BAM Column: Shows on shuffle

Posted by brandy

on October 13, 2008M at 8:49 am

Lee Ann Womack performs in September at the Fifth Annual Cross Canadian Ragweed Family Jam at Oklahoma City’s Zoo Amphitheatre. (Photo by Sarah Phipps/The Oklahoman)

From Monday’s The Oklahoman.

Maybe it’s a short attention span or an ingrained love of musical diversity, but I am a shuffle kind of person.

My iPod is always set to randomly select songs from my assorted playlist. I get a special buzz when that little microprocessor cranks out an unlikely sequence like Fleetwood Mac’s “I Know I’m Not Wrong,” Dierks Bentley’s “Long Trip Alone” and the Flaming Lips’ “Free Radicals.”

So, when frontman Cody Canada announced at the recent Cross Canadian Ragweed Family Jam that “we treat this gig kind of like our personal iPod to kind of show everybody what our taste in music is from one end of the spectrum to another,” that struck a chord with me. And the spectrum was pretty broad, with the final hours of the daylong show veering from Lee Ann Womack’s country crooning to Buckcherry’s booming sleaze rock to Ragweed’s own rowdy, freewheeling alt-country.

I’m no Buckcherry fan – I’ll take my odes to rock ‘n’ roll excess with more fun and less nihilism, thanks – but the Los Angeles band brought a dark energy and an interesting contrast to Womack’s warm warbling of broken-heart ballads. Ragweed’s country-rock rabble-rousing offered the perfect musical missing link between them.

Similar cross-genre thrills were on the lineup of Orange Peel. The recent Oklahoma State show featured country-crossover duo Sugarland and tourmates Ashton Shepherd and Kellie Pickler. But student organizers also threw pop-punk band Motion City Soundtrack into the mix.

The Minneapolis-based quintet brought quirky, literate lyrics, Jesse Johnson’s synthesizer and frontman Justin Pierre’s falsetto to a party dominated by fiddles, mandolins and Southern drawls.

The band fit in about as well as skater punks at a rodeo, but their fun, melody-driven music segued surprisingly smoothly into Sugarland’s high-energy theatrics. Besides, Sugarland’s Kristian Bush told me he went through a skate-punk phase, so he probably enjoyed the set.

Not every concert can genre-hop – after all, some people prefer perfectly ordered playlists for their mp3 players – but for those of us who stay on shuffle, it sure is fun.

-BAM

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