Micah Davidson

Micah Davidson, a bassist-turned-music-booking-agent, is a big part of the NC Brewers and Music Festival, scheduled for Saturday near Charlotte, N.C. Get show details at Top Tickets.

The Roanoke native talks on this podcast about how he went from being a player in such bands as Dead End Parking to booking bands. It’s a cool story, and it shows that there are more ways than one for a musician to make a living in the life he or she loves.

Plus, we’ll stream music from Davidson’s music life with members of Dead End Parking. “You’ll Never Know” is a song that Davidson says the band learned the night before it was recorded. “Seven Sons” features all the original members of Dead End Parking. Both songs appear on former DEP frontman Nathan Carter’s CD, “Mercy Tree.”

Hunter Hayes | Courtesy Juan Pont Lezica

Country guitar hotshot, singer, multi-instrumentalist and hit songwriter Hunter Hayes is just 21 years old. But the recent Grammy nominee is no overnight success.

Hayes, who opens for Carrie Underwood tonight at Roanoke Civic Center, has been playing music with big stars since he was a pre-schooler.

At age 4, he joined Hank Williams Jr. onstage for a version of “Jambalaya,” a song that Williams’ father had made famous. The little fellow was confident and grooving, nailing his accordion part and drawing onstage praise from Williams Jr.

He doesn’t remember much about it, aside from go-cart racing with his father on the festival grounds and seeing all the buses backstage.

“It is funny to look back, because I don’t remember it,” he said, laughing. “Looking at baby pictures is one thing. Watching videos of yourself on YouTube, [nearly] 20 years after, is kind of freaky.”

Read the full story on Saturday in The Roanoke Times Extra section.

Southern Culture on the Skids frontman Rick Miller is a friend and fan of Roanoke=based artist Bill Rutherfoord, who pained this piece, “What Really Happened” | Courtesy Bill Rutherfoord

Southern Culture on the Skids plays tonight at Growler’s American Grill. Click here to read the full text of the story below and get show details.

Drummer Dave Hartman remembers the old King’s Inn as a sort of mythological place. He was too young to get in when it was in its heyday, but he and his buddies would gather in the alley behind it, drinking beer — he wasn’t sure how they got the beer, because they weren’t old enough — and dreaming of being inside.

“We would spend the whole night down there,” Hartman said. “The bands would start at 9 and they would go till 2. And we would sit out back there and drink beer and party. And no one ever came out the back door.

“We thought it was the most glamorous place inside. We’d never seen it, and we could only imagine all the people partying in there and all the musicians. And we just dreamed of a day where we would finally be old enough to get in there.”

It was never to be, though. Hartman, 50, said that the joint shut its doors for good in 1980, on the day that he turned 18.

“Our image of what it must have been like in there and the reality of what it must have been like in there was really far apart,” he said. “We imagined it was like New York City in there or something, like Max’s Kansas City.”

But he and his friends were able to get into at least one bar before they came of age. The place was Shaky Jake’s, now the Backstreet Cafe on Salem Avenue, and it was the place where a young Hartman first realized the perks of playing in a band. Full story | Podcast

Southern Culture on the Skids | scots.com

As Roanokers, we sometimes lose perspective on our city. We’re here all the time. We take cool things for granted, or we don’t even know they exist. We tend to get mad at some of the new stuff and denigrate some of the old.

So it’s at least interesting to know what folks from other places think of the Noke. With Southern Culture on the Skids, an indie rock institution that returns to town on Saturday for a show at Growler’s American Grill, we can can get a multi-faceted perspective.

After all, two of the three core members — drummer Dave Hartman and bassist/singer Mary Huff — grew up here but have lived in the Chapel Hill, N.C., area for many years. Frontman/guitarist/songwriter Rick Miller has never lived here but has visited many times.

Here is what each member of the band has to say about their favorite things in Roanoke. It’s fun! Get show details via our Top Tickets page and read more — with cool photos — in Saturday’s Extra section.

Flannel Church | Courtesy Margaret Willard

Duane Trucks, who brings the band Flannel Church to Growler’s American Grill on March 6, has quite a pedigree. (Go to Top Tickets at music.roanoke.com on to get show details.)

His oldest brother is guitar god Derek Trucks (Tedeschi Trucks Band), and his uncle is Butch Trucks, drummer for the Allman Brothers Band. From the time Duane Trucks was a child, he had big drumming influences. One of his brother’s early gigs was with Col. Bruce Hampton and the Fiji Mariners, and through Hampton, Duane was exposed to such drummers as Jeff “Apt. Q-258″ Sipe and Tyler “The Falcon” Greenwell” (now one of the drummers in Tedeschi Trucks Band). He got to hang out plenty with Derek Trucks Band’s longtime drummer, Yonrico Scott, too.

Growing up, the Trucks boys’ father would spin Allman Brothers albums and play bootleg tapes of band rehearsals. Duane Trucks didn’t realize it at the time, but he would wind up sounding like his Uncle Butch.

“I didn’t even realize it until I went out and started playing and hearing the first recording of myself playing live or seeing the first video that I ever say of myself playing, [and] I was like, oh my God, I sound like Butch,” Duane Trucks said in a Feb. 13 interview. “How does that happen?”

Read more »

Ross Copperman, a 2001 Glenvar High School graduate, is working on songwriting and production in Nashville, Tenn. | William Morris Endeavor Entertainment

When last The Roanoke Times visited singer/songwriter/producer Ross Copperman, it was 2006.

The Glenvar High School and James Madison University graduate had signed a record deal with Phonogenic, a branch of Sony BMG Entertainment in the United Kingdom. He was writing and recording what would be his only record for that label, “Welcome To Reality.”

The disc came out overseas in May 2007. While the reality wasn’t exactly grim — two songs, “As I Choke” and “All She Wrote,” did relatively well in England — his career failed to take off, and the hoped-for run of hits in the United States never materialized.

But Copperman is no quitter.

“I work 24 hours a day, [seven] days a week,” he wrote in a recent e mail exchange.

These days, the 30-year-old is doing his work in Nashville, Tenn., where he has turned his attention solely to songwriting and production. And you don’t have to search much to hear his work.

Read the full story at roanoke.com|  Check out video of Copperman’s past solo work here at youtube.

Eddie Palmieri | Courtesy Jefferson Center

By Tad Dickens | 777-6474

Latin jazz and salsa pianist Eddie Palmieri, at 76, still can get a crowd going with his Afro-Cuban music and grooves. His music still has the power to move behinds.

Palmieri, who headlines Jefferson Center on Friday, believes that his genre will always have that power. And he even knows why. During his decades of study and performance, he dug into the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, which breaks down the music via mathematics. Palmieri emerged with what might be the hippest possible explanation of his music’s power.

“In those arrangements, there’s tension and resistance,” Palmieri said in a recent phone interview. “And the tension and resistance is going to lead you to an exciting musical climax.

“If sex and danger are the exciters, the reaction of the human being to that is love and fear. That must be in the arrangement. That way you generate that centrifugal force.

“When a piano player gives a solo to a bongo player, to the timbales, to the conga, we’re generating more and more energy, so that when the full tutti of the brass comes, if you don’t get excited … you’d better check yourself into a hospital or something. You’re not well.

“And that’s why that music is just so unique, so wonderful. I’ve dedicated my whole life to it.”

Read the rest of the story and get show details at http://www.roanoke.com/319369

From left: Andrew, Evan, Sarah and Michael Gregory | Courtesy of The Gregory Brothers

Former Radford boys The Gregory Brothers spent much of the past year doing presidential election season videos for The New York Times. Strangely enough, the Times asked them to do the videos not long after one of the paper’s writers wondered in print how much of a shelf life the Gregorys’ Auto-Tune The News and other Youtube features might have.

“What a weird story to kind of come around after a couple of years of doing this political, news-oriented stuff,” Evan Gregory said, “then get called by the premier newspaper in the country to say, [in faux-nerdy New York accent] ‘Hey, you guys want to put your videos in our paper?’” The Gregorys ended up producing four videos for Op-Docs during the campaign season.

But when you’re making unexpected hits on the web, unexpected things happen to you. There are constants, though, and one of them happens on Saturday, when the brothers, including Evan’s wife, Sara Gregory, return to Radford for their eighth annual Gregory Brothers Christmas Show.

Read the full story at http://www.roanoke.com/extra/wb/318120 | See all the New York Times op-docs, including four Gregory Brothers election-season features.

Sarah Siskind | Courtesy photo

Sarah Siskind, who wrote Alison Krauss’ Grammy-nominated song, “Simple Love,” plays Kirk Avenue Music Hall tonight with her husband, The Infamous Stringdusters bassist Travis Book.

But in a sense, the act will be a trio, because Siskind is great with child. The baby girl, due in just a couple of months, is already demonstrating a feel for her parents’ jobs, Siskind said.
“She loves music,” Siskind said in a phone conversation last week from her home in Nelson County. “I did quite a bit of touring this fall, when I was four and five months pregnant … She’s had a lot of guitar resonations right on the belly. She recognizes Travis’ voice when he sings.

“We think she’s musical already. I had her in one show actually kick to the beat of the song. I call her my little kick drum. That would be perfect for our little duo — have an official trio with a drummer.”

Read the full story in Thursday’s Inside Out.

Show details: 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Kirk Avenue Music Hall, Roanoke. Adults, $15; students, $8. kirkavenuemusic.com, sarahsiskind.com

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Tift Merritt | Courtesy of Parker Fitzgerald

Singer/songwriter Tift Merritt has a piano at her New York City home, but not a grand piano, the type that inspires her.

But one night a while back, after a gig at New York’s City Winery, she told the staff there how much she loved the house grand piano. The response: Come on down and play it any time before we open the doors.

“I said you know, you should be careful, because if you tell me that, I will actually do that,” said Merritt, who opens for Justin Townes Earle on Wednesday at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg.

Read the full story.

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