Vicki Mayowski on The Avett Brothers
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I’ve been an Avett Brothers fan for years. A good friend clued me into their music a few summers ago, taking me to see them play a free concert at a local park. After that show, I was hooked and I saw them every time they came to town. Each year they’d play a bigger venue, but in early 2011 something big happened to the band that elevated them to another level: the Grammys. They performed alongside Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons that night, and I know I wasn’t the only Avett fan watching with an almost parental pride, all the while wondering how this would change my favorite band.
My answer came quickly: that May, the Avett Brothers played a sold-out show in a 5,000 seat outdoor amphitheatre in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Not even a year earlier, they’d been relegated to playing an old roller rink that might have held 1,000, jokingly introducing their songs with “Now this next one is a couples skate.” The contrast was crazy. I went to the concert with my sister Justine, who I’d accidentally converted to fandom when the eject button on my car’s CD player broke with an Avett Brothers mix stuck inside at the start of a 3-hour road trip. We went straight for the general admission pit and grabbed pretty sweet spots about 3 rows back. As we waited for showtime, we ran into our two favorite ladies we saw at every Avett concert we went to; old enough to be our mothers, they’d told me that following the Avetts on tour was their mid-life crisis cure, and had followed them from Bonnaroo all the way to the Netherlands. But we also met a lot of first-timers, Avett newbies who were amped for the music to start.
When the Avett Brothers took the stage, it was a whirlwind of awesome. The brothers started out with audience sing-a-long “Go to Sleep,” cranking the energy up high and leaving it there as they pounded through a setlist of songs that felt as though it had been written especially for me. Though the crowd was triple the size of their last show, they never seemed nervous or unsure of themselves. When Scott Avett wiped his sweaty face with a rag and threw it into the crowd, Justine caught it, which was simultaneously the best moment ever and completely disgusting. As always, the show went by too fast, and before long we were cheering for an encore. They ended with their most a frenetic stomp-and-holler tune, “Talk on Indolence,” that had the pit jumping in time together. It left us drained but exhilarated, and as we left we watched large group hugs forming, and overheard people say it was best show they’d ever seen.
There’s a somewhat sad nostalgia that comes along with watching your band become everyone else’s. I know I’ll probably never see the Avett Brothers in an intimate setting again. But that night in 2011, there was also a overload of joy, as strangers got way too close to each other and danced to their shared favorite tunes. With a new record on the horizon in the new year, there’ll most likely be even more fans next time around. I’m prepared to brave the crowds, because I’ll be following the Avett Brothers wherever their career takes them.
Vicki Mayowski: accountant by day, wannabe writer by night. She blogs and tweets.
