A Consert Report I Did Recently

Split Lip Rayfield Concert

My buddy Thomas and I had planned on going to a party that night, but we heard that this other friend of ours was celebrating his birth day at Patton Alley Pub. There was going to be a show, so I decided that that seemed more interesting than a party without live music. I had never heard of Split Lip Rayfield before, other than they were bluegrass, so on the way to the bar Thomas played some for me. I thought that it was pleasant to the ears, which made me more excited to go.
When we got to the bar the opening act had already started. I didn’t catch their name, but they were a two man band that fused indie rock with bluegrass. The two musicians relied heavily on their string instruments. They both played acoustic guitars, chordophones, with call and response between each other. One of them used a tambourine, an idiophone, on his foot and stomped the stage, also an idiophone, as the precision in the performance. They took turns with the lead singer position. Their voices accented each other well.
The people who were at the bar were just arriving; they were finding their spots, like picking a home for the night. While the opening band was playing there weren’t a whole lot of people dancing out in front. Most of the people were sitting at the surrounding tables, booths, and at the bar. They didn’t seem to enthusiastic about the opening band. I believe that the reason was that most of the people that were there, were there to see a blue grass show. That was not what genre the opening band aspired to. I still enjoyed them though.
Toward the end of the opening band’s performance the red-haired guy took a break for a couple of songs and the dark-haired performer did some solo work. One of his solo songs was a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues.” The structure of this piece was polyphonic in rhythm. “Cocaine Blues” is a song that as far as I could tell was in triple meter and was somewhat of a segue into the next band because it was more country and upbeat in comparisons to what the opening band had been playing. This is about the time that people got up and started to come closer to the stage and dance around.
By the time Split Lip Rayfield came onto the stage it was getting late, and everyone was getting pretty loose and drunk. People were applauding as the stage hands finished doing the set up for the band. From what I could tell the musicians in Split Lip were in their mid to late forties. After the show I looked the band up, and they have been together for about fourteen years. You could tell from the rapport of the group that they get along well. It felt like they had been playing together for all of their lives.
Split Lip is a trio of musicians. The one on stage left seemed to be the oldest and played an incredible acoustic guitar and a mandolin, which are both chordophones. The man at center stage played an old muffler that had been modified into a stand up bass. The neck of the bass was the exhaust pipe. The resonator was the bulk of the muffler, and the connector pipe was the stand for the bass. This unique adaptation of a stand up bass was a chordophone. They guy at center stage also had a kazoo attached to his microphone with scotch tape. About half way through the show they took the kazoo off of the microphone. The kazoo was the only instrument in the performance that wasn’t a stringed instrument. Instead the kazoo is an aerophpone. The songs that featured kazoo had an odd yet pleasant twist. The kazoo added some timbral variety to the pieces. The man that performed on stage right played a banjo (a chordophone). In my opinion the banjo is the essential part a bluegrass ensemble. Most of their songs included themes of drinking, women, running away from the law, heart break, and having an outlaw life style. Their voices had a bit of a southern twang and went together very harmonically. The blue grass that Split Lip Rayfield performed was up tempo and seemed to have some rock overtones.
There were not too many social institutions represented at the concert, but the ones that were there were prevalent. The bar itself was a social institution in where people come to the establishment solely to have a good time and forget about the hardships of life and to socialize with people that they have similar interest with. The interest might be similar music taste, or it might just be the enjoyment of drinking. There is also the social institution of the concert with a stage and audience dancing out in front of the band. The bar made sure to honor this institution by setting back all of the tables to make sure to leave ample room for people to pack into. The way the secular concerts are set up is to honor the band that is performing by setting them on a pedestal or stage in this case, raising them above everyone in the room. Even the way that the speakers are set up is a part of this social institution by creating an embrace that the audience can fit into and be surrounded by the music.
The identity of the musicians seemed to be that of people who might be on the outskirts of the normal social order, where musicians have become so commercial that they all end up sounding the same. They have somewhat of an older sound, which is why I believe that I enjoyed them as much as I did. They seemed a little rough around the edges but all in all morally good individuals.
People at the show ranged in ages dramatically from people that were my age, twenty-one, to people who were in their mid to late sixties. The one thing that I enjoy about going to these types of shows is that you’ll never see any people that act and dress like gangsters and thugs. You can always tell what kind of people are at a show by the ability to get to the front of the stage. If you go to a rock show, it’s like hitting a brick wall when you get up anywhere close to the stage but at this show people would just move aside and let you get as close as you want. The type of music from the book that most resembles the type of music that Split Lip performed would have to the Irish Celtic chapter because of the relationship of dancing to the music. Overall I enjoyed the concert. My only problem with it was that it didn’t last quite as long as I would have wished.