Stuart’s Confusion Corner is going to get even more confusing Saturday night when sounds of the North Florida swamps rise from the stage of the Lyric Theatre. Walter Parks, a Jacksonville native now living in Savannah who left his lead guitarist role with Richie Havens after a decade of touring to form his own neo-Southern rock band, Swamp Cabbage, gives us “Swamp by Chandelier,” a concert of acoustic guitar accompaniment to Parks’ rough-edged vocals.
Parks has a quote from Judy Collins on his website: “Walter is a musical treasure, an artist of the highest caliber … I adore him.” He’s also got a fascinating bio, for a man still lining up with old Florida sensibilities.
The concert starts at 7 p.m. and he may make it an early night. (He’ll be opening for Dr. John in Ponte Vedra Sunday.)
Add “alt-country” to the neo-Southern rock label and you’ll find Drive-By Trucker at the top of the list.
They’re playing at Plaza Live in Orlando Oct. 10 in a tour promoting their new album English Oceans. Their 12th release, all but one of the 13 new songs were recorded in a two week-long session in 2013, and all were written by Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. It’s Cooley who’s getting a lot of the attention for the six cuts he composed himself, the most involvement he’s had with the group. The songs are about specific people, and the subjects are an odd lot: from political operative Lee Atwater to their late band member Craig Lieske, who died of a heart attack at the end of the 2013 tour.
“It can go from chain-saw rock-n-roll to very delicate pretty-sounding stuff,” says Cooley.
Plaza Live is located near Orlando’s living, breathing, restaurant- and hotel-filled downtown, and a short drive south of Winter Park.
In Melbourne, John Prine tickets are selling briskly for an Oct. 16 show at the King Center. Prine, a song-writing icon of American roots music, has had to fight neck cancer more than a decade ago and more recently lung cancer diagnosed in 2013.
For his fans, it’s all the more reason to rally around the 68-year-old Prine. At a recent sell-out concert in Minneapolis he had to apologize for his raspier-than-usual voice, promising it would abate after a few songs. It did. With luck, he’ll treat the Melbourne audience to a few favorites he’s been touring with, including my go-to smile-inducer, “Dear Abby.”
Prine will be joined by Sara Watkins, the delightful singer/songwriter and fiddle player who recently toured with Jackson Browne.
Boz Scagg’s appearance may still be on the down-low, but the man who won a Grammy for “Lowdown” back in 1975 is playing Nov. 6 at the Sunrise. In all, Scaggs has made seven albums, with the first, Silk Degrees, going platinum many times over. Scaggs has just released “A Fool to Care” which follows the 2013 album “Memphis” that Rolling Stone called “sublime.” That album reached No. 1 on the Billboard Blues Chart and made the Top 20 on the Billboard 200.
As the weather cools, optimism is reborn in the gardeners among us. Botanist Ginny Stibolt, who relocated from Maryland to Green Cove Springs near Jacksonville is coming to the Vero Beach Book Center to talk about her latest book, “The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape.”
Stibolt will speak in Vero at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11, but if you really want to make the most of her visit, consider her three-hour workshop on native plants at south Stuart’s Morgade Library on Saturday, Oct. 10. That’s on the Chastain campus of Indian River State College. The workshop is free but requires a reservation through the Cocoplum chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society: www.cocoplum.fnpschapters.org.
Riverside Theatre’s season opener, “Swinging on a Star,” tells the story of lyricist Johnny Burke. In advance of the Oct. 27 opening, the theater is presenting a week of Bing Crosby movies starting Oct. 12.
Burke wrote the words to many of the songs that made Crosby a huge star in the 1940s. It’s pretty clearly meant to be a refresher course for Crosby fans, and not an introduction: for a younger audience, the 2 p.m. matinees probably wouldn’t qualify for a dispensation from work. The films are free but require a reservation.
If you kicked yourself for not buying tickets to Monte Python greats John Cleese and Eric Idle when you heard Scott Simon’s interview with them on NPR, take heart: there were still seats left at press time for the performance next Friday, Oct. 9 at Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce.
