Nashville Music Blog

Photo by Steve Cross

See slideshows for more photos: Superdrag; Mic Harrison and the High Scores.

Sadly, The Spin couldn't grab a spot up front during Superdrag's set at Exit/In this Saturday. Despite all of our super-fan grandstanding, we were mingling when we should have been claiming our spot on the monitor line. Instead, our spot was ganked by a bunch of kids from the 'Nooga--and Dallas, Tampa and some other places--that had gone to the Knoxville show too, and you can't really argue with folks that will drive all over this great state of ours chasing one of our finest resources. This would be our only itsy bitsy wittle let down for the evening.

In a startling turn of events, we actually showed up on time to catch local openers The Privates tear through a set of tightly wound agit-pop. We actually got to hear the killer new tracks that they recorded with Battletapes in the car on the way over, so we were pretty pumped going into it, and the boys certainly did not disappoint. Dave Paulson's story about seeing Superdrag in '96 was especially poignant.

Mic Harrison and the High Scores; Photo by Steve Cross

The second band was Mic Harrison and the High Scores, and their only real problem was that they weren't Superdrag. Most nights we would have been into 'em, but we were not really in the mood to hear a more rough-and-tumble Travis Tritt, even if the lead guitarist was insanely, insanely awesome. Which he was.

Our only qualm with Superdrag was that 'Senator' Tom Pappas wasn't wearing leather pants, which, ya, is really nitpicky but there wasn't much else to complain about. They played for almost two hours, including most of the classics like "Do The Vampire," "Senorita" and "Sucked Out." All the new songs sounded phenomenal, and they closed out the night with our No. 1 super-jam "Destination Ursa Major." We couldn't have asked for a better night.