- Yonder Mountain String Band
While Katy Perry was littering the tween-filled Sprint Center with confetti and frosting, there was something a world apart going down at Crossroads KC. Something a little dustier, more tattooed, and assuredly more stoned. While waiting in line to get our tickets, a man cruised up to his friend in front of us in the line, a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel's and a beer in his hands. “You get tickets here?” he asked. There were quite a few versions of this guy wandering around throughout the evening.
Mountain Sprout is from Arkansas and does no work to play down the hillbilly stereotype: full beards, stringy hair and dirty clothes. It totally works for them. Playing with the traditional bluegrass setup of banjo, bass, fiddle and guitar, the foursome sings songs about partying and running afoul of the law, including a song about shoplifting from Wal-Mart. The biggest cheers of the night came from a song called “Screw the Government,” a fun ditty made more fun by a cool trick the bassist used to get a deep drum sound out of his instrument. He swung his big upright bass from one hand to the other, clapping his left hand around all of the strings at once, making a big “thwunk” sound on each swing that came surprisingly close to the sound of a bass drum.
The crowd began to swell toward the end of Mountain Sprout’s set. Bluegrass brings out an interesting mix of traveler-punk and hippie, and a lot of hybrids in between. For example, one of my favorite people of the evening was a man covered in tattoos, with long, dark dreads and a black cutoff denim vest with a huge Pantera patch sewn on. Looked like a regular metal guy — until he brought out his neon light-up hula hoop, which he somehow aggressively jumped through and twirled throughout the evening. “Man, I didn’t know hula could be hard,” noted my friend Zach.
Just after dark, Split Lip Rayfield took the stage, and the crowd responded with clouds of pot smoke, the smell from which didn’t abate for the rest of the evening. Guitarist and vocalist Eric Mardis noticed: “It smells a bit like Colorado up here.” I don’t think anything could probably have made the crowd happier, other than maybe the music itself. It’s easy to understand why the band is such a local institution. Wayne Gottstine is fiercely fast on his mandolin, and Jeff Eaton’s energy on his homemade bass (built from the gas tank of a 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis) is totally infectious. Jeff Austin, mandolin player for Yonder Mountain String Band, joined Split Lip onstage for a quick cameo. The band dedicated its last song, “Outlaw,” to the recently deceased and still clearly very much missed Kirk Rundstrom.
- Yonder Mountain String Band
Yonder Mountain String Band came out to a smoky, ultra-rowdy, drunk and stoned crowd. Lacking the energy of Split Lip or the dirty funny of Mountain Sprout, Yonder Mountain String Band is something else entirely: the ultra-polished, jammed-out version of bluegrass. The band got a few songs in and then a police helicopter, which had been hovering overhead with its searchlights on for about 10 minutes, zoned in on a house just east of the venue on Locust Street. The lights zeroed in on a group of four or five punk-looking kids sitting on the roof of the building, who quickly dispersed. The helicopter continued to circle for about five more minutes before finally leaving. The band played throughout, and once it reached the end of the song, bassist and vocalist Ben Kauffman said, “Now, we’ve had a lot of things happen at our shows ... but that was our first flyover.” Everyone was momentarily distracted, but then the weed and booze kicked back in, and everybody got right back to dancing.
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