Moose Nicholson

Tell me about every arena, theater, and festival you've ever played if you'd like. The only stage I really care about is the one twenty feet in front of my lawn chair. That's the beautiful thing about live music. Every show starts over. Every Thursday, every band walks onto the Bud Light Stage with a completely clean slate. It doesn't matter whether it's your first paid gig or you've collected enough awards to need another shelf. Once the music starts, all of that history becomes exa

There was a time when parents hated this music. Not all of them, of course, but enough that "turn that noise down" became part of growing up in the '90s. The distorted guitars. The gravelly vocals. The flannel. The angst. Grunge wasn't supposed to become timeless. It was supposed to be a phase. Thursday night, hundreds of people gathered in Downtown Aiken to sing every word. Somewhere along the way, the soundtrack of teenage rebellion quietly became classic rock. For their first trip

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 like they accidental