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MUSIC

Former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello is at Birchmere under the moniker The Nightwatchman. His album World Wide Rebel Songs isn't as headbanger-friendly as Rage's self-titled debut, but he's still doing the heady politics thing. 7:30 p.m. $25.

The Black Cat celebrates its 18th birthday tonight with a stage full of local bands; The Max Levine Ensemble headlines. 8 p.m. on the mainstage, $5. Backstage is Party Lights, everyone's favorite girl-group and garage dance party. 9:30 p.m., $5.

HR from Bad Brains will play an acoustic set tomorrow night at The Fridge. The event, a fundraiser for a documentary about the musician himself, will be hosted by Chuck Treece from McRad. Thomas Blondet DJs. 6 p.m.

One of the best outdoor Labor Day weekend options may be the 23rd Annual Blues Festival at Carter Barron on Saturday. The event, hosted by the D.C. Blues Society, includes a musical instrument petting zoo for kids; guitar, harmonica, and vocal workshops; and an after-party for $12. Noon, free admission.

If you're a regular Arts Desk reader, you know we're fans of Volta Bureau, the dance music production team of Will Eastman, Micah Vellian, and Outputmessage. Tomorrow night, the ensemble plays a release party for its single "Hope," alongside local DJs Jay Simon, Chris Nitti, and Lxsx Frxnk. 10 p.m. at U Street Music Hall. $10.

Brazilian singer Luisa Maita is back for another show at Bohemian Caverns. If you missed her in November, consider rectifying that. 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Sunday, $15.

SKATEBOARDING

Pull your "Skateboarding is Not a Crime" t-shirt out of the bottom drawer for tonight's Thrasher magazine photo show at The Fridge. It's a one-night-only event in celebration of the skater mag's 30th anniversary. 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Free.

THEATER

The annual Page-to-Stage Festival kicks off tomorrow at Kennedy Center. All weekend, more than 40 local theater troupes will host open readings and rehearsals of works in progress. Admission is gloriously free. Check out the schedule on the Kennedy Center's website.

FILM

Tomorrow, THEARC hosts the East of the River Film Festival, a showcase of independent short films by local filmmakers. It's free all day from noon to 10 p.m.

You could probably spend the next couple days watching Irish films at the National Gallery of Art. This weekend brings showings of the 1952 comedy The Quiet Man and 1959's This Other Eden. Free.

SWIMMING

Brightest Young Things hosts its last pool party of the summer. The theme: back to school. Noon to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Capitol Skyline Hotel. $15.

To read Brent Burton's review, go here.

Friday

• State Radio, Big D and the Kids Table. 9:30 Club. $20.

• Justin Trawick. Strathmore. $10 in advance, $12 at door.

• Christian Tetzlaff Trio. Wolf Trap. $35.

• Powder Kegs, The Torches. The Red & The Black. $8.

• Juniper Lane, Melodime. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12.

• US Royalty, Phil Ade, Poor But Sexy. Rock and Roll Hotel. $12.

• Curbfeelers. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• Screen Vinyl Image, Last Tide, Dead Leaf Echo, Ceremony. Velvet Lounge. $8. 21+.

• Mid-Atlantic Band Battle: Commodore Koko, B-Film Extras, Dub City Renegades, Elements of Addiction, HeLo, Redshift. Jammin Java. $10.

• Laura Tsaggaris, Paul Michel, Bellman Barker. Black Cat mainstage. $10.

• KC Jazz Club: Jonathan Batiste Quintet. Kennedy Center Terrace Gallery. $15.

• Boys Will Be Boys, Escape the Armada, We Have the Summer, Tomorrow's Ours, Rosy Likes Red, What A Night. Jaxx. $6 in advance, $10 day of (or $8 with flyer.)

Saturday

• Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Beethoven & Mozart with a Twist. Strathmore. $25-$80.

• Eric Brace & Last Train Home, Peter Cooper. Wolf Trap. $18.

• Honor By August, The Influence, Jones Street Station. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12.

• V.P.R., Wake Up Cold, Stout, Common Enemy, Tsuchigumo. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10.

• Rival Tribe. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• T-Model Ford, The Shirks. Velvet Lounge. $12. 18+.

• Wild Beasts, Still Life Still. Black Cat mainstage. $13.

• KC Jazz Club: Carl Allen-Rodney Whitaker Project. Kennedy Center Terrace Gallery. $25.

• Nouveau Riche. DC9. Free before 10 p.m., $8 after. 21+.

• Seasons After, Bitter, Seelow Hights, Ethereal Genocide. Jaxx. $10.

Sunday

• Gretel. IOTA Club & Cafe. $10.

• School of Rock: Best of Season Show. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10.

• Wolfs Blues Jam: Hot Rods and Old Gas, Hot Roddess Lisa Lim. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• lowercaseletters, mgl. Velvet Lounge. $8. 21+.

• Beth Rinaldo, Scott Holland & Friends, The Honey Dewdrops. Jammin Java. $8.

• Off With Their Heads, The Scare, Tiny Bombs. Black Cat backstage. $10.

• Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. $45.

• Electronic Saviors Benefit Concert – Industrial Music to Cure Cancer: Jim Semonik, DJ Kangal, DJ Blue Vampire, DJ Noir, Cyber Strukture, Xuberx, Sonik Foundry, Boole, Interface, Deviant UK, I:Scintilla, Ego Likeness, Terrorfakt. Jaxx. $15 in advance, $20 day of.

Justin Trawick photo by Thomas Van Veen Photography, via MySpace.

To read more of Aaron Leitko's review of Measure, go here.

Frontman Jeremy Whitman, a philosophy and social policy graduate student at George Washington University, wrote the song when he was 17, basing it on his own experiences. "There's a lot of teenage-y suburban influence ... It was just hormones raging. Now I think, 'Were things ever that bad?' And no, they weren't.'"

To read more of Ben Westhoff's review and listen to "Just Die Young," read this week's One Track Mind.

• Haiti Benefit Concert for the Red Cross Relief Effort: Brother Shamus, The Walkways, No Second Troy, Boxcar Collision, Bobby Thompson and more. IOTA Club & Cafe. Donations based.

• Sockets Records Showcase (with The Cornel West Theory, Hume, Imperial China, Buildings and Big Gold Belt). Black Cat. $12.

• Mike Terpak Blues Explosion. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• Escape the Armada, Apartment 15, The Bourbon Devils, Cerca Trova, The Rythers, Better Red Than Dead, Irresponsible, LA.TD and Allday Mori. Jaxx. $8 in advance, $10 at door.

• King Giant, Tone, Gifts from Enola and Dark Sea Dream. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10.

• National Symphony Orchestra: Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" (Fri.-Sat.). Kennedy Center Concert Hall. $20-$85.

• Ra Ra Rasputin, Bellflur and Savoir Adore. Velvet Lounge. $8. 21+.

Saturday

• Gloria Kim and Michael Butler. Jammin Java. $8.

• Down N Dirty Fest: The Audition, Sparks the Rescue, The Getaways, We Have the Summer and more. Jaxx. $13 in advance, $15 day of.

• Two Tears, Eyes of the Killer Robot and The Electricutions. Black Cat. $10.

• Scott Ramminger and The Crawstickers. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• Laura Tsaggaris with Dawn Landes and the Hounds. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12.

• Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. Music Center at Strathmore. $25-$80.

Sunday

• A Night With Thievery Corporation. 9:30 club. $40.

• XMC and The Formers. Black Cat. $8.

• Robert Klein. Birchmere. $35.

• Blues Jam with Hot Rods and Old Gas and Hot Roddess Lisa Lim. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• People Under the Stairs, Grieves with Budo and Kenan Bell. Rock and Roll Hotel. $15.

Taking a look at the Numero Group label's new Light: On the South Side release, Jason Cherkis also took to some tippling. At the suggestion of the label's co-founder, Ken Shipley, he dug into the hefty book-and-LP set—featuring songs and Michael L. Abramson's photographs from Chicago's mid-’70s funk-blues scene—with some Crown Royal and can of Schlitz. Cherkis writes:

I realize that this exercise is almost racist: the Crown Royal, the Schlitz, and the Kools are all stereotypes of a certain experience, a certain scene. But there’s a point: They are all bridges to Pepper’s. So I stick with it, gulp down the cheap beer, turn the pages, and admire the men with Eddie Murray sideburns and the pimp scepters. In a few years, crack would take over and the blues would start to sound a lot like a Disney version. I don’t see anyone lavishing a box set on the House of Blues.

I want to keep staring at Abramson’s pictures.

Johnny Pepper opened the original Pepper’s in 1956 with a $500 loan from Ford Motors. He played host to the Chess record label’s masters and the wannabes, the harp heads and the guitar gods never to find a flock. The joint changed locations, grew a theme for Mondays called “Blue Monday,” and its owner eventually joined up with a harmonica player/label owner/drug dealer. The club stayed true, taking in feminism, funk, and a killer house band all within its small dance floor.

Read the full article here.

If having your first name added to the name of your band is a bellwether for burgeoning celebrity, then you could say 22-year-old Davy Knowles has arrived. A British blues guitarist with a soulful baritone, Knowles has sort of an Stevie Ray Vaughan-meets-Richie Havens thing going on. His band, Back Door Slam Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam, released an album earlier this summer called Coming Up For Air. Produced by Peter Frampton, the record is very much pop with a blues sensibility, rather than the other way around.

In many ways, Knowles & BDS sounds like the younger brother of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals; both jam-ish blues-pop bands with lead singers who have great pipes and love to show them off—the main difference being that Knowles plays guitar, and Potter plays keyboards your heartstrings.

Speaking of Knowles’s weapon-of-choice, the dude flat-out shreds. For guitar nerds, this will be well worth the drive to Alexandria.

DAVY KNOWLES & BACK DOOR SLAM, TONIGHT @ BIRCHMERE, 7:30 P.M. $20

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

Local boy (well, Virginian) Justin Jones opened with a set that was more modern country-pop than throwback country-folk, but that gave way to the barn-burning bonhomie of the Felice Brothers, an outfit of Yankee good ol’ boys from upstate New York. The Felice Brothers honed their chops in juke joints and subway stations and recorded their first two albums in a chicken coop, so they seemed out a bit out of place on the Merriweather stage. But it was clear right away that we were to play by their rules. Everybody was out of their seats by the second song, clapping and singing along to “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” “Run Chicken Run,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Two Hands”—struggling all the while to match the energy of the band, whose members would run in circles, crash into each other, and take turns dancing on top of the kick drum (occasionally whaling on the cymbals with a washboard).

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals assumed a more formal stage presence—with the mic stands adorned with rose bouquets and Potter herself fit for the prom in a pale-gold gown—but their set was no less boisterous. Grace and the Nocs, who intersect with American roots music at the corner of Raitt and Joplin (oft-cited analogs, but undeniable ones), played a mostly uptempo set culminating in the title track(s) from the band’s first major-label (re-)release—a high-energy organ jam bookended by an a cappella intro/outro that would be called gospel if its lyrics didn’t eschew God and the Bible in favor of Water. Call it green gospel. Did I mention the band’s from Vermont?

Poor Sam Beam (aka Iron and Wine) came on next to play what was effectively an intermission between two halves of a hootenanny. Dressed neatly in khakis a white button-down—which, combined with his trademark beard, made him look like Happy Gilmore’s caddy—Beam seemed a little embarrassed to follow Potter’s dam-bursting water anthem with his gossamer lullabies. The result was a lot of grace notes and a chest-voice croon that gave whispery cradlesongs like “Upward Over the Mountain” and “The Trapeze Swinger” a more soulful presence in lieu of a backing band. (Where are the Calexico boys when you need them?)

Levon and his entourage—among them his daughter, Amy, and fellow Dylan collaborator Larry Campbell (who produced Helm’s new album, Electric Dirt)—came on next to remind the audience where all that second-wave folk stuff had come from. In the night’s only real disappointment, Levon declined to sing, per orders from his doctor. But, as City Paper Web editor and fellow concertgoer Ted Scheinman aptly put it, “Thank God for Larry Campbell.” Campbell led the band (which also featured Levon’s Midnight-Ramble horn section and E Street Band/Conan O’Brien multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Vivino) in a set that included four Band classics—“Long Black Veil,” “The Shape I’m In,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Chest Fever”—the last featuring Campbell in a spine-chilling guitar imitation of Garth Hudson’s diabolical organ intro. With Levon’s vocal chords out of commission, they stayed away from songs such as “The Weight” and “Ophelia,” a wise and respectful choice (to sing “The Weight” without Levon would have been sacrilege, even with his blessing).

Levon kept time on drums and played a bit of mandolin, but his primary function at the Revue was to preside over the celebration of a tradition he and his contemporaries helped shape. In the middle of his set, the 69-year-old icon took a breather while his daughter, Campbell, and Campbell’s wife Teresa Williams sang a three-part harmony to the Grateful Dead ballad “Attics of my Life.” It was, perhaps, the unlikely highlight of the set; reverly turned to reverence as the trio sang, “I have spent my life seeking all that’s still unsung / Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see / When there was no strings to play, you played to me.” In the shadows offstage, Levon was sitting with his eyes closed, rolling his head in slow circles, smiling.

Old Crow Medicine Show closed the six-hour circus with a typically charismatic hoedown, frontmen Ketch Secor and Willie Watson filling the song breaks by yammering back and forth in a schtick that harks back to the snakeoil salesmen from whom they drew their name. The Felice Brothers, who had been touring with Old Crow all summer, slipped on and off stage intermittently throughout the set, which reached a pitch with heel-stompers “Shack #9” and “Minglewood Blues.”

The restless ticketholders had left the back half of the pavilion empty by the time the concert was approaching its eighth hour, and those who remained pushed in toward the stage. Before the musicians closed with “Wagon Wheel”—very much the missing link of post-WWII folk, co-written by Old Crow and Bob Dylan—the day of solidarity culminated as Ian Felice joined Secor at the mic for the slow-paced ballad “We’re All In This Together.” One sensed they were not just singing to their bandmates.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user PZAO.

There is a whole genre’s worth of performers who draw large crowds throughout the American South (and parts of the North) and who sell a sizeable amount of music, but rarely get mainstream media press, rock website attention, or airplay on stations that program for younger folks. I’m talking Chitlin Circuit soul aka Southern Soul. As these artists occasionally draw from a related 12 bar song form, the promoter is billing the traveling festival hitting Showplace Arena, 14900 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Upper Marlboro, Maryland Friday night March the 13th at 8 as “The Blues is Alright Tour,” and locally as “The Capitol Blues Festival.” However, do not expect beer commercial style guitar heroics.

With a roster featuring Clarence Carter, Marvin Sease, Latimore, Mel Waiters, and Roy C., the focus will be on earthy lyrics about drinking, womanizing, hanging out, and memories of good ol’ days. While the artists can get raunchy, Marvin Sease does “The Candy Licker,” Mel Waiters has the “Get It On Song,” and veteran performer Clarence Carter does “Strokin,’” all of the performers also have some storytelling lyrics that work thanks to their gospel-rooted vocals and upbeat keyboard, bass and drum backing rhythms.

One of my fave albums in the genre is Mel Waiters’ 2006 Throwback Days. Waiters’ warm syllable-stretching beautifully conveys the melancholy message of the title cut, while he gets raspier on the upbeat “Friday Night Fish Fry.” I talked briefly on the phone with Waiters.

WCP: So you have a new album coming out?

MW: Yes, the single came out last week. I produced it myself. I wrote some songs myself and did some with others including Robert Conerly [He co-wrote “Friday Night Fishfry”].

WCP: Where did you record it?

MW: I have my own facility.

WCP: Where are you from?

MW: Born and raised in San Antonio.

WCP: So you’ve done some d.j.’ing?

MW: I did radio for 9 years before becoming an artist. Now I have a weekly program called “Friday Night Fish Fry” that’s syndicated online [www.southernsoulradio.com].

WCP: Your songs all have lyrics that resonate.

MW: I take a lot of time in selecting material because it has to represent me.

WCP: Who are some singers that you admire?

MW: The late Johnny Taylor and Tyrone Davis.

WCP: How would you describe your sound? How is it different from others?

MW: My forte is a Southern soul thing with a blues twist in the lyrics. My production is r’n’b and its danceable. Every now and then I do a blues cover like Z.Z. Hill’s “Bump and Grind.”

WCP: Do you wish you could reach other audiences, like blues-rock ones and others?

I did a blues cruise. That showed me I could reach that audience. I try to mix it up.

WCP: Some of it is marketing. It doesn’t always seem like your label is reaching out.

MW: There’s no artist development and money put into promotion by record companies any more, so I’ve been saving my money to make my budget and promote Mel Waiters to where I wanna be. It’s just another level I want to go to. I feel like I have a 10 or 12 year run left in this business and I want to give it a shot.