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SXSW Scene Report: Benjy Ferree at Okay Mountain
Benjy Ferree broke out the pixie dust at eastside gallery Okay Mountain Friday. His new folk-rocker, “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee Bobby Dee,” is a concept album about Disney golden boy Bobby Driscoll, who experienced childhood fame as an actor and as the voice of the animated Peter Pan before booze cut his adult career short and led to a premature, penniless death. Ferree might have been over-thinking it when he came up with the idea of packaging songs as a chronicle of Driscoll’s rise and fall, coupled with the rite-of-passage themes from Peter Pan, but all of that was irrelevant in the live delivery.
Ferree - sans the beard, glasses, and hobo hat he wore at last year’s SXSW, perhaps as a way to inhabit the ostensibly clean-cut Driscoll persona - was joined in duet by lost boy Drew Mills. They breezed through songs like “Big Business,” about the hard knocks of Hollywood, and “Fear,” wherein Ferree stretched his Jack White voice to sound more soulful than bluesy. Along the way, the duo interspersed a lot of synchronized whistling, and Ferree shouted out, over and over again, “Peace, love, and all that,” to the sparse crowd. It was almost as if he’d been smoking the pixie dust before he started spreading it.
Photo by Kathy Hoinski
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