Velvet Truckstop

There comes a moment at every SXSW. Your feet hurt. You can’t bear to over hear one more name-dropping conversation or see one more person glued to their iPhone while a band is killing it a few feet away. You are tired of wading through the mess on 6th Street. You are just plain tired, only averaging about four hours of sleep a night. That’s when you need something to remind you why you’re here, and I couldn’t have asked for better medicine than Velvet Truckstop. Crammed into a sweaty Nuno’s, VT laid down rock and roll salvation of the highest order. With their lofty electric blues, driving southern rock jams and echoes of The Band and Wilco, they gave me, and several others, the will to dance down the last hours until closing time. Readers, you need to get acquainted with Velvet Truckstop. These cats are cut from some genuine cloth, the kind of band that pulls you through the rough times and sends you out into the night with a romping “Hallelujah!” Guitarist Dorsey Parker was especially tapped into something huge, making it look so damn easy but one glance at his fingers moving across his axe left your head spinning. They got songwriting skills that bow towards the classic, such as the asphalt-scarred “Carolina Way,” where Jamie Dose sings about the “broken dreams and guitar strings” that litter the highway while you’re chasing a dream. But you keep pushing on regardless, because you believe in what you’re doing. If that’s not what SXSW is ultimately all about, then I don’t know what is.