Old Crow Revels, <i>Rocky Horror</i> Rocks on NYE

The Spin has often mused on the relationship between Americana music and the musical history the genre attempts to turn to modern purposes. It was freezing cold on New Year’s Eve in downtown Nashville, and we had Lowell George’s 1972 Little Feat song “Cold, Cold, Cold” running through our minds as we trudged to the Ryman to see Old Crow Medicine Show, a quintessential Americana band, ring in 2018. The music of the folk-country-rock ensemble, which has played the Mother Church almost every New Year’s Eve since 2009, epitomizes the mixture of reverence for the past and old-school commercial calculation — “show business” is another name for it — that we call Americana.

Continuing the theme, we heard Little Feat’s white-boy-funk anthem “Rock and Roll Doctor” playing as part of the pre-show music, after which we were treated to opener Joshua Hedley’s well-paced set. (We also noted the presence of legendary WSM radio personality Eddie Stubbs, who introduced both bands.) Hedley, a longtime performer at Robert’s Western World on Lower Broadway, hit the stage in an aqua-blue Nudie-style suit and played concise retro-country tunes, including a cover of Doug Gilmore and Mickey Newbury’s “She Even Woke Me up to Say Goodbye” and an original titled “Let’s Take a Vacation.” Hedley, who signed with Jack White’s Third Man Records last spring, is a fine country classicist.

Old Crow’s set was perplexing. On the one hand, frontman Ketch Secor is a great stage performer. As he skidded across the stage on one leg and held his fiddle bow high to emphasize a lyric, Secor embodied the band’s concept of a modern string band whose goal is to entertain listeners and dancers alike. As far as dances go, we also enjoyed multi-instrumentalist Critter Fuqua’s Chuck Berry-style duck walk during another number.

On the other hand, the performance reminded us of an outtake from Christopher Guest’s 2003 mockumentary about folk music, A Mighty Wind. Secor & Co. played to the rafters, and the band’s approach to America’s storied folk music came off a bit, well, hokey at times — take their overcooked version of Merle Travis’ “Sixteen Tons.” We enjoyed their rendition of their own “Alabama High-Test,” one of their best meditations on the allure of dope and the rigors of the road. They also did a version of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman,” a song that is essentially performer-proof, though they didn’t happen to mention Webb as the writer.

The night before, they’d played their most recent record, a reworking of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, in its entirety (with a special guest appearance from Margo Price). They nodded to Dylan on New Year’s Eve with four songs: “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” featuring guitjo player Kevin Hayes on vocals, along with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the now-famous Dylan-Secor tune “Wagon Wheel” and, for an encore, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

Meanwhile, over at The End, we got a nicely balanced performance of material that very much lends itself to overacting. The Rocky Horror Rock ’n’ Roll Show was a performance of music from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and its stage precedent, The Rocky Horror Show), with some bits of the script acted out, a few scenes from the 1975 film projected on a screen, a few puppets, lots of props and the kind of audience interaction — amplified by the presence of an ace cast, who also sang and played in the crack band — that helped the film achieve its midnight-movie cult status.

“Sweet Baby” Richie Kirkpatrick and his band Richie warmed up the crowd. It dawned on us that we’ve seen Richie on New Year’s Eve several times, but it never feels old-hat. We’ve seen them in many configurations, but this occasion was the first time in several years they brought a twin-guitar attack. Matt Menold from Clear Plastic Masks was pointed and ferocious on the second six-string, giving Kirkpatrick even more space to flex his superlative skills as frontman. The songs are sometimes goofy and weird, but they're well-crafted and ring true when you get to the sentiment at the bottom of them.

We hadn’t seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show in years. But all we had to do was follow the packed crowd’s lead to get the rituals down pat, from lobbing savage remarks at the narrator on the screen to wobbling our way through the dance steps to “The Time Warp.” The plot itself may not seem as subversive as it did 40 years ago, but the basic message — that there are far more dimensions to love and sexuality than cultural gatekeepers of the Eisenhower era would have you believe — hasn’t lost a bit of its relevance.

The story is so flamboyant that the music is easy to overlook. But Richard O’Brien’s songs do a fantastic job of flipping saccharine, watered-down takes on rock ’n’ roll on their heads, and they were played expertly with gusto by folks who know how to bend rock to their will. Following an introduction from Leah Miller as an authoritative mistress of ceremonies who took some cues from Cabaret and Doug, Amy Smith sang the sweet theme song “Science Fiction/Double Feature” while a puppet in the form of a giant pair of lips mouthed along behind her. Zach Gresham from The Mute Group played ultra-square Brad Majors (ripping righteously on "Dammit Janet"); Jill Townsend from Nightblonde was his fiancée Janet Weiss (whose "Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me" made us blush); and champion sideman Bruce Ervin proved himself able as the too-short-lived Eddie (who wielded a mean sax on "Hot Patootie — Bless My Soul").

Other members of the rogue’s gallery included Black Moon Mother’s Brianne O’Neill as Columbia, Nightblonde’s Megan McCoy as Magenta and Joanna Sugameli as the scheming butler Riff Raff. Fable Cry frontman Zach Ferrin carried off the show-defining lead role, bravely following in Tim Curry’s footsteps as the voracious pansexual alien Dr. Frank N. Furter. That part is easy to overdo, since the character dominates every scene he’s in, but Ferrin gave him depth — his lust over his new creation, the tan and muscular Rocky (played by the hunky Jasson Cring, the most articulate Terminator to appear in these parts) was convincingly tempered with a queasy bit of something like parental pride.

So it was that we kicked off 2018 contemplating two very different approaches to putting on a show, considering the tensions between art and commerce. As long as this issue remains at the center of the conversation about music in this town, we're pushing toward making it the best it can be.