Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale are highly respected musicians for whose music I am a big fan. But at their recent performance at the Variety Playhouse, I could not hear the music through the deafening wall of drum and bass. The drum and bass effects reminded me of the thunder noise that accompanies almost every change of scene in one of those adventure/video-game movies, an almost constant rumble of sub-woofer bass that made my chest vibrate and my ears hurt; a noise almost as painful, almost as bad as the one you feel stopped at a signal light next to a car playing one of those ultra-low sub-woofer stereos. Their bass player used an upright acoustic bass, but it was amplified in such a way that a person listening on a radio would certainly not be able to tell; the notes being broadcast were far lower than the low E on any human-operated bass instrument, upright or electric. Another casualty of this sound engineering willful negligence was the fiddle and table steel guitar. Their potential contribution to the music was blasted away by the bass and drums. By the way: I am a bass player, so I like to hear the bass...as a part of the music, not instead of it.
I am a big fan of the poetry of good song lyrics, and I know that Jim and Buddy (and Buddy's wife, Julie) write some good poetry, but you would not know it from Saturday's concert. Except for the few (at the most, maybe five) songs that Jim and/or Buddy did with acoustic guitar and without bass and drums, I could not understand the lyric meaning of anything they sang.
If you like Buddy and Jim's art, download or buy a CD of their music and listen to it in the kitchen while you make a nice dinner with someone you love. Skip the live show and save some money and a few decibels of your hearing from destruction.