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ACL Fest review: Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses
What a difference a couple of years, a few hundred nights in beer joints, a lot of hard work and, oh yeah, an Oscar can make.
When Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses first played the ACL Festival (in 2008, if memory serves), they were relegated to the tiny BMI Stage. Well, this year Bingham has taken Horace Greeley’s advice and headed west—about a half mile west, to be exact, to the AMD Stage, as big a venue as the festival has to offer.
Bingham approached the challenge of putting a barroom band in front of many thousands of people in instinctive fashion. As far as he was concerned, he was playing the world’s largest open-air honky-tonk and he and the Dead Horses cranked up the energy level appropriately.
Coming out of the chute like the rodeo rider he once was, Bingham was cheerfully profane and ready to get the party started. The rambunctious “Dollar A Day” (with its hardscrabble line, “It costs a whole lot of money/To live in the land of the free”) and the Steve Earl-ish “Depression” put hard times to music, while the loping country-rocker “Southside of Heaven” harkened back to Bingham’s own picaresque past. “Hallelujah,” which may be Bingham’s high-water mark as a songwriter so far, hushed the sun-kissed crowd.
Throughout, Bingham was animated, engaging and seemingly happy to find himself at the only place he wanted to be on this particular Sunday afternoon.
His music, however, took on aggressive, even abrasive edges as he and guitarist Corby Schaub alternately and together strapped on slide guitars in “Direction of the Wind,” “Bluebird” and “Sunshine” and played with an intensity that evoked a duel with straight razors. It was, arguably, some of the toughest music of the festival weekend, a musical analog to the hard and windswept territory that so Bingham’s musical creations inhabit. It’s no country for old men, nor young ones either, but it’s Bingham’s home range. Not even an Oscar can change that.
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Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: ACL 2011
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By chris
September 18, 2011 8:41 PM | Link to this
That wasnt corby schaub. Corby was missed as he is much more refned
By h
September 19, 2011 10:35 AM | Link to this
pretty sure that wasn’t Corby. Hasn’t played with him in a while
By Texas Music
September 20, 2011 8:07 AM | Link to this
Whose Ryan Bingham ?
By Texas Music
September 20, 2011 8:08 AM | Link to this
Who is Ryan Bingham ?