Category Archives: Loose Wheels Texas

Blues night at Loose Wheels Texas — 5 masters at work!

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All photos and very short story by Mary Jane Farmer — Click on the link below for big-gus-4-sax-1all photos.

October 21, 2016, brought together five blues bands at the premier live music venue of Grayson County (Texas) — Loose Wheels Texas. Along with the packed house and great music, there was a raffle to benefit the Grayson County Children’s Advocacy Center, and with all that together, nobody left feeling blue.

The line-up, in order, was Big Gus & Swampadelic with added guitar by Oliver White, Jason Elmore & Hoodoo Witch, Andrew Jr. Boy Jones with Kerrie Lepai sharing vocals, Mike Morgan & The Crawl, and Jim Suhler & Monkey Beat.

The quote of the night was “I don’t know who put this line-up together, but it is the best one ever.” Bands took no more than 15 minutes for one to break down and the other to set up, and that kept the pace at a very brisk clip, each band playing at least one hour.

And people in attendance were still talking about the special-ness of the whole Friday evening at another event on Sunday afternoon.

Keep up with all Loose Wheels Texas activities on their Website: LooseWheelsTexas.com, or here in the Scene In Town Live Music Calendar.

For all photos, click here — (Sorry, this photographer had to leave before Jim Suhler got on stage, and been told more than once that I missed one more great performance! I believe that!)

Big Gus & Swampadelic — Don’t fence them into one genre!

Short story and pix (click on link at the end of this story) by Mary Jane Farmer

Gus Samuelson

 
For more information on Big Gus’ songwriting style(s), pick up the January issue of Buddy Magazine.

Big Gus & Swampadelic have been around now about a year, in this incarnation, and yet none of the musicians are new to the music scene. Gus Samuelson led the band Shootin’ Doubles prior to changing his musical focus to what it is now… not genre specific, not formula specific, and not what everybody else is doing. Swampadelic features Bill Sallee on stand-up bass, Ric Denker on fiddle, Chad A. Ford on drums, Greg Waits on trombone, and Gus on guitar, lead vocals, and  sometimes washboard. Ford is also with the Dallas Cowboys drum line, Waits is with a jazz band, and Denker is the only remainder of Shootin’ Doubles besides Big Gus.

This band recently smoked the Loose Wheels Texas stage in Denison, with each song delivered showing just how come the band has been compared more than once with the likes of Doug Sahm, bringing surprises with every song. It was the premiere for Big Gus’ newest song, “In The Water,” an Americana blues number featuring, right now, just him on guitar and lyrics and Ford on drum thumpage. Introducing the night was a song swap between Gus and Ed Burleson, belting out songs in their own direction, mostly country as that is Burleson’s speciality.

Another of the uniqueness of this band is that they do no cover songs at all, only originals. Buddy Magazine is carrying a story in its upcoming January issue about Big Gus and his songwriting backgrounds and styles. This free magazine should be available in venues this weekend.

For more pix, click here

Swampadelic fronts Marcia Ball Band

Big Gus Samuelson

Story and pictures by Mary Jane Farmer

Friday night (2/10/12), the band Swampadelic opened the show at Loose Wheels Texas, in Denison, for the capacity crowd there also to see Marcia Ball. Big Gus Samuelson leads Swampadelic, a band that blends horns with fiddles and drums with bass, along with Gus’s lead guitar work and original songs. The outcome is a style of swamp-a-tonk blues that defys genre identification. Ric Denker, fiddler, will come out with a blues tune, with Greg on trombone adding accent, and then Greg will turn around and kick off a swamp-style country tune, Ric doing the accents. It often reverses. Through it, Gus picks the melody and a few asides on his guitar, while Bill Sallee keeps it moving on his 100-year-old stand-up bass. Drummer Chad Ford ties it all together with a style unique only to him.

Swampadelic plays again Thursday at Love & War in Texas (Plano) 8-10 p.m. (2-16-12), the next in the Lone Star Underground series.

Marcia Ball

Marcia Ball — well, what can you say. The queen of swamp boogie blues adds her own originals and her keyboards to her band of bass, horns, lead guitar, and drums. Marcia is a yearly-regular at Loose Wheels, and this time, like the others, packed the house. The true dignity of music is something that seldom can be identified in musicians, but Marcia Ball brings it to every stage she graces.

Apologies for there not being as many pictures of Marcia as there are of Swampadelic here, but the crowd was so big it was impossible to move from one side of the room to the other — a good sign of a successful night!

Swampadelic pictures, click here

Marcia Ball pictures, click here