shifted. Not in a way that felt off… just unexpected enough to make you look up. Rob called a change midstream at one point and you could see it ripple across the stage. A glance, a half-step, then everyone leaned into it like that turn had been sitting there waiting the whole time. That’s the trick. It’s not that everything goes exactly how you think it will. It’s that everyone’s ready when it doesn’t. That

Last year didn’t happen. It rained all day. Not the kind you wait out either—just steady, committed, no breaks in it. By the time it would’ve mattered, there wasn’t If you were walking through for the first time, you might wonder what you’re looking at. Chairs set up with nobody in them. Pockets of people instead of a crowd. No one lined up waiting on the band. Looks like something hasn’t started yet. But it has. The regulars know the rhythm. Chairs go down to cla

There’s always that early stretch at Amp where the night’s already underway… it’s just scattered across The Alley. Not empty. Not full. Just… moving between places. If you were walking through for the first time, you might wonder what you’re looking at. Chairs set up with nobody in them. Pockets of people instead of a crowd. No one lined up waiting on the band. Looks like something hasn’t started yet. But it has. The regulars know the rhythm. Chairs go down to cla