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

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

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

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

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

What even counts as “classic” anymore? The other day I heard Green Day on a classic rock station, and it felt like catching a glimpse of your own reflection in a shop window — familiar but older than you remembered. Somewhere along the way, “classic” stopped being a genre and became a moving target. Maybe it’s not about the decade at all. Maybe “classic” just means it still hits. And Black Dawg hit hard — they might’ve been playing the classics, but there wasn’t a single thin