Jack Daniel’s Birthday Gig w/Plan B, Warpaint, Steve Cropper, K-Flay & The New Silver Cornet Band - Lynchburg Tennessee, USA - 15/10/11
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Nashville is a small city that punches way above its weight when it comes to music. Like a condensed Austin, Texas, every single building here has some musical function. Not just the stadiums and bars, but even my hotel room - instead of Time Magazine or something - has a complimentary copy of America Songwriter on the bedside table (there's a good feature with Paul Simon, you should read it). But the intention is clear - this is a music town, and if you don't like it, hey, there are other towns for you, buddy.
[THE JACK DANIELS DISTILLERY]
On a beautiful, warm October morning, we're driven past building after building with enormous novelty guitars protruding from the sides out through the overwhelmingly green Tennessee countryside toward Lynchburg. It becomes more and more apparent with each stream ('creek', sorry) we cross and disused barn we pass that we'll be entering a town whose population won't number much more than Wigan Athletic's average away support. This is a big state, but for vast swathes of it, there's not a human being in sight.
We're reliably informed by Helen, our charming hostess at Miss Mary Bobos restaurant, that Lynchburg actually has a population of 6,000 (Wigan can dream!), and has been here for 200 years. That, however, makes it ancient by American standards. Most of the town's population make their living, somehow or other, from Jack Daniel's. And much of the food at Bobos is expertly marinated in it.
[GOOSE]
Full disclosure – we’d not be here if it weren’t for Jack Daniel’s. They have us out to cover their annual birthday gig, this time featuring Plan B, Warpaint, Steve Cropper of Booker T & The MGs/The Blues Brohers and rapper K-Flay performing backed by the New Silver Cornet band. They look after us incredibly, providing us with tours of the distillery (expertly guided by none other than Goose himself), whisky tastings and a night of rock and roll music. As such, it would seem incredibly rude to say a single bad thing about them. Journalistically, this presents a problem. I should be able to say whatever I want, yet I don’t feel like I can. But luckily, I also genuinely have no reason to. You’ve just got to trust me when I say that regardless of my gratitude at being present, the thing that I am present at is really rather good. Warpaint especially.
[K-FLAY]
First up is K-Flay, a San Francisco based rapper and electronica producer who nobody in the room has ever heard of, yet everyone seems to find instantly rather endearing. Hers is a scruffy and unassuming, jeans and t shirt kind of charm, but her tunes are far slicker, ‘Stop, Focus’ and ‘Doctor Don’t Know’ showing she’s been paying attention to the subtler, most successful work of collaborator Liam Howlett of Prodigy fame. Her studious nature is paying dividends, and her combination of some future-thinking electronica with a bafflingly speedy lyrical flow impresses all who are present.
Such is the nature of the event, the New Silver Cornet Band are everybody’s backing group (our girl’s usually accompanied by a laptop and a sampler), and though their rootsy style doesn’t jar with K-Flay’s hip hop leanings anywhere near as badly as it could, as a combination they shine brightest on the closing pair of covers. We get an eventually relatively faithful take on The Zombies ‘Time Of The Season’ (once it gets going) and a closing rendition of Glenn Miller’s ‘Cattanooga Choo Choo’ that somehow manages to turn what I had previously thought was a thoroughly jolly song in to something really rather sad. Still, there’s a talent in that.
[WARPAINT]
Just two members of Warpaint - vocalists and guitarists Emily Kokal and Teresa Wayman - are here for tonight’s gig. Nobody’s quite sure why that is, but we’re happy to have them here all the same – their collaboration with the NSCB (we’ll call them that from now on, cool?) steals the show, sells it to a cash and carry, and spends the money on a big trophy engraved with the words ‘WE ARE BRILLIANT’. The song ‘Undertow’ has lived in my head since I knew I was attending this gig, and its subtle reworking at the hands of this Frankenstein band lives up to my lofty expectations for finally getting to hear it live. It’s sad, infectious, and just completely gorgeous. I never knew I loved it so much. And it could have ended there for all I cared.
[WARPAINT & STEVE CROPPER]
It continued, not that I’m sad that it did. Emily, Teresa and their new friends actually only get through another two Warpaint tracks – ‘Burgundy’ and ‘Elephants’ are delivered expertly, slightly different from the records but hey, slightly different band right? – before it comes to covers time. And it turns out covers time is basically an opportunity to show off. We’re convinced yet further that not only do the pair have excellent voices - talents that their chosen genre of indie rock arguable doesn’t lend itself to unleashing in their fullest - but also excellent taste. The songs they choose are three ones of which music as an art form can be most proud; ‘Jolene’ (which features the first appearance of the night from Steve Cropper on guitar), ‘Do Right Woman’ by Aretha Franklin (on which Theresa’s voice is breathtaking) and Emily’s cheeky take on The Shirelles ‘Dedicated’ to polish things off.
[PLAN B & STEVE CROPPER]
We don’t have to wait long before the emergence of Plan B, who despite admitting to us in a pre-gig interview (footage with you soon) that he was full of trepidation about performing with such a legendary bunch of musicians as Steve Cropper and the NSCB (told you it’d catch on), still manages to bound on to the stage suited and booted with his trademark swagger very much intact. This is not the Plan B who you might remember from a tiny Rockfeedback gig at the Buffalo Bar (with Larrikin Love and Josh T Pearson – were we on acid?!), calling you a c*nt and singing songs about murder and rape. This is born again as a soul man Plan B, and he has come for the ladies. He’s so smooth he almost slips off the stage.
What with his reinvention now complete, the NSCB are actually extremely adept at providing Plan B with the soul that the recorded versions of songs like ‘Welcome To Hell’ are somewhat lacking in. They’re not only technically very skilful, but they know how to play with feeling, and that combined with a slight show of humility from nervous old Mr B leads to this part of the evening being certainly more enjoyable than I had expected it to be. And regardless of whether you’re a Plan B fan or not, by the time he’s joined by Steve Cropper and Warpaint for a version of Cropper’s own classic ‘Soul Man’, you just have to think “I’m in Tennessee watching Plan B, Warpaint and Steve Cropper do ‘Soul Man’ at a whiskey distillery” and enjoy the ridiculousness of the situation to the full.
[STEVE CROPPER]
Steve Cropper rightly gets his own part of the set to show off in, making beautiful sounds emerge from his otherwise unforgivable leopard print guitar, and treating us to renditions of hits he penned like ‘Midnight Hour’ and ‘Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay’. He’s perhaps the only man other than Otis Redding who should ever be allowed to sing that song, and it’s because he wrote it. A mammoth event in the history of recorded music, a song that has taken on a life beyond its creators or performers, that now exists in the public psyche in the same way something like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ does, it’s an honour to hear it delivered at the hand of the man responsible for its creation. Just lovely.
[DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE]
And then it’s over, this extremely friendly room of people not once threatening to turn in to the total brawl that ‘rock gig at a whisky distillery’ conjures up thoughts of. We’re put on a bus back to Nashville, and some of us head out to have fun. One of us steals money from a man who has a gun. One of us ends up in a strip club “because it was the only place that was open”. I have a man ask me if I want to sleep with his wife. I do not (she’s a Republican). Nashville’s good to us, but it all makes me miss the comparative serenity of the gig, that moment when the first notes of ‘Undertow’ transported me further from home even than Tennessee.
Check back soon for video interviews with all acts.
Artists in this article: Warpaint, Plan B, K-Flay, The New Silver Cornet Band, Steve Cropper
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