1) Tonight is the first Friday on the Green of the year! Bring a blanket and some lawn chairs and money if you want beer and/or dinner. The show starts at 6 with Ting Tang Tina, followed by Gollay, Shadows of Jets, and headliner Abraham Alexander, whose soul-stirring civil rights ballad “America” was the Weekly’s 2017 song of the year. Show is free and all-ages. The green is on Lipscomb between Rosedale and Magnolia. Here’s Abraham Alexander singing “Heart of Gold” for a SoFar Sounds show. What a voice!
2) If you hate the turn that country music has taken over the past decade, Jamie Richards’ throwback honky tonk sound will restore your faith. He’s at Lola’s Trailer Park (2735 W 5th) tonight (Friday) at 7pm. Show is all ages, cover is $10. Here’s Richards and his band playing a gig in Oklahoma:
3) Saturday is MASS’s (1002 S Main) first anniversary, and the bill is stacked with a mix of newer bands and old favorites, kicked off by Meach Pango at 5:30 and headlined by Oil Boom at 11:30 (see the disclaimer at the bottom of this so you can learn more about my relationship with both MASS and Oil Boom); between them (from latest to earliest) are Big Red Ants, the Daybreak Hits (MASS co-owner Ryan Higgs’ new band), Dead Vinyl, All Clean, and Matt Tedder. Show is 18+ (or under if a parent brings the minor), doors are at 4, and cover is $10. Dead Vinyl goes for a live version of last year’s “To the Bone” in this video, and it kinda sounds like something off Physical Graffiti:
4) Because I’ll be playing (see the paragraph above and the one at the bottom if you didn’t already), I’m going to miss Big Mike’s Black Sabbath tribute night at Lola’s, which is a bummer, because his Sabbath tribute is my favorite of all his various tribute acts. Like he does with his Led Zeppelin nights, Big Mike adds enough members to his band to best recreate all the sounds from Sabbath’s recorded material, which means you’ll get to hear stuff from later albums like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage. Doors are at 8, show is all-ages, starts at 9:30, and cover is $10. If you pass on this because you’re sick of hearing “Paranoid” on the radio, here’s a video of Big Mike killing an acoustic cover of “Spiral Architect” in his living room:
5) The Old 97’s County Fair festival is on Saturday at Dallas’ Main Street Garden (1902 Main St, Dallas), at which the OG Dallas cowpunks headline a lineup that includes both Lord Huron and the Mavericks in poster’s big font spots. But if you ask me, the smaller-font acts are really where it’s at; Valerie June and Paul Cauthen are worth the price of admission alone, and there’s also the Bottle Rockets, Heartless Bastards’ Erika Wennerstrom, Jaime Wyatt, and the Bastards of Soul; that action starts at 11:30, and admission is $65. But you could also go see Ronnie Milsap in Irving at the Southern Junction Nightclub and Steakhouse (101 N Rogers Rd, Irving), which starts at 6pm; cover for that show starts at $20. I saw him in 2007 at Choctaw Casino for my friend’s 30th birthday and he put on an incredible show! Here he is playing “Smokey Mountain Rain” in Branson, MO (which sounds like the most Ronnie Milsap-ian performance you could hope for):
FULL DISCLOSURE/WRITER BIO ALERT: per editorial suggestion, in addition to writing about music and other shit for the FW Weekly, I am an investor in a venue/bar called Main at Southside, colloquially known as MASS. I also bartend at the Boiled Owl Tavern, a bar that also hosts shows a few times a month. And, since we’re on the subject of warning you against what may be perceived as my own icky, unseemly self-promotion and/or conflicts of interest, I play bass in the following bands: Oil Boom, Son of Stan, Darth Vato. Sometimes I talk about one or more of those entities in this space, but I assure you that it has very little to do with my own vested interests; it just happens that the aforementioned venues and bands are part of the Fort Worth music scene, and this music scene is something I care very passionately about, as I have been part of it since 2002.
