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Photo by Christopher Lugo/Staff Rocksteady@8 at one of their concerts at The High Dive in Highlands last year.
The Highlands Chamber of Commerce’s summer concert series continues this weekend with Ol’ Dirty Bathtub and Rocksteady@8.
One of Western North Carolina’s premiere acoustic bands, Ol’ Dirty Bathtub, will perform at Town Square on June 10 for the Friday Night Live Concert Series.
The band, which brands themselves as an acoustic party band, formed their current line up around the fourth of July weekend in 2016.
“It had been kind of an entity for a while before, but the band’s current lineup kind of coalesced around July 4 weekend in 2016,” dobro player and former Highlander reporter Carter Giegerich said. “The lineup then, and now, is me playing dobro and then a guy named Neil Lippard playing guitar, Jerad Davis, also playing guitar, Adam Bigelow playing bass and Brad Boulet playing mandolin.”
Giegerich, who majored in journalism and minored in bluegrass music at East Tennessee State University, first got involved with the band while working as a reporter at the Highlander.
“The way that I got involved with this band was that Adam Bigelow, the bass player, has got a lot of titles, and one of them, I would say, is an ethnobotanist. He does wildflower walks and I was invited to go on one of those as a reporter for the Highlander. And so, I did and in doing my research about Adam, I discovered that he was also a bass player and I had been looking for some folks to play music within the area. So, I brought it up to him and he invited me over to Brad’s house to just sort of hang out and play some tunes. I think that everybody but Jared was there that day and then I met Jared later that week, and they had a show coming up. It was the first show we played together, and it was at Innovation Brewing in Sylva. And we had a good time and, and it sort of all kind of clicked.”
Giegerich’s love of music spawned at a young age, having grown up in a musical household. He first learned to play dobro after his father passed away, but he wanted to be a performer from an early age.
“My dad was a working musician in the Baltimore and Washington DC area,” Giegerich said. “And he was an exceptional musician. And he played dobro and pedal steel which is kind of how I came to play those instruments as well. He passed away in 2010. And I inherited like a bunch of really, really expensive slide guitars and figured I should probably learn to play them instead of selling all of them. But before that when I was like 12, I had spiky hair and I really wanted to be in a pop punk band. I kind of started to learn acoustic music in the middle of my teen years and I used to go to camps and festivals with my dad a bunch and I eventually reached the point where I realized that the fun of music was the communal aspect of it.”
The band features a dobro, mandolin, acoustic guitars and an upright bass. While their style of music has typically been viewed as being somewhere between Americana and Bluegrass, Giegerich prefers to call it acoustic party music instead.
“It’s kind of hard to name the genre of music that you play when you’re doing it, but we’re the way that the way we brand ourselves is that we are an acoustic party band,” Giegerich said. “I think probably a lot of people would view it as some sort of in between Americana and Bluegrass. I don’t really think that it kind of falls in either of those camps. But like if you reduce it down to its core elements, probably those are app titles, but I would call it acoustic party music. We do. Some bluegrass tunes and some country tunes and a lot of like pop music and things that are kind of outside of like the standard library of tunes for American traditional music.”
Giegerich says people should be ready for a party, full of high energy at their performance.
“Highlands is going to lose its mind. I think they can expect to hear music they’ll want to dance to. And that’s what we like, when people dance, and you don’t have to dance. But it’s cool when you do and I think that that is what motivates us a lot, seeing people responding positively to our music, and we kind of tried to create a feedback loop in that way. But I would say like they can expect to hear songs that they’re really familiar with and songs that they’re not familiar with at all and some really just otherworldly dobro solos. I mean, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a good time.”
The band’s show will start at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 10 and will go on until around 8:30 p.m. Admission is free, and all are welcome to attend.
Rocksteady@8, a band based in the Southeastern US that features one of Highlands School’s own, will be performing at the Kelsey-Hutchinson Founders Park on June 11 for the Saturdays on Pine concert series. The band was started by current lead-singer, Jason Nwagbaraocha, and fellow ska singer Ed Lowery in 1999.
“All members were members of ska, reggae, and other world music outfits in Tampa during the 1990’s, and knew each other, or knew of each other through the music scene, trumpet and vox player Brian Aulisio said. “In 1999, Jason Nwagbaraocha and Ed Lowery, both lead singers in ska bands at the time arranged to get together to form a band that concentrated on the mid 1960’s Jamaican music genre known as ‘Rocksteady’, an early form of reggae music.”
Aulisio grew up playing trumpet in his school band, but it wasn’t until college when he formed his first band alongside some friends.
“I played trumpet in middle and high school bands but didn’t really pursue anything my freshman year in college,” Aulisio said. “Towards the end of my freshman year, my friends and I discovered a local Tampa ska band named Magadog. They influenced us to start our own ska band in Tampa. The music style became quite popular, and pretty soon I was driving back to Tampa (from the University of Florida in Gainesville) every weekend to perform. There were several ska bands around that promoted and took care of each other. The camaraderie among everyone was the biggest influence on me to continue studying and performing classic Jamaican music.”
Rocksteady@8 has seven members and boasts Aulisio on trumpet/vox, Jonathan Priest on drums, Vincent Sims on Guitar/vox, Joe Grady on Bass/vox, Jon Richardson on keys, Victoria King on sax and Jason Nwagbaraocha. The band mainly plays Rocksteady music, as their name may suggest, and roots reggae.
“As mentioned before, we originally concentrated on the Rocksteady music of the mid to late 1960s Jamaica, but we also play lesser-known roots reggae of the 1970’s, and Jason our singer is very adept at performing the vocal chants and raps of early 1980’s dancehall music,” Aulisio said. “Some of our songs also incorporate Afro-Cuban and Afro-Funk rhythms.”
Saturday’s performance will be the band’s return to Highlands after performing a sort of two-night reunion show at the High Dive bar in July 2021.
“The positive reception of the people watching, and wonderful summer weather influenced us to return to town,” Aulisio said. “All of the members agreed that performing reggae music in the mountains of Highlands was a cathartic experience. All of the members wish to extend our deepest gratitude to Marci Sherwood at the Chamber of Commerce for giving us the opportunity to perform at such a wonderful event this year.”
Aulisio said that people can expect to hear music that makes them want to get up and move while providing a positive and energetic experience. He also hopes that people will come away from the show with a new-found appreciation for the different styles of reggae music.
Rocksteady@8 will start their performance at 6 p.m. on June 11 and it will last until around 8:30 p.m.
- By Kaylee Cook