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Rambling through the music of the '80s |
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Written by Dan England
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Friday, 26 October 2007 |
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 Those of you who stuck to Culture Club, Kajagoogoo and Club Nouveau may not realize this, but the music of the 1980s had more variety than a dozen doughnuts.
There were bands that classic rock stations play today, such as a few hair metal bands and hard rock mainstays like AC/DC. There was the pop music, of course, sprinkled with one-hit wonders. And the Marsalis brothers helped lay the groundwork for the “young lions” movement that helped propel hard-bop jazz into the limelight. Heck, the Grateful Dead even finally got a hit on the Billboard charts with “Touch of Grey.”
So it’s only appropriate that Whitewater Ramble is rehearsing at least twice a week to get ready for its tribute to the ’80s on Halloween night at the Aggie in Fort Collins. If you listen hard enough, you’ll find all those styles in the band’s music, even if it does bill itself as a jam band based in bluegrass (much like the Grateful Dead).
Patrick Sites, who sings and plays mandolin loves the dance music of the ’90s heavily influenced by, well, the dance music of the ’80s.
Brian Coddington, on acoustic guitar and vocals is a big Scorpions and AC/DC fan, with a little Motley Crüe thrown in, along with the Dead.
Howard Montgomery on upright bass said he’s a jazz nut who played the classics such as Miles Davis on gigs with his father. The band even has a fiddle player who learned his instrument through classical music.
“We’re all a little different, but you put it all together, and we can play virtually any style with our own ‘thing,’” Coddington said in an interview. “It’s a wonderful recipe for musical tension sometimes, because we all try to pull the song our way.”
Coddington also compared the band to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, the banjo-based band with roots in jazz, pop and a little Dave Matthews (although Fleck really started first), a band with layers and layers of musical styles all meshed together in an improvisational jam.
Despite all that pedigree, playing a set of all ’80s tunes is more challenging than Coddington originally thought.
“It’s a daunting task to play stuff that everyone is so familiar with,” he said.
“Everyone wants to hear the tune the way they remember it.”
The ’80s also weren’t a joke.
“There was some pretty epic stuff going on,” he said. “We’ve got one of those ’80s dance songs, some fun numbers and also some obscure stuff. It will be fun.”
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HALLOWEEN SHOW
“A JamGrass Tribute to the ’80s” featuring WhiteWater Ramble with The Filthy Children and Wasabi
8 p.m. Halloween Night, Wed. Oct. 31 at the Aggie Theatre, 204 S. College Ave., Fort Collins. Tickets are $5. First Prize for costume contest is $100. Call 482.8300 or go online to www.aggietheatre.com for more information. | Only registered users can write comments.
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