The Grumble & The Teens We Brought With Us
- Moose Nicholson
- 5 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Posers Welcome
It's Your Business...Theirs is Plumbing
How Private is Your Digital Life?
The Backyard is Open For Lunch... and So Is...
Tomorrow: Edward Phillips & The Blue (Video)
Posers Welcome
There was a time when being called a poser was a serious accusation.
Not serious in the adult sense. Nobody was questioning your professional credentials or auditing your taxes. This was arguably worse. Someone was questioning whether you were actually cool.
And in the 90s, there were rules about these things. You couldn't just like music. You had to like the right music, preferably for the right reasons and ideally before too many other people discovered it. Your shoes said something about you. So did your clothes, the stickers on your notebook and whatever you'd drawn in White-Out across your black Jansport backpack.
Looking back, I'm willing to admit that I was kind of a poser.
I had the Airwalks. I had the Jansport. I had the Nirvana smiley. I played Bush's Sixteen Stone until I knew every inch of it.
I also really loved “Counting Blue Cars.”
At 13, those things somehow required reconciliation. There were lines between grunge and alternative, punk and metal, the stuff that was legitimately cool and the stuff you were only supposed to like when nobody else was around. We treated musical taste as identity, and identity as something that occasionally needed defending.
Thirty years later, most of those borders have disappeared. Maybe we grew out of them. Maybe we simply got tired of keeping score.
Either way, The Grumble showed up at the Bud Light Stage Thursday night with a set list that would have made those old distinctions pretty difficult to defend.
They opened with John Mellencamp's “Pink Houses” and spent the first set roaming through the Doobie Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin before wandering into Sublime, Tom Petty, Counting Crows, Foo Fighters, Oasis, Stone Temple Pilots and Cracker. The second set leaned harder into the music many of us grew up with: Eve 6, Meat Puppets, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fuel, Bush, Tonic, Local H, Seven Mary Three, Finger Eleven, 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul.
It wasn't a carefully defended genre anymore. It sounded more like somebody had pulled an old record collection off the shelf and discovered that, without all those teenage rules attached to it, everything got along surprisingly well.
And in a way, that record collection has become a time capsule. Not one we buried and came back to thirty years later, but one we've been carrying around with us the entire time.
The Grumble don't seem particularly interested in opening it up and pretending nothing has changed.
Patrick Daddario on guitar, Bob Honck on bass and Blaze Dragna on drums are a power trio without much of the theater that phrase can imply. Bob and Blaze build a strong, steady foundation, occasionally slipping in a flash that reminds you just how much three musicians can have going on without making a spectacle of it. Pat moves between rhythm and lead over the top, but the surprise is his voice. There's something oddly calming about it against a set list filled with songs that weren't always written from particularly calm places.
That restraint fits them. They're not trying to summon the angst that once came packaged with some of this music, and they're certainly not trying to convince anyone they're still angry teenagers.
They're playing the songs from where they are now.
And maybe that's closer to the way the rest of us hear them now, too.
The anger and alienation weren't imaginary. They were part of what gave a lot of 90s music its charge, and for a teenager trying to figure out where he fit, they could feel every bit as important as the guitar riff underneath them. But thirty years has a way of changing the listener even when the recording stays exactly the same.
Karen Bunney caught a different version of that Thursday before she'd even made it to her usual spot in The Alley. The band had started “Pink Houses,” and suddenly she wasn't downtown anymore. She was back in Michigan, sitting on the floor of her room listening to the album on vinyl.
That's what survived the time capsule.
A song can still carry whatever its writer put into it, but after enough years it starts carrying pieces of us, too. The bedroom where you first heard it. The 1990 Eddie Bauer Bronco I drove while I played it to death. The people who were around then. Sometimes just the strange sensation of remembering exactly who you were when a few familiar notes find you again.
By Thursday night, nobody needed “Pink Houses” to belong beside “Machinehead,” or “Backwater” to prove it had more credibility than “Kryptonite.” Those arguments belonged to younger versions of us.
The songs had picked up too much life along the way.
There was a pretty good illustration of just how much life right there beside the stage.
Instead of a tip jar, The Grumble had turned their night at Amp into a fundraiser for the South Aiken High School golf team, including Pat's daughter. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate collision of then and now: songs that once accompanied teenage angst being played by a bunch of dads while helping their kids.
But that doesn't make the music feel domesticated. “Machinehead” still has that riff. “Bound for the Floor” still churns. “Cumbersome” still carries its weight. Pat even pulled out a talk box for “Superstition,” giving Stevie Wonder another little detour before sending the set back on its way.
The teeth are still there. Nobody needs to bare theirs anymore.
Maybe that's what The Grumble's particular restraint gets right. They don't soften these songs into nostalgia, but they don't treat nostalgia like historical reenactment either. There was no need to dress the part or manufacture the posture that once surrounded the music. Thursday looked like Thursday: shorts and button-downs onstage, families and friends scattered through The Alley, dogs under tables, a stroller in the crowd.
The people who grew up with some of these songs didn't come to become teenagers again.
They brought the teenagers they used to be with them.
The Alley
Your Business is Yours... Theirs is Plumbing.
Opening a restaurant teaches you an alarming amount about plumbing.
Not because you wanted to learn it.
Because eventually somebody asks where you're putting the indirect drain for the ice machine.
The what?
Turns out, there are entire categories of questions you don't know exist until you try to make an old building do something new.
Can you add another sink here? Where does the drain go when you're standing on poured concrete and the convenient crawlspace in your imagination doesn't actually exist? Can the existing system handle an undercounter dishwasher? Does that giant water heater still make sense when you're fighting for every square foot of usable space, or is it time to start thinking tankless?
And why, exactly, can't the ice machine just drain into the sewer like everything else?
Every answer seems to uncover another question.
That's one of the strange things about opening a business. You spend months thinking about the things customers will eventually see, while an enormous amount of the actual work happens inside walls, beneath floors and behind equipment.
Commercial plumbing isn't always about fixing something that's broken.
Sometimes it's figuring out how to make a building do something it was never designed to do.
Restaurants certainly aren't alone in that. New equipment, renovations, expansions and old buildings with new purposes all come with their own version of *where the hell is this supposed to drain?*
When those questions start piling up, they're good questions to put in front of people who know the answers.
**That's when you call Stark Plumbing.**
(803) 866 - LEAK
The Bud Light Stage
How Private Is Your Digital Life?
Your phone knows where you've been.
Your car probably knows where you've been.
Your doorbell knows who walked past your house.
Cameras read license plates as we drive around town.
Your watch knows when you're sleeping.
And somewhere along the way, we all clicked "I Agree."
So... who can actually get that information?
That isn't hypothetical in South Carolina.
In July, the South Carolina Court of Appeals considered a case involving GPS location data collected by a private bond company. Investigators obtained that information without a warrant and used it to place a suspect near the scene of a robbery.
The court found that was a problem. Even though the data was being held by a private company, the defendant still had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements, and investigators should have obtained a warrant. The conviction ultimately stood because there was enough other evidence that the mistake was considered harmless.
And here's where it gets even more interesting.
Another South Carolina case decided this summer dealt with Flock license-plate cameras. In that case, the Court of Appeals reached a different conclusion. Police searching photographs of a vehicle captured on a public roadway did not, under those facts, violate the driver's constitutional privacy rights.
So GPS tracking? Privacy interest.
A license plate photographed on a public street? Different answer.
Your phone? Your security cameras? Your employer's cameras? A recording someone made of a conversation? Your car's location history?
Now things get complicated.
And that's really the point.
The law has spent hundreds of years deciding what constitutes a search of your house. Now courts are having to decide what constitutes a search of the invisible cloud of information we drag around behind us every day.
If you're ever on either side of one of those questions, don't rely on what somebody on Facebook says is legal.
Call BMG.
Going Outside for Lunch
Lunch Doesn't Need a Rain Date
We've told you last week that The Backyard is open for lunch.
So we'll tell you again.
Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Open at 11.
Same burgers. Same sandwiches. Same Backyard. Just several hours earlier.
And yes, we've seen the forecast this week.
Turns out opening a restaurant called The Backyard comes with one fairly obvious occupational hazard: sometimes the sky decides it would also like to participate.
Don't let that scare you off.
We've got shade when it's hot, fans when it's hotter, and if the rain shows up...
we've got a spot for you.
Come find us for lunch this weekend.
Thursday: Edward Phillips & The Blue
If you caught Edward Phillips & The Blue last time around, you already know why we wanted them back.
They reach deep into the blues, from Robert Johnson and Son House to Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, then follow those roots wherever they lead. Rock, punk, classics and everything that grew from the same musical family tree eventually finds its way into the set.
And for Edward, that curiosity doesn't stop when he leaves the stage.
Over on his YouTube channel, he plays, digs into the history behind the blues, and hosts live Q&As where the conversation can wander wherever the music takes it. We've included a taste below.
Then come hear the louder version.
**Edward Phillips & The Blue return to the Bud Light Stage this Thursday at 6:30.**
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