Mountain Jam Festival
By Matthew Toledo - 9/4/2000
Athens musicians know Chillicothe, Ohio as the home of the Recording Workshop. But that may change as a new music festival scheduled for the 22nd and 23rd of September strives to become a southeastern Ohio music tradition.
The Mountain Jam music festival is the brainchild of two musican entrepreneurs and Chillicothe natives, Bill Rhoads and Zach Scott. Zach Scott is a married electrician, father, and all around music fan. Bill Rhoads co-founded the Southern Ohio Arts & Entertainment Inc. Both men are members in the band Soul Cypher, which will be premiering on day two of the festival at 4 PM.
|
Bill Roades describes Soul Cypher's style as, "a mixture of funk, jazz, blues and hip-hop."
Melvin B. Strange of idiotpress.com booked the entertainment for the event. Chuck Queen of Cosmic Hermit Productions will be the stage manager. Lastly, Shawn Coppell will be running sound and lights. Shawn is also known for his work with the Camp Buzz festival held each year near Portsmouth, Ohio.
|
The two-day Mountain Jam festival features overnight camping and port-o-potties. As with most outdoor music festivals, glass bottles and pets are highly discouraged since no one likes to step in pet poop or broken glass. Or, worse case scenario, you step on glass and then on poop. Either way, you'd feel pretty poopie if you stepped in anything besides grass, water, or mud.
The lineup features a fairly diverse bill encompassing many different musical genres. When questioned about the scope of the lineup Bill Rhodes stated, "As far as the diversity of bands, that is true. The flow of the shows should be smooth, you'll see on Friday and early Saturday many ‘jam-groove' bands --for lack of a better term-- and late Saturday is when the harder rocking bands take stage." He went on to say that the event's headlining act, Voodoo 101 "seems to be able to do both groove and rock."
|
The first Night's lineup is fairly short but powerful and features an ambient experimental band from Columbus known as the Moon Dance Experiment and a "straight up pop rock band"
Melvin B. Strange describes day two of the event as starting "kinda subdued." That's probably not a bad idea considering many people may be nursing hangovers. Acoustic performer Eric Zielinski will start the concert followed by Columbus based jam band, Farmhouse. Soul Cypher is next on the bill followed by yet another Columbus jam band, Qunah Parker. Mothman will finish off the mellow portion of the show with an acoustic set.
"This is where we see a transition in the musical styles," States Melvin, "Vile brings their heavy modern rock edge to the stage." Headlining the event is Voodoo 101.
Voodoo 101, a staple at Chillicothe's Stardust Lounge has a new CD in the works. They have an alternative rock influenced sound fronted by a talented female vocalist, part time actress and mom. Fun factoids about the band include the fact that everyone in the band has worked at a strip club at one point in time. Their latest CD was paid for entirely with money they've made from liver performances and was mastered by Motion Digital studios here in Athens, Ohio.
Sound clips of several of the bands can be found on this site.
Tickets are available at The Sound Exchange in Lancaster and on-line at the Mountain Jam web site and at FrogNet.
