Cashthrax: A Metalgrass Band

I don't confess to be musical in any sort of way other than liking to listen to it. But I do know a little bit about bluegrass - how it generally sounds, the kind of instruments that are involved, the harmonies. Enough to know that the show I went to Friday night featured a band that was decidedly not bluegrass.

While we were subjected to the sounds of The Unknown Band, I made a few observations, puzzled together this mysterious musical performance and came up with this: the band came together with two sets of brothers - one in each pair devoted to classic bluegrass and their counterparts equally passionate about heavy metal. But rather than be brothers divided, they decided to meld their incongruous loves into a band of heretofore unknown composition: the metalgrass band.

The metalheads brought their pounding drums and their electric guitar riffs and the grassroots brought their upright bass and their banjo and then they found the missing ingredient: the pretty-boy frontman who could hunch over a mandolin but never quite make noise with it. And this motley crew became Cashthrax, an absolute abomination to both ends of the spectrum.

And poor Jason and me were stuck...for thirty minutes, listening to them bang and wail in a fashion that was a glaring insult to all things bluegrass and a wad of spit in the eye to all things metal. But they labored on, picking and plucking in their cowboy boots and their Converse and their long Amish beards and sang something that was neither identifiable nor enjoyable.

And then the headliner appeared with the proper instruments and harmonies and vocals and sounds and words. The world improved greatly for a brief moment...and then tilted on its axis in a haze of white-boy pain and mid-life clogging. A cluster of frat-boy redneck types moved into the middle of the open floor - one wearing a camoflauge cap, another a Member's Only jacket - and began what can only be characterized as a rhythmless white-boy shuffle. They were soon joined by a 40ish or so woman in a dress so ugly, it pained me. No. Seriously. This dress - this boxy black and camel dress - hurt me. And it hurt me even more when I noticed her hair was held in place by a small pink terrycloth scrunchie. She took to the floor in her thick suntan-colored pantyhose (shoes kicked to the side) and clogged the dickens out of that concrete floor. And when she wasn't clogging, she was to the side with her decidedly more stylish friend (although Jason insisted she didn't score that many extra points) who seemed to be the girlfriend of a hip Atown townie who was so stoic and immobile, I would've thought him dead. But it was his friend - the sometimes sax player (?) - who was the attraction for the clogger. And while stylish friend (whose name I decided was Willow) tried to motivate her catatonic beau to move things along, the sax player and the clogger had intermittent awkward conversations leaned across the impassive zombie while Willow stroked his neck. And on top of that, we were fascinated by the incredibly bad date that was happening stage left, cringing at the body language and counting the guy's trips to the bar for another beer. Drink til she's cute!

All that said, the band was rather enjoyable. That is until they descended from the stage into the mob of mutants and continued playing and the mutants started shouting incomprehensibly. That's I turned to Jason and said, "Let's go now." And we walked out into the cold and hoped that whatever fissure had opened up in the universe behind us had closed - and hopefully taken that hideous dress with it.