DISCLAIMER

"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield"
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1833

"live deep and suck out all the marrow of life"
- Henry David Thoreau, 1845

"Some guys, they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up,
And go racin' in the streets"
- Bruce Springsteen, 1977

"...to the heart, there's no time for you to waste.
You won't find your precious answers now
by staying in one place"
- Frank Turner, 2009

"The best things in life aren't things
They're living and breathing"
- Michael Franti , 2011

"Well, this world is ours while we are in it
Grab a hold of my hand
And we can take it
Together, our lives are just one passing minute
It could be gold, if we make it"
- Jay Buchanan, 2012

"We've got these times of our lives
Let's take this time to let it show
'cause these are ours.
These are ours!"
-Justin Furstenfeld, of Blue October 2013

"I owned every second that this world could give,
I saw so many places, the things that I did"
- Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, 2014

"No cash in the bank, no paid holidays
All we have, all we have is
Gas in the tank, maps for the getaway
All we have, all we have is time"
- Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, 2014



All written content and photos by Rob Fulfer unless otherwise indicated.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Shall we gather at The Tabernacle

Saturday, November 22, 2008 Our road trip to Atlanta this past weekend was way too brief, but it was enjoyable. After checking into the Embassy Suites downtown and partaking in the manager's free cocktail reception in the lobby (woo-hoo!), we hooked up with Ashlee's long-time friend, Terry, for dinner at Spoon, a small Thai restaurant just off the GA Tech campus. Excellent food and fun. We couldn't talk Terry into going to the concert with us just down the street at The Tabernacle and that's too bad because he missed a pretty good show. There were four bands playing with one of our favs, Augustana, slated third to play and the show started at 7 PM - we arrived at around 8:30 - plenty of time to see Augustana's full set, right? Uhh, wrong??? They were more than halfway thru their set when we arrived and it was only an hour and a half into the show?? Granted, the two bands before them we had never heard of but what did they play? Two songs each?? It was a bit of a disappointment that the one time we plan to be "fashionably late" to a concert it bites us in the butt. On the bright side, we were able to see a half-dozen or so songs performed by Augustana including a nice acoustic version of "Sweet and Low" and a rousing cover of The Traveling Wilburys' "Handle Me With Care." It takes guts and talent to pull that one off and they did it flawlessly. They closed their set with another strong cover of the Delta blues-rock classic, "Baby, Please Don't Go." As we waited on OneRepublic to take the stage to close the show, we wondered around The Tabernacle and were very impressed with this venue. It's a beautiful old historic building with tons of general admission seating on the second and third floors plus the open first floor in front of the stage. Acoustics and sight-lines were good and the location in downtown Atlanta next to the Olympic Park was safe and convenient. We will definitely add this gem to our collection of places we would come to again. Back to the music. OneRepubic is a fairly new band birthed literally from the internet and MySpace. They have two songs that we had heard, so we weren't super-familiar with them. Reviews of their live performance were positive, so we were hoping for the best and actually got a pretty good show. The really surprising thing was that the 5-piece band is actually much more musically-talented than their poppy radio-friendly hits - "Apologize" and "Stop and Stare" - truly indicate. Lead singer, Ryan Tedder, has a strong voice with decent range along with great piano self-accompaniment. The most interesting aspect of the band was their use of instruments like the cello, the xylophone and the Spanish guitar that are not usually associated with a "rock band." While The Tabernacle is a fairly small venue, these guys might actually be more appreciated in an ever smaller more intimate venue (perhaps unplugged) to truly experience these instruments being used in their songs and not somewhat drowned out by rock-concert standard maxed-out vocals, guitar and drums. Overall, they put on a solid performance with good energy and flow that was worth checking out.