County Road 49 Family Road Trip
Best of the Best
The Fail Guy for Your Water Heater
Cyber Bullying Can Have Real Consequences
The Backyard is Now Open at 11am
Tomorrow: King Size
It's About Family
We have a wonderfully inconsistent definition of family.
Sometimes it means the people whose DNA you share. Sometimes it means the person you married. Sometimes it means the friends who have been around long enough that explaining the distinction seems pointless. According to Vin Diesel, it may also include virtually anyone who has ever helped you steal a car.
County Road 49 lands somewhere between the Partridge Family and Fast & Furious.
Paul Kelly brought his son Brandon and his wife Jessica. Chris Keys has been part of the crew for years. This time they brought along their friend Kenny George. Five people, enough musical overlap that nobody seems particularly concerned about whose job belongs to whom.
Which, come to think of it, sounds less like a band and more like a family road trip.
That may be the easiest way to make sense of a County Road 49 setlist.
Brandon can settle into the Chris Stapleton, Band of Heathens side of things, then Paul steps up with Vince Gill or makes the Commodores’ “Easy” feel perfectly at home. Jessica spends plenty of the night filling out the harmonies, but give her the microphone and she’ll take a song like The Outfield’s “Your Love” and make a pretty convincing argument that it never particularly needed a male singer in the first place.
Chris Keys is doing all of this from behind the drums, somehow finding enough spare oxygen to reach the high notes on Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” and take on “Hotel California.” Kenny George mostly settles into rhythm guitar and the fabric of the band, until that low register of his becomes exactly what a Dire Straits song needs.
It makes for a strange playlist on paper. Country, Southern rock, yacht-rock-adjacent Commodores, Foreigner, Dire Straits, The Outfield.
But families rarely agree on what belongs on the radio anyway.
Karen Bunney actually noticed another version of this years ago, the first time she saw County Road 49 at the Atomic Festival in New Ellenton. What stuck with her wasn’t a particular song. It was that they could play each other’s instruments. If somebody got tired, she remembered, somebody else could simply take over.
They didn’t need to play musical chairs Thursday night for the point to survive.
Last year’s Amp debut gave us the proof when Paul moved behind the drums and Chris picked up the bass. This year, the lineup itself had changed. Jessica had joined Paul and Brandon up front, and Kenny George had climbed aboard without turning County Road 49 into the Kenny George Band. He mostly played rhythm, added vocals where they fit, and occasionally took his own turn at the microphone.
That’s probably the more interesting thing about the band anyway.
Nobody has to disappear for somebody else to take the wheel.
Brandon can still absolutely tear through a guitar solo. Paul and Jessica can exchange those little looks that only married people seem to have an entire vocabulary for. Chris can be pounding away behind all of them and suddenly become the voice you’re listening to. Kenny can spend most of a song tucked into the arrangement, then drop into a vocal register nobody else onstage has.
Everybody gets their turn.
The trip keeps moving.
But family wasn’t confined to the stage Thursday night.
Turn around.
There were babies being bounced near the stage and kids weaving through the grownups. Grandparents and grandkids. Couples. Friends. Dogs who have attended enough Amp shows to probably qualify for sponsor credentials.
And in one of the photos from the night, a little girl is holding up a phone. Look closely and there’s a face on the screen, presumably Dad, joining the evening by FaceTime from wherever he happened to be.
That’s family too.
For nine years now, Amp has been building a family of its own, one Thursday night at a time. Some come nearly every week. Some show up when their favorite band is playing. Musicians leave the stage and become part of the crowd. People who first met in the Alley eventually stop needing an introduction.
At some point, the line between the bands we bring back and the people who keep coming back to see them started to disappear.
Maybe that’s why County Road 49 fit Thursday so naturally.
The stage was full of one definition of family.
The Alley was full of all the others.
Maybe Vin Diesel had a point after all.
Family isn’t necessarily everybody riding in the same car.
Sometimes it’s just everybody who keeps showing up for the ride.
The Alley
Your Water Heater Has a Designated Victim
There is a piece of metal inside your water heater with a remarkably bleak job description.
It's supposed to die first.
It's called a **sacrificial anode rod**, and most tank-style water heaters have one. Usually made from magnesium, aluminum, or an aluminum-zinc alloy, the rod is more chemically attractive to corrosion than the steel tank surrounding it.
So the corrosion goes after the rod instead.
Slowly.
For years.
Until eventually, there's not much rod left to sacrifice.
Which raises a question most homeowners have probably never considered:
**When was the last time somebody checked yours?**
An anode rod is a maintenance item that's easy to forget because it's hidden inside an appliance that generally receives very little attention until the morning somebody discovers the shower has gone cold, the hot water smells strange, or there's water where water definitely isn't supposed to be.
The rod won't make your water heater immortal, but inspecting and replacing a depleted one can help protect the tank from corrosion and potentially extend its useful life.
It's a wonderfully strange bit of plumbing engineering: **destroy this relatively inexpensive piece of metal so the considerably more expensive piece of metal can live.**
If you have no idea what condition yours is in, you're in excellent company.
Fortunately, **Stark Plumbing** knows where to look.
(803) 866 - LEAK
The Bud Light Stage
The Cat in the Hat Isn't the Scary Part
There is currently a particularly bizarre corner of the internet occupied by AI-generated images of the Cat in the Hat standing outside real schools, homes and communities, sometimes accompanied by threatening messages or references to actual people and places.
To a teenager, that may look like a meme.
To the kid named in it, it may feel like a threat.
And to a school administrator or police officer tasked with figuring out whether the threat is real, “we were just joking” isn't necessarily the end of the conversation.
That's probably worth talking about with your kids.
The screen doesn't make the person on the other side hypothetical. Cyberbullying is real. Harassment is real. Threats are real. And something created in thirty seconds for a laugh can travel considerably farther than the teenager who posted it ever intended.
Of course, teenagers occasionally ignore excellent parental advice and do spectacularly foolish things anyway.
If yours ends up on that side of the situation, take it seriously. Don't turn the family group chat into an amateur legal department. Don't start deleting posts or messages. If school administrators, investigators or law enforcement become involved, getting qualified legal advice early can matter.
But there's another kid in this story.
If your child is the one being threatened, harassed or targeted, particularly when online behavior begins following them into school or the real world, you don't necessarily have to figure out what to do next by yourself either. Preserve the messages, screenshots and other evidence. Report immediate safety concerns appropriately. And when the situation has crossed beyond something the school or a social-media report button can adequately resolve, an attorney can help you understand what options are available.
Whether your kid made the post or became the subject of it, the important lesson is essentially the same:
What happens online can become very real, very quickly.
And if it does, BMG Law may be one of the calls worth making.
Apparently We Have Lunch Five Days a Week Now
We started serving lunch on Fridays and Saturdays.
Then we added Sunday.
Apparently that wasn't enough.
So we've made another perfectly reasonable restaurant-owner decision and added **Wednesday and Thursday lunch too.**
The Backyard now opens at **11 AM Wednesday through Saturday**, which gives you two additional weekdays to decide that whatever you were supposed to accomplish after lunch can probably wait until tomorrow.
Smokestacks. Swinos. Charred-O-Nays. Wings. Cold drinks. The yard. The Airstream. All the usual suspects, just considerably earlier in the day.
We've made one adjustment on the other end, too.
**Sundays are now 11 AM–3 PM.**
Sunday is lunch. Come eat, hang out for the afternoon, and then we'll send everybody home and briefly pretend restaurant people know what a weekend is.
So, for those keeping score:
**Wednesday–Saturday: open at 11 AM**
**Sunday: 11 AM–3 PM**
Five lunches a week.
This seemed like a good idea at the time.
Thursday: County Road 49
At this point, King Size doesn't need much of an introduction.
Ruskin, Cam and Brannon have been Amp regulars for years, turning familiar songs into something decidedly their own.
Alice in Chains. Tears for Fears. Prince. Green Day. Britney Spears, if they're feeling particularly destructive.
You know the songs.
You just don't necessarily know what King Size is going to do to them.
They're back at Amp this Thursday.
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