Let's Do This and See What Happens: Stella Blue
See What Happens
Plumbers You Can Trust
Clients Rave About BMG Attorneys
The Backyard is Open For Lunch
Tomorrow: The Grumble (Video)
Let's See What Happens
We had already lost one Thursday.
Anna had been cancelled the week before, so when Kenny and I started setting up for Stella Blue around 3 Thursday afternoon, neither of us was particularly interested in losing another one.
At the time, that didn't seem like much of a concern.
The skies were clear. The radar showed a small chance of rain that looked like it would probably miss us. It was also roughly 110 degrees with the kind of humidity that makes simply existing outside feel like work.
In other words, a perfectly normal August afternoon in South Carolina.
We got to work.
By 5:00, all hell broke loose.
Not a passing shower. Not one of those little summer storms where everybody ducks inside for twenty minutes and comes back out.
We got hammered.
Water poured through the Alley. Stella Blue found themselves wading through ankle-deep water trying to save their gear. A couple blocks away, a tree came down hard enough to take out power at The Backyard.
Brandy Douglas was pretty sure the night was over.
Honestly, so was I.
Kenny George wasn't.
There's a Jerry Garcia quote about improvisation that feels particularly appropriate here.
“Let's do this and see what happens.”
Garcia was talking about music.
Thursday night, it became more of an operating philosophy.
The rain eventually slowed. The radar started looking better. The Alley was still there. The stage was still there. The gear had survived.
And Kenny thought we could pull it off.
So we started putting everything back together.
There was no pretending we'd have the night we'd planned. A storm like that at exactly the wrong time had done its damage. People had made other plans. Some were probably staring at downed limbs in their own yards. Some had simply looked outside an hour earlier and correctly concluded that going to an outdoor concert was an insane idea.
But some came anyway.
A little after 7:00, after a week without Amp and two hours of Thursday doing everything it could to make it two, Stella Blue started playing.
And suddenly we had a concert again.
We should probably address this first.
Brandy Douglas does not consider herself a “singer.”
Air quotes included.
She knows she can sing. She sings. She fronts a band. But apparently there is some additional threshold one must cross before receiving the official designation of Singer, and Brandy has determined she has not crossed it.
This presents a small problem.
Nobody seems to have told the crowd.
After the show, her voice was one of the things people kept talking about. People singled her out as a front person. They talked about the vibe she brought to the stage.
And maybe that's part of why it works.
Brandy doesn't perform like she's waiting for everyone to notice The Singer. She plays. She sings. She gives the rest of Stella Blue room to move around her.
And there was a lot of moving around Thursday night.
With a name like Stella Blue, there aren't many prizes for guessing where some of the band's musical DNA comes from.
Scarlet Begonias.
I Know You Rider.
There were some wonderfully loose jams in there, the kind where a song stops being something you're reproducing and becomes something you're playing with.
But Stella Blue wasn't particularly interested in staying in one neighborhood.
The Black Crowes showed up with Thorn in My Pride. Zeppelin gave us Going to California. The Allman Brothers came along for One Way Out and Whipping Post.
And then Stella Blue played Sober.
Tool.
Because apparently traveling from Jerry Garcia to Maynard James Keenan in the same evening seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And somehow, it was.
That may have been my favorite thing about Stella Blue. The set didn't feel like somebody throwing wildly different songs into a playlist. They had enough of their own identity to pull those songs toward themselves.
They could wander.
And they had the musicians to do it.
It wasn't a normal Amp crowd.
There was no way it could be.
The storm had arrived at almost exactly the right time to destroy an outdoor event. We started an hour and a half late. Downtown had taken a beating.
But the people who came didn't seem particularly interested in mourning the people who didn't.
They danced.
They sat on the pavement in front of the stage.
They pulled out their phones.
They clapped from the brick walls.
They settled back into the Alley and let Stella Blue have the night that, a couple hours earlier, none of us thought they were going to get.
And the reaction afterward wasn't, pretty good considering the storm.
It was:
Great band.
Incredible show.
They rocked the house.
People talked about Brandy's voice. They talked about the musicianship. They talked about being glad the storm hadn't shut the whole thing down.
The weather explained why there weren't more people there.
It had absolutely nothing to do with why the people who were there loved Stella Blue.
Maybe that's what stuck with me about Stella Blue.
We started the night with a plan.
The storm took care of that.
What we got instead was a band willing to wander from Jerry Garcia to Maynard James Keenan, from Scarlet Begonias to Sober, with a few long jams and absolutely no apparent concern for whether all of those things were supposed to belong together.
They made them belong together.
And somewhere in there, the people who ventured back downtown after the storm started dancing. Someone sat down on the pavement in front of the stage. Phones came out. Applause came off the brick walls.
The night we'd planned never happened.
This one did.
Robert Hunter once wrote:
“One way or another, this darkness got to give.”
Thursday night, eventually, it did.
And when it did, Stella Blue was still there.
Maybe Jerry had the rest of it right too.
“Let's do this and see what happens.”
Turns out it's not a bad way to make music.
Or handle a Thursday.
The Alley
The Story Was Never the Pipe.
We've read a lot of Stark Plumbing reviews this year, and there's a pattern to them.
Something has gone wrong.
There's water somewhere water absolutely should not be. A drain isn't draining. Something is leaking. And whatever you had planned for the day has just been replaced by dealing with this.
Then Stark shows up.
That's the part people keep writing about.
They showed up quickly. They explained what was happening. They fixed the problem. They cleaned up. They kept people informed.
One customer was overseas when his daughter found their kitchen flooded. Stark was there within minutes, got the situation under control, and kept him updated from the other side of the world.
That's a pretty good definition of what you actually want from a plumber.
Not just someone who knows how to fix a pipe.
Someone who can make the problem stop being your problem.
(803) 866 - LEAK
The Bud Light Stage
The First Conversation Matters Most
You'd think reviews for attorneys would mostly be about winning.
And sure, there's plenty of that in BMG's reviews.
But that's not what people seem to talk about most.
They talk about phone calls being returned. Questions being answered. Someone explaining what happens next. Being kept informed. Being treated like a person instead of a case number.
One reviewer even praised them for being honest enough to explain when hiring an attorney wasn't necessary.
That's probably the part that sticks with me.
Most of us don't spend much time dealing with the legal system. So when we suddenly have to, we don't know the process, the language, what matters, or sometimes even what questions we're supposed to ask.
Knowing the law is obviously important.
Knowing how to walk somebody through it might be just as important.
That's something BMG's clients seem to notice.
What's Next?
So, we've been doing a thing over at The Backyard.
Lunch.
We've talked about adding it for a while, and this past weekend we finally decided to quit talking about it and just open the gate.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 11am.
And I'm pretty happy with how the first weekend went.
The menu was already basically built for lunch anyway. Burgers, sandwiches, fries, salads, all the stuff we've been serving at night. The only real difference is now you can eat it under the oaks in the middle of the day.
Which, as it turns out, is a pretty nice place to have lunch.
So if you've been meaning to make it over to The Backyard but haven't yet, you've got three more chances every week.
Come see us.
Thursday: The Grumble
The Grumble are back at Amp this Thursday.
They've become Amp regulars at this point, and they've found a pretty sweet little pocket in our lineup: **90s alternative and grunge.**
Which is great news for those of us who are now old enough to hear the music we grew up with described as "classic."
Three guys. A surprising amount of sound. Everything from 90s alternative and grunge to blues, classic rock and some originals mixed in.
We'll let the video handle the rest.
**The Grumble**
Thursday • 6:30 PM
Amp the Alley
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