Musical Vagabond: Free beer and free music and free circus freaks, OH MY!! - Lagunitas Couchtrippin' to Austin tour with J. Roddy Walston & the Business

What do burlesque dancers, moshpits and southern rock have in common? Apparently quite a bit if you ask J. Roddy Walston & the Business and those on their Couchtrippin’ to Austin tour. This tour made a stop at DC’s U Street Music Hall as part of their road trip to Austin, Texas for the 2014 South by Southwest Music, Film & Interactive Conference. As some of you know, I have a deep romance with the city of Austin, TX and am sad to not be attending this year’s SXSW, so this was the next best thing. Did I mention this free beer and music event was on Mardi Gras?? It was difficult to pass up such a perfect storm of fun and free things. The Couchtrippin' tour decided it would be fun to hire the DC Rollergirls to mingle with guests and have burlesque dancers, clowns and other circus-like people to roam around the venue. It turned out to be the best of ideas, since it was Mardi Gras after all!

Tickets to this particular event were free via Eventbrite, compliments of my soccer pals and overall partners-in-crime Natalie and Christine. These planned events (i.e. Living Social) are so pervasive in DC, and furthermore, are often not worth the time and money spent. That being said, I was a bit hesitant when I received the invite, but as soon as I saw J. Roddy Walston & the Business was performing, I was locked in. Natalie decided to be a responsible adult and further her education, while Christine and I decided it would be far more beneficial to wait outside in the frigid March air (oxymoron?) and wait for approximately 45 minutes to go into the damp hole that is U Street Music Hall, drink free beer and listen to awesome-ish music – sounds good to me so far.

I say awesome-ish music because I had very mixed feelings about the other band on the ticket for this show. So So Glo came on right before J. Roddy. The band before them, Low Cut Connie (I'll get to them in a moment), was musically similar to J. Roddy in their nod to raw southern hard rock, so this is what I was expecting from a band right before the headliner. Instead, the audience was met with a menagerie of sounds - Wu Tang Clan namely - as the band came on stage, which I have to say got me pretty stoked. Then these Brooklyn boys began to take on a Beastie Boys-esque persona. By they time their set began, it was raw punk. My reasons for not being particularly fond of this band are several - (1) I don't like punk (easy enough?), (2) it wasn't punk I could respect - it was a sound reminiscent of some high school rejects who probably should have remained garage-bound, (3) I never heard a unique sound - it was like a mashup of bands and they couldn't decide if they wanted to be Green Day or Sum 41. All of those things considered, there is a chance I wasn't a fan of this band based on the amount of moshing going on around us (remember that thing about being garage-bound high school kids?). I'm also not a fan of seeing such hard rock forced into such a tiny venue like U Street Music Hall - the venue simply does not lend itself to this genre. These bands that wanna rock out should just mosey on over to U Street Music Hall's older (and much cooler) brother, 9:30 Club, and rock their faces off. Did I also mention that I'm pretty sure the sound guys were hammered - indicated by the moment when J. Roddy got in a heated verbal argument about their amps sounding like proverbial dog shit.

Ok, I started with the rough parts of the evening first - now to the highlights. The first band - Low Cut Connie – was playing as I walked into the venue and they were exactly what you wanted to hear as you had just waited in the freezing cold ready for some free beer - a fun honky tonk vibe with some hard rock elements. If you imagine the crazed honky-tonk piano antics of Jerry Lee Lewis (minus the cousin marriage), the over-the-top gyrations of Elvis and the frontman flamboyance of Freddie Mercury, you will have a good idea of the on-stage presence exuded by Low Cut Connie lead Adam Weiner. This was one of the more exciting, fun-to-watch bands I’ve seen in a while. Weiner engaged the crowd by jumping off stage into the crowd (a little more tame than crowd surfing) and with some fun call-and-response).

Finally time for J. Roddy! These local Baltimore boys are some cool cats reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd with the entire band having matching long manes. J. Roddy has quite a presence on the piano, doing some serious headbanging throughout the set. They were super engaging, energetic and fun to watch - looking forward to seeing them at Bonnaroo 2014! All my videos of J. Roddy's set royally sucked, so you can get a better idea of their sound and stage presence below: