Ryan Bingham And The Dead Horses Drop Debut Produced By Former Crowe

:: Ryan Bingham and The Dead Horses ::

:: Fox Theatre :: September 8 ::

:: Black Sheep :: September 9 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Based in the traditions of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Ryan Bingham and his band The Dead Horses, have married their version of outlaw country with the rawness of Bruce Springsteen, Albert King and The Black Crowes to create their own whiskey soaked brand of American folk music that appeals to everyone from good old boys to hipsters. To paraphrase the Osmonds, “It’s a little bit country, it’s a little bit rock and roll.”

Just over ten years ago Bingham was little more than a punk kid, bouncing around West Texas and New Mexico trying to stay out of trouble. It was during a few months in Laredo living in a rundown apartment complex where he came face to face with his future. “There was this guy who was living next door to me who would sit outside on his front porch and play his guitar in the afternoons,” Bingham told The Marquee just a few hours after returning from his honeymoon in Costa Rica. “I got to hanging out with him and listening to him play, and one day I went in and got this guitar my mother had bought me a few years before and went over and asked this guy if he would teach me a few chords. He taught me a few things and I was hooked. I have never really put it down since.”

One of the few things that this guy taught Bingham was an old mariachi song that stuck with him for a while. “He showed me this old song called La Malagueña and it was the only song I knew for about a year,” he said. “The reason I started writing my own songs was because I got so sick of playing that one song that I just started making up other stuff.”

One of the first songs that he wrote back when he was first putting pen to paper was “Southside of Heaven,” and the song is one of the reasons that Bingham attracted the attention of leading label in the world of alt-country, Lost Highway.

Shortly after signing with the label, Bingham realized that he and his band needed to get their collective act together quickly in order to make something of the opportunity they had in front of them. Knowing he couldn’t do it all on his own, he reached out to a relatively new friend, Marc Ford (former guitarist of The Black Crowes), for help.

Bingham had met Ford through another one of the happy accidents that have steered the course of his music career thus far. “Me and my drummer started heading out to L.A. from Texas and one of the first gigs we got was at the King King in Hollywood. There’s a girl in there named Karla Long that runs the place and I remember we called her up and she said, ‘Yeah, I can put you on Monday night at one o’clock in the morning. I don’t know if anybody will be here, but you guys can play for tips or whatever.’ We said, ‘That’ll be great,’”

Bingham laughed. “She was friends with Marc and he ended up hanging out there that first night we played. It was just her, Marc and a couple of other people, and after we got done with our set he came up to us and said he dug what we were doing. Over time, we became friends and while we were in town we started going into the studio and jamming on some things.”

It was those jam sessions that led Bingham to believe that Ford was the right man to mentor his band and when they got together to kick the project off, he realized he had struck gold. “It was like going through rock and roll school. Marc was the guy who really sat us down and was like, ‘All right guys, this is all fun and great and dandy but if we are going to record these songs we’ve got to get some kind of plan and play the songs the same way for at least a couple of takes so we can record them.’ He had a lot to do with structuring the songs and the parts that we were playing and keeping us from stepping on each other’s toes all the time and getting everybody to stick to their parts,” Bingham said.

The fruit of those initial recording sessions landed Bingham on “The Tonight Show,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and finally, in February of this year, he was featured on the revered PBS live music showcase, “Austin City Limits.”

It has been a whirlwind ride for the former bullrider from New Mexico and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down with the release of his most recent album Roadhouse Sun, which broke the Top 20 in the U.S. Country charts earlier this summer. “The TV stuff and the satellite radio has been incredible. I didn’t really realize how much influence that stuff had,” Bingham said. “We hadn’t really toured that much through the East Coast and we just got

back from up there about a month ago and had several soldout shows and great crowds everywhere. It was definitely a shock to go to those towns and start playing the songs and have people know the words.”

:: Ryan Bingham and The Dead Horses ::

:: Fox Theatre :; September 8 ::

:: Black Sheep :: September 9 ::

Recommended if you Like:

• Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
• Joe Ely
• Bruce Springsteen

Anyone who reads us regularly, knows we don’t care about politics, but when Stephen Colbert, called Boulder the “Teabagging Captial of America” and got our Congressman, Jared Pollis, to funnel a Coors Light with him, well, we just can’t help but post it. “You’ve not tasted anyone’s teabag until you’ve had Boulder’s in your mouth.”

:: Aerosmith w/ ZZ Top ::
:: Saturday, August 1, 2009 ::
:: Coors Amphitheatre ::

By Brandon Daviet

Photos by Lisa Sicliano

First, a little musical politics of sorts. If we really want to take a shot at reducing the obesity problem is this country we don’t need legislation to forcefully limit our caloric intake. Rather we should have a clearly defined policy that standing up and dancing at a concert is NOT a crime and is actually good for you to boot. I can understand some people wanting to sit down during shows, I do it about 30 percent of the time these days, but I also completely understand people wanting to shake their groove thing. If you really want to sit on your couch during a rocking song just wait for the DVD or learn to be more amicable to the people who don’t want to pay good money to sit still. It’s a hard situation to solve, as both “sitters” and “standers” have the right to enjoy the show but maybe concert promoters should focus on solving this dilemma instead of inventing new, creative ways to assess service charges. Just my opinion because not a concert goes by these days without me seeing a squabble over this very issue. Continue — Read more »

Yonder serves up its latest musical recipe, its fifth studio album, The Show

:: Yonder Mountain String Band ::

:: Fox Theatre :: Aug 7 ::

:: (FMQB Conference) ::

:: Fox Theatre :: Aug 27 ::

:: Red Rocks Amphitheatre :: Aug 28 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Ever thought about how closely cooking and music are related? Maybe not, but it’s clear that Yonder Mountain String Band’s Jeff Austin thinks about it a lot. As a self described amateur chef and “foodie,” and a full-time member of one of the biggest bluegrass bands around these days, he has plenty of experience with both art forms.

Austin is a walking encyclopedia of high-end restaurants in every nook and cranny of this country, but it is his taste on mandolin and the recipes that he and his comrades serve up on stage that has not only catapulted them, but sustained them in the international bluegrass spotlight for so long.

“Food and music are very, very similar,” Austin said in a recent conversation with The Marquee on the deck of a little café just minutes from his Nederland, Colo., home.  “The collaboration between you and an instrument, the thought process of a song and the thought process of a recipe, the fact that you really have to pay close attention to your essential basics and after that you are free to improvise. It’s really the same.”
Continue — Read more »

M. Ward brings timeless tracks to annual Folks Festival in Lyons

:: M. Ward ::

:: Folks Festival (Lyons) :: August 16 ::

:: Monolith Festival @ Red Rocks ::

:: September 12 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

He is the “Him” of She and Him, a member of The Monsters of Folk, an accomplished producer and, of course, a wildly talented solo artist who has slowly emerged into the public consciousness with a string of critically acclaimed albums. Beginning in 2000 with Duet for Guitars No. 2, M. Ward formally started a career in music that had, in reality, begun years earlier as a high school student locked in his bedroom with a four-track tape recorder.

Since those days in high school, Ward, now 36, hasn’t slowed his prolific pace and still uses his trusty four-track to capture his ideas. “As soon as I was done recording, mixing and mastering Post War I started thinking about the next record because that’s the way my weird brain works,” Ward told The Marquee from his home in Portland, where he was working on plans for an upcoming Monsters of Folk tour. “I go through my tapes of hundreds of songs that I wrote and hundreds of songs that I have been listening to since I was a kid to find songs that will fit together on a record.” Ward freely admits that some of the songs on his recent release Hold Time could have been written ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago. “All of the records that I have made are a combination of songs that I have been writing since high school and songs that I wrote yesterday.”

Continue — Read more »

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue have roots in jazz’s birthplace

:: Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue ::

:: Fox Theatre :: July 30 ::

:: Sunset Concert Series (Telluride) :: August 5 ::

:: Jazz Aspen Snowmass :: August 6 ::

:: Larimer Lounge :: August 7 ::

By Karen Maye

For Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, it was never a question of if he would play music, it was more a question of when he’d be grown enough so his arms would be able to reach all of the positions of the slide.

“I didn’t really have a choice; I started playing when I was 3 or 4 years old,” Andrews told The Marquee in a recent interview. “My brother kind of gave me a trombone and that was it.”

Troy Andrews was raised in the Treme district of New Orleans’ 6th Ward, birthplace of Louis Armstrong and — as some people consider it — the birthplace of jazz. Growing up surrounded by music and the unflagging support of his family, (most specifically his brother James, the trumpeter known as “Satchmo of the Ghetto”) were key components in Andrew’s musical success.  Equally adept on both the trumpet and trombone, Andrews is a force to be reckoned with on both instruments, and has been for some time. At the age of 6, Andrews was bandleader of Trombone Shorty’s Brass Band. Before they even had instruments, Andrews was rallying neighborhood kids, marching down the street with cardboard box “snare drums,” plastic soda bottles, and a “big wheel tuba,” pretending to be a brass band.
Continue — Read more »

Judas Priest performs 30-year-old classic album British Steel on tour

:: Judas Priest ::

:: Red Rocks Amphitheatre :: August 11 ::

By Brandon Daviet

The summer of 2009 will go down in the annals of rock and roll as the summer that many bands — mostly as a treat to their fans and probably to stroke their own egos a little — took to the country’s sheds and amphitheatres armed with set lists featuring classic albums from their back catalogs. Some bands are pulling out all the stops, like Steely Dan, who are playing different albums on different nights. Some bands have found the challenge a bit daunting — like Aerosmith, whose decision to play Toys in the Attic was slightly abbreviated after singer Steven Tyler found out he needed more rehearsals to pull off the album’s finale “You See Me Crying.” And that’s in addition others, like Ratt and Mötley Crüe, paying tribute to their own classic albums.
Continue — Read more »

Mark Karan brings a lifetime of experience on Walk Through The Fire

:: Mark Karan and Jeremiah Puddleduck ::

:: Cervante’s Masterpiece Ballroom ::

:: August 14 & 15 ::

By Joe Kovack

It is rare that an individual knows the direction they want their life to follow at a young age and even rarer that one stays the course, no matter how long it takes. Mark Karan is one of those individuals.

Now at 54 and with his debut solo album Walk Through the Fire just released in June, Karan can check another spot off of his musical to-do list. Karan has been in the business for quite some time, but it was his love of music and his ever growing array of musical collaborations that culminated into fulfilling this goal.
Continue — Read more »

From hippies to hipsters, back-to-school weekend awash with choices

By Brian F. Johnson

:: Avett Brothers ::

:: Boulder Theater ::

:: Friday, Aug. 21 ::

A pack of English majors with a stack of thesauruses might still find themselves at a loss for describing the Avett Brothers.
Technically, they play folk music, but they do so with an intensity that you’d expect from bands playing at CBGB’s during the punk heyday of the 1970s and ’80s. The North Carolina group may play acoustic instruments and be dressed in their Sunday best, but make no mistake, this is head-banging material — even if it’s still kind of coffee shop friendly.
Continue — Read more »

The Jayhawks

Music From The North Country (3-disc version)

American/Sony Legacy

4 out of 5 stars

One of the most overlooked bands from the late 1980s and 1990s, The Jayhawks have flirted with mainstream success ever since the release of their major label debut, Hollywood Town Hall, in 1992. However, in terms of artistic influence, they have always been on the forefront.

Last month while watching Bon Iver perform their soldout show at the Ogden Theatre in Denver, I couldn’t help but smile when they encored the Jayhawks track, “Tampa To Tulsa,” from Rainy Day Music. Good music continues to inspire. Continue — Read more »

Jaden

Midnight Sky

Independent

3 out of 5 stars

If you live in Colorado and have not yet heard of Jaden I am sure you will.  This 8-year-old girl from Louisville, CO just released her debut CD, Midnight Sky. What is even more startling is that she sings, plays guitar and percussion, and wrote nine of the album’s 11 tracks; lyrics and all. Did I mention she was eight years old?

Jaden first got the urge to play guitar at age 5 while at a Michael Franti & Spearhead concert. A year later she convinced her parents to have her start lessons and she began training with classical Suzuki.

Before long she was figuring out and learning her favorite rock tunes, including songs by Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Soon thereafter she was writing her own material and sitting in with national acts such as Michael Franti & Spearhead and Keaton Simmons. News of her talent was obviously spreading quickly.
Midnight Sky is Jaden’s debut album and is an 11-track effort featuring simple instrumentation; Jaden on acoustic guitar, vocal and simple percussion. Continue — Read more »

George Thorogood & The Destroyers

The Dirty Dozen

Capitol Records

4 out of 5

Old “Lonesome George” often gets a bad rap, that usually lapses into uniformed insults, concerning his credibility as a “blues” singer/guitarist. Many of these verbal assaults come from a crowd that hasn’t explored the Thorogood’s “goods” outside of the FM dial.  There is no doubt that Thorogood’s post “Bad to the Bone” (Think “Get a Haircut”) originals are watered down when compared to straight blues of his youth, but they still qualify as kick ass tunes for the most part.

Thorogood’s newest disc is a successful attempt to bring the past to the present with a unique approach. The first half of the new recordings slams home a batch of blues covers like an excellent version of Muddy Water’s “Born Lover” that, when compared to the original, really displays the brilliance of Thorogood’s high octane blues interpretations. The second half of the disc features fan favorites like the rip-roaring “Howlin’ for My Baby” and a few out of print tracks, with the most notable being the country standard “Six Days on the Road,” that demonstrates Thorogood and his crew aren’t one-trick ponies. If you only think of “I Drink Alone” when you hear Thorogood’s name you should really give this album a shot.

—Brandon Daviet