There’s several ways to celebrate and promote freedom. The best one, in my humble opinion, is through the world of art. This was the overriding theme at the “War Charlotte: Life in a Nameless Decade” event held Friday and Saturday at the Steeple Lounge. Five dollars gained you admission to the gala, with all proceeds going to the American Red Cross, The ACLU, and the United Way of Central Carolinas. Local visual artists donated works for the project, local DJs spun works of “empowerment, protest and change” (most notably Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”), and musicians — including Snagglepuss, Don Dixon, and an all-star aggregate known as the Wartime Players — played music, if not of change, of living in the moment (see Don Dixon’s classic nugget “Most Of The Girls Like To Dance But Only Some Of the Boys Like To.”) In addition, the show featured two young ladies clad in American flag bikini tops, who chose to live in the moment by posing, cheesecake style, to Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Rarely has a more stirring tribute to the glory and grandeur of our great land been seen. I mean, “effective form of protest.” I mean…oh, forget it.Saturday morning, Charlotte woke up from a week of Londonesque weather to a bright and sunny day, perfect for taking a walk or washing the car or going to a festival. Yes! A festival! Like the CPCC Frolic, perhaps! Yes, that will have to do.An underrated area festival, the Frolic features all sorts of cool stuff, including vendors selling tamales and fried fish, (stringed instrument) picking parties, and top-notch — if underappreciated — area musicians (see Tarboro’s George Higgs).
You also get 10-foot-tall guitars, courtesy of local guitar fanatic Mike McBride. What, you may be asking, is so great about 10-foot-tall guitars if you’re not, say, Yao Ming? It’s the fact that the huge instruments attracted kids to the booth all day like John Mayer draws frat boys. At the booth, the young’uns were able to pick the guitar for a minute or two, and beat on a drum, something they don’t get to do enough with all the financial cuts in music education.
Having arrived in a beyond-foul mood earlier in the day, hearing the Piedmont Blues of Higgs lifted my spirits. If it takes gigantic guitars to lure kids to this greatest of art forms, I vote to put them on every corner. It’d make a hell of a lot more sense than those damn rocking chairs we used to have everywhere.
Interlude: Question: How does one tell the difference between the crowd at Saturday night’s “Pimp and Ho” party at the Time Lounge, and that venue’s normal clientele? Answer: You can’t!
Ah, Sunday night: A time for relaxation, and reflection on the week that has passed and the one that lies ahead. A time for some jazz, perhaps, and a glass of wine. Evidently, everyone else in Charlotte had the same idea, as Sunday night’s show at the Visulite Theatre by John Scofield proved. Scofield — who has played with both jazz icons (Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis) and JamJazz bands (Medeski Martin and Wood) — is an unassuming chap, with little stage presence to speak of, outside of the fact that he can play a guitar better than most people currently breathing. As such, the weight of the packed house was on Scofield to “bring it,” which he did with an apparent minimum of effort. Scofield, who sort of looks like the dad on TV’s Family Ties were he to lose a lot of hair, even managed the nifty trick of playing with himself on stage. Perhaps a rephrasing of that last sentence is in order. Via an iBook computer and a stack of effects pedals, the guitarist was able to play a guitar lick, record it, and then solo over the top of it or shade it in with barre chords. You were thinking Jim Morrison, perhaps?
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.
