Guitar club makes like Bob Dylan
USU’s Guitar Club played the music of American musician and poet Bob Dylan for an appreciative audience Saturday evening. Nearly 100 people filled the Lundstrom Student Center to participate in the Guitar Club’s ongoing Karaoke Concert Series. At the free show students performed Dylan’s influential music and encouraged audience members to participate.
At 8 p.m., the small stage was pre-set with a drum kit, two microphones and electric amplifiers, making it quick and easy to switch performers. During the show, a borrowed projector posted lyrics onto the wall for the audience and performers, so everybody could sing along.
Performers jumped onstage with mandolins, banjos, guitars and harmonicas, reflecting Dylan’s popular orchestrations. Some performers shouted out to friends in the audience, inviting them onstage to help out on a song. The crowd knew the choruses to many classics such as “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and weren’t too shy to sing along.
Ben Abbott, senior majoring in watershed management, played with two others early in the show. He asked the seated crowd to move their chairs closer to the stage and they quickly shuffled forward.
The show became a group experience from that point on. Abbott wore a harmonica in a harness around his neck so that he could play it together with his mandolin. He was accompanied by Mo Edwards, a senior in art, with her guitar and guitar club member Tanner Lex Jones on his electric bass.
Abbott commented that he’d learned the art of playing harmonica through his nose. Edwards immediately told the audience, “It sounds better when he does.”
Julia Mecham, junior in guitar education, performed “I Shall Be Released” and the audience dared not interrupt her voice, a unique mix of low contralto with falsetto lilts in between words.
Jones used his mouth and a microphone to wheeze through a chorus. The other performers onstage swatted uselessly for an invisible swarm of buzzing flies. Some in the audience covered their ears, laughing.
The show went on till almost 11 p.m., with memorable performances of “All Along the Watchtower” by guitar club member Eric Chipman, and “Hollis Brown” orchestrated with guitar and banjo.
The evening ended with the core members of USU’s guitar club playing “House of the Rising Sun”. Guitar performance major Mike Freu was invited onstage and provided a melodic electric guitar solo.
“You can’t beat Bob Dylan,” said freshman business major Sam Wilson as the show ended.
Previous Karaoke concerts focused on music of The Foo Fighters, Paul Simon, Mason Jennings and, most recently, Radiohead, which completely packed Lundstrom’s large meeting room with an estimated 300 or more in attendance.
The next event, called Live, Original, Local, will be March 27 in the Lundstrom Student Center, said Jordan Riley, president of USU Guitar Club. It will focus on local songwriting and performing. Riley invites performers to come with an original song to present for the first time for an audience. Admission will be free, but donations will be taken for the guitar club’s much-needed projector.
– brendon.butler@aggiemail.usu.edu