Heart & Soul Makes The List
Best of the Best
Don't Wait for A Celebrity to Save the Day
Trust the Locals Who Have Your Back
The Backyard is Now Open at 11am
Tomorrow: County Road 49
VH1 Best of Live
There used to be an entire genre of television built around making lists.
The 100 Greatest Songs. The 50 Greatest Albums. The 40 Greatest Whatever-We-Could-Find-Footage-For.
VH1 would gather a rotating cast, work its way through the rankings, and spend an afternoon reminding you of songs you hadn’t thought about in years.
Last Thursday, Amp the Alley apparently booked the live version.
Only instead of talking about the songs, Heart & Soul played them.
And they brought enough people to do it properly.
Seven of them, in fact.
That sounds like a lot after spending the previous Thursday watching Edward Phillips and The Blue make the case that three people are plenty. Heart & Soul seems to subscribe to the opposite theory. If you’re going to work your way from Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder to the Beatles, Santana, Van Morrison and the Doobie Brothers, you might as well bring reinforcements.
So the stage filled up. Singers changed. Instruments changed hands. Different people stepped forward as different songs called for them.
And gradually, it stopped feeling like one band trying to stretch itself across fifty years of music.
It felt more like the cast kept changing because the next episode had started.
Set One alone could have kept the VH1 producers busy.
“Gimme Some Lovin’” gave way to “Soul Man.” Then Santana, Huey Lewis, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder. Somewhere between “Piece of My Heart,” “Into the Mystic,” Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove,” trying to identify a decade became pointless.
That was the trick to the whole thing. There wasn’t really a theme to follow because recognition was the theme.
You knew this one.
And this one.
And, yep, you definitely knew this one too.
By the time they got to Set Two, the imaginary countdown had apparently abandoned whatever rules it started with anyway. Tom Petty could sit next to Fleetwood Mac, Sam & Dave could run into Van Morrison, Carole King could lead to the Beatles, Blood, Sweat & Tears could share a page with the Bee Gees and the Righteous Brothers.
It was less The 100 Greatest Songs of All Time and more:
The 100 Songs We Can Probably Get Everybody in the Alley to Know.
Karen Bunney certainly knew them.
While I spent a good portion of Thursday night looking everywhere except directly at the stage, Karen was keeping considerably better notes. She heard Neil Young in “Harvest Moon,” Wynonna Judd in “No One Else on Earth,” the Bee Gees in “To Love Somebody” and Van Morrison in “Into the Mystic.”
That difference in perspective was partly occupational.
Photographing seven musicians on the Bud Light Stage is a small geometry problem. There are only so many holes between microphone stands, music stands, keyboards and the six other people you aren’t currently trying to photograph.
Randa Berry gave me a particularly narrow window. From the right angle, she’s sitting behind the keyboards singing. Pick the wrong one, and I’ve somehow photographed Wilson from Home Improvement peeking over the fence to say hi-de-ho to the Alley.
That’s a me problem.
So I spent more time than usual turning around.
And maybe that was useful.
Because from the stage, Heart & Soul’s setlist looked almost comically broad. From the other direction, you could see how a setlist like that actually works.
One song sent somebody toward the stage. Another brought out a phone. Somewhere else, somebody started singing along without seeming to realize they were doing it. Others kept talking right through one song, only to snap their attention toward the stage when the next familiar opening arrived.
Forty-five songs gives you a lot of chances to find somebody’s song.
And Heart & Soul seemed perfectly content to keep drawing numbers until they did.
By Set Three, there really wasn’t much left to prove.
Neil Young. Joe Cocker. Linda Ronstadt. Rod Stewart. Otis Redding. Wilson Pickett. Carole King. Stevie Nicks. Chuck Berry.
And somewhere in all of that, the reason for bringing seven people along became a little clearer.
The week before, Edward Phillips and The Blue had demonstrated just how much noise three very good musicians can make. Heart & Soul weren’t necessarily making more with seven.
They just had more things to make it with.
A trumpet adds one more color. Mike Terry’s sax adds another. Randa’s keys open another door. Ashley Foreman’s percussion can put something underneath a song that a standard drum kit doesn’t. Mark Ferriter can sit behind that kit, then pick up a mandolin when the song asks for that instead.
None of those additions completely changes what the band is.
Each one just moves the fence a little farther out.
Which becomes pretty useful when your setlist can’t seem to find a fence at all.
And somewhere among those 45 songs, Heart & Soul added one that wasn’t on any of the three setlists.
“Happy Birthday.”
Karen Bunney was celebrating what she called a “Beddian birthday,” reaching the same age as the year she was born.
Normally, that might qualify as a fun little moment from the evening.
But Karen isn’t a little footnote in an Amp recap.
Bands come through The Alley once or twice a year. Karen comes through that gate Thursday after Thursday, takes her place up front, listens to damn near everything, talks to the musicians, remembers the songs I forgot, and then goes home and writes her own account of the night, usually with a little history about the music tucked in for good measure.
Then I read it.
Karen is a vastly superior note-taker, and I have long since abandoned any shame about copying off her test.
She is our unofficial stenographer, my weekly cheat code, one of The Alley’s loudest advocates, and, year after year, quite possibly its most reliable fan.
So when Heart & Soul stopped somewhere in the middle of those 45 songs to sing “Happy Birthday,” Karen wasn’t just another birthday shoutout from the stage.
She was exactly where she’s been Thursday after Thursday, year after year.
Front row.
Happy birthday, Karen. Nice haircut, too.
The Alley
Don't Wait for Someone Who Plays a Plumber on TV
This week, Tyler Perry became America's most overqualified emergency plumber.
An 81-year-old Illinois woman was displaced from the home she'd lived in for more than 40 years after a burst pipe caused extensive damage. Her insurance claim was denied, a restoration bill became an $18,000 lien, the story went viral, and Perry eventually stepped in to help.
Which is wonderful.
But probably not the sequence of events you want to rely on when something underneath your sink starts dripping.
Call Stark before your plumbing problem requires the intervention of a Hollywood producer.
(803) 866 - LEAK
The Bud Light Stage
Shopping Local Isn't Only a Retail Suggestion
There are bad days.
There are days when you need an attorney.
And apparently there are days when you need an attorney because of the attorney you hired for the first bad day.
A Georgia jury recently awarded a 73-year-old man $4.3 million after he alleged the national law firm he'd hired following a serious car accident settled his case without his consent.
There is probably a lesson somewhere in there about knowing who is actually handling your case.
BMG Law is local. You can learn their names before you need them.
The Backyard is Open at 11 am WED - SUN
We have exciting news for anyone who has previously required a flowchart to determine whether The Backyard is open for lunch.
We're done with that.
Wednesday through Sunday, the answer is now the same:
11 AM.
Burgers. Swinos. Charred-O-Nays. Wings. Cold drinks. The yard. And increasingly, whatever strange thing we've decided to cook over fire this week.
If we're open, we're open for lunch.
Thursday: County Road 49
County Road 49 made their Amp debut last year with the sort of set that didn't need much decoration. Three musicians, tight harmonies, some casual instrument swapping, and a songbook that wandered from Skynyrd and Vince Gill to Jason Isbell, Teddy Swims and the Commodores without ever sounding like somebody hit shuffle.
Brandon Kelly supplied the guitar fireworks, but with remarkable restraint. Chris Keys brought the voice Karen Bunney once described as “raw… it just tugs at your heartstrings,” while Paul Kelly helped hold together a trio comfortable enough with each other to trade instruments and still land “Seven Bridges Road” in three-part harmony.
They weren't flashy. They were just very, very good at what they were doing.
County Road 49 returns to Amp the Alley this Thursday.
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