It’s too bad that more people weren’t around two Fridays ago, because the G. Love concert definitely could have used a little more energy.
The night began early with Standing Wave, a west-coast band that had a very grass-roots, almost early Dave Matthews Band sound. However, no one was getting into the music at all.
I don’t blame them ? Standing Wave was probably not the best choice for an opener, especially for a band like G. Love.
The Sauce have been playing together since 1992 and still have the interesting sound that they started with. If you can think of a twist of old school delta blues with new school hip-hop and add a little acoustic grunge feel, then you’ve approximated what G. Love sounds like.
The band consists of “G. Love” on guitar and harmonica, Jim “Jimi Jazz” Prescott on bass and Jeffery “The Houseman” Clemens on drums.
What’s great about these guys is their laid back approach at music production has allowed them to acquire some influential partnerships in the industry, such as Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson and recently John Medeski ? on their latest album ? to name a few. What’s not so great about these guys is that it seems they need crowd energy to play a good show and during their visit to campus, there wasn’t a whole lot.
The Sauce played a relatively mediocre set, taking a very long time to even get on stage and then banging away a few shabby hits like “Baby’s got Sauce” and “Cold Beverages” ? a song that really can’t go wrong lyrically, especially at a college.
Then, only an hour into the show, they got off stage and Mr. Love thought it would be best to do a few solo acoustic numbers to at least please the female audience with his sappy charm.
Then his back-up came on and they tried to pull it together again with “Rodeo Clowns,” which didn’t really work because most of the crowd was leaving by then.
I had always heard that these guys were excellent to see live. It’s a shame that it didn’t work out that way when they came to our campus.
However, during their second set I could have sworn that they teased the Grateful Dead tune “Franklin’s Tower,” which made the show for me.
Babcock can be reached at cbabcock@campustimes.org.
