The Railroad Revival Tour came to Tempe, Arizona on April 23rd. The bands that performed included: The Old Crow Medicine Show, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and Mumford & Sons. The last I heard, 5,000 tickets were sold and that it was a sold out show. The best word to describe the entire show is: hoedown.
It was a hoedown
This is the first “hoedown” that I’ve been to, but it was so much fun and the music was really good! Thousands of people filled the dirt lot that was turned into an outdoor stage with food and drink vendors. Indian tacos were being sold as well as sausage.
The people who attended the concert wore the modern plaid shirt and skinny jeans. Others took the more traditional route and wore ragged pants and shirts, which fit in well with Edwarde Sharpe frontman Alex Ebert who wore nothing but long johns.
Ebert made several jokes between songs and spent some time with the audience and even got inbetween the crowd. One of his jokes was: A termite walks into a bar and asks where’s the bar-tender? This one took me a while to understand, as well as the rest of the audience, because no on laughed after he finished the joke. Ebert had also gone as far as jokingly calling Arizona the occupied Mexico. All of his jokes were clearly not meant to invoke any hard feelings and were purely for entertainment.
The highlight of the entire concert was Mumford & Sons. As usual, they played popular songs with a few lesser known ones. “Little lion man” and “The cave” were among the more popular ones. Marcus Mumford, the lead singer of the band, joked about the people who were “too cheap to buy tickets.” There were apartment complexes right next to the dirt lot mentioned earlier. Groups of people were on the roofs of the apartments watching from the “cheap seats.” Mumford said that the people were in the same boat as the band because the band didn’t pay for tickets either.
The Alt-Rock Obsession 