I couldn't have named a Grateful Dead song with any confidence before Thursday night. Which immediately put me at a disadvantage against the people wearing tie dye who looked like they'd been preparing for this moment since approximately 1978. The difference was noticeable before Scarlet Begonias ever played a note. The crowd wasn't quite as large as the week before, but it was definitely different. More tie dye. More Billy Strings shirts. More folks who didn't look

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