Moose Nicholson

Ryan Abel is always getting help from his friends — but that’s kind of his superpower. He’s the boisterous ring-leader of Augusta’s music scene, the guy who can rally a couple dozen pros from different projects and somehow make them sound like they’ve been touring together for years. Thursday night on the Bud Light Stage, he did it again. This time it was Michael Baideme on guitar, Brooks Andrews on bass, and Russell Jarad on drums — a lineup pulled from a web of bands that stretches across ever

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 thing dated about it.

Last year Johnathan Wilson got about halfway through his set before the sky decided it wanted a solo. Rain came in sideways, short-circuited the night, and left everyone wondering what might’ve been. This time the weather held, and Wilson came back with the same crew and a clear plan—to rinse off the bad luck and finish what he started. What followed wasn’t so much a setlist as a ritual. From a distance, it might’ve looked like some kind of musical séance—the stage lit by amps instead of candles