Tickets- Official Box Office

Russell Dickerson will be performing live at The Bluestone on Friday, February 17th, 2017

Doors for the show will open at 7pm

Opening artist: TBA

Tickets are $15

Tickets on-sale Friday, November 4th at 10am

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Josh Abbott Band

live at

 The Bluestone Thursday, November 16th

as part of their

“Until my Voice Runs Out tour”

Doors for the show will open at 7pm

Opening Artist: TBD

Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 day of show

PURCHASE HERE

RESERVED LOFT TABLE SEATING

RESERVED TABLE PURCHASE DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMISSION TICKETS TO THE SHOW.  

Admission tickets must be purchased separately

The loft is located on the second level of The Bluestone

• Loft Lower Tier: $250 (seats four people-no exceptions)
• Prime view of stage!
• Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
• Server
• Exclusive Private Bar access

• Loft Upper Tier: $200 (seats four people-no exceptions)
• Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
•  Server
• Private Bar Access
• May be Obstruction in View

*All Reserved tables located in the loft area

ALL SALES ARE FINAL

When Josh Abbott Band recorded “Ghosts” for its fourth album, Front Row Seat, Abbott expected to redo the vocals. The final chorus had some technical imperfections, and he figured he could improve on the performance once his heart settled down. Producer Dwight Baker, one-half of the Austinbased duo The Wind and The Wave, wouldn’t let Abbott retouch it.

“I was actually crying my eyes out during that last chorus, and that’s why there’s a couple of notes in the beginning of that section that don’t really explode like normal,” Abbott says. “Dwight was like, ‘We’re keeping that. That’s real.’”

Real is the operative word for Front Row Seat, a 16-track song cycle that represents the most ambitious and emotionally challenging project yet for JAB, a highly melodic six-piece ensemble that’s managed to keep a foot in both the Texas music scene and the national country world. The band won four times during the inaugural Texas Regional Radio Awards behind an upbeat brand of country that still leans on classic instrumentation – particularly banjo and fiddle – to effect a raucous, roof-raising attitude.

The band has lobbed three singles onto the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart – including “Oh, Tonight,” the first charted track to feature Grammy-winning Kacey Musgraves – and nabbed a Top 10 album with the 2012 release Small Town Family Dreams and reached No. 12 with the 2014 EP Tuesday Night.

But Front Row Seat steps beyond the band’s honky-tonk inclinations for a more personal journey as the album traverses the emotional course of Abbott’s first marriage and subsequent divorce. It was not his original intention to depict his private life in a public way, but as he wrote the songs for Front Row Seat, beginning before the split actually occurred, he naturally mined his emotional life for a set of songs that were profoundly honest and revealing. It was only as they began recording the material at Baker’s Matchbox Studios outside of Austin, that they realized they had the germ of a tangible plot.

“We started looking at the music we’d done and had a whole bunch of other songs that we really loved and we were like, ‘Man, we could put this together and make a really neat story out of it,” fiddler Preston Wait recalls. “Especially with the song ‘Front Row Seat,’ we basically just made it kind of like you’re watching a movie and it’s your front row seat to this life.”

Owing to that silver-screen character, JAB employed screenwriting technique by assembling the project with the five elements of plot structure: the exposition, or beginning; an inciting incident; the climax; a falling action (in this case, a breakup); and the resolution.

The story begins with “While I’m Young,” in which a college-aged Abbott lives a typically carefree existence, spending much of his discretionary income in bars and living for the moment, an ideal that’s captured authoritatively in the anthemic “Live It While You Got It.” As the album progresses, he meets a woman who commands his attention for more than one evening, finding himself by track 7, “Crazy Things,” mulling what it is that would make a woman who’s dang-near perfect fall for someone so flawed.

By the time the album concludes, his once-ideal relationship has turned sour, and the two are no longer one. The fracture becomes apparent through the resignation of “Born To Break Your Heart,” and he discovers in “Ghosts” that all the memories that once lived with such passion and revelry continue to haunt his memory, taunting him with whispers of a past he can never reclaim. As Front Row Seat closes with “Anonymity,” Abbott sings a spare dirge with acoustic guitar and fiddle, fantasizing that he could return to the start of the relationship and live it out right.

Midland LIVE at The Bluestone on Saturday, November 17, 2018!

*Opening Artist: Desure

*Doors for the show will open at 7PM

*Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 day of show

Ticket On-Sale July 13th, 2018 at 10AM! 

With all the chest-thumping going on in Nashville today, where bluster and swagger have replaced heart and soul, you half expect some of country music’s male stars to be sporting bruises. Which is what makes Midland, a trio of friends based in Dripping Springs, Texas, so undeniably refreshing. Made up of singer Mark Wystrach, lead guitarist Jess Carson and bass player Cameron Duddy, Midland is the embodiment of Seventies California country, all smooth Eagles harmonies and heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics. Their songs are intoxicating, sung with the twang of George Strait.

And it’s impossible to resist.

Now, after endearing themselves to fans with the hit radio single “Drinkin’ Problem” and a self-titled EP, Midland unveil their full-length debut, On the Rocks (Big Machine Records).

A collection of 13 tracks all written or co-written by Midland – the guys took their name from a Dwight Yoakam song – On the Rocks excels at setting a mood, transporting the listener to another place and time. It’s an album made for wide-open skies, endless deserts and wondering where the road is going to take you next.

“Drinkin’ Problem,” written with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, who produced the album with Dann Huff, reclaims the drinking song for classic country music, making it less about an endless party and more about self-medicating. “They call it a problem, I call it a solution / just sitting here with all my grand illusions,” sings Wystrach, evoking the best booze ballads of both Gary Stewart and Merle Haggard, two of the trio’s chief influences.

“Make a Little,” a rollicking ditty, is more optimistic, soaring with the brotherly harmonies of Wystrach, Duddy and Carson and a timely message: “There’s just not enough love in the world.” The rapid-fire lyrics embody the clever wordplay that is unique to country music – “we should make a little, generate a little / maybe even make the world a better place a little” – and also nod to Alabama, another country band that helped spark a revolution in the genre.

Midland hearken back to a time when an artist’s personal style – colorful suits, tailored denim and well-worn hats – dovetailed with the music. And they tip their hats to other groundbreaking artists throughout On the Rocks.

The kick-back and get-high ode “Altitude Adjustment” name-checks John Denver, the majestic “Nothin’ New Under the Neon” sounds like vintage Eddie Rabbit, and the glorious “At Least You Cried” channels Dwight Yoakam. By album’s end, the band 2 returns to the Eagles, recalling their famous intro to “Seven Bridges Road,” with the closing “Somewhere on the Wind.”

“On the Rocks is a confluence of our musical tastes and our reverence for classic country,” says Duddy, whose wife, photographer Harper Smith, shoots all of the group’s stylish photos.

“This record is truly a nod to the time period we are influenced by,” says Carson, a Pacific Northwest native, “and is an effort to bring that sound and that pageantry back to the forefront.”

“We write with a very visual storytelling approach. We paint that big picture and go to that place,” says Wystrach. “Where is this story going? Let’s paint it.”

“Electric Rodeo,” with its plaintive piano, sweeping strings and high-in-the-saddle chorus, is a prime example of the “picture” the band talks about creating. And “Check Cashin’ Country,” a solo composition by Carson, stands as the band’s true-life road diary: the tale of a country-rock band trying to find time to sleep as they hustle from gig to gig, barely making enough money to put gas in the tank. It’s the country equivalent of Seger’s “On the Road.”

Midland first came together at Duddy’s wedding in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the three members ended up jamming onstage at the rehearsal dinner.

“It was this serendipitous chain of events, and it was the best week ever,” says Wystrach, who, despite his hippie persona, was actually raised on an Arizona cattle ranch. “By the end, we knew the three of us had amazing chemistry.”

“Midland isn’t manufactured,” says Duddy, born in California. “We are three real friends who stumbled upon making music together.”

Whether they intended it or not, Midland are filling a void in country, with songs that run the gamut from lush Urban Cowboy anthems to loose campfire sing-alongs. Putting their own spin on a classic sound, they’re making something old relevant again.

“We are a band,” says Carson, declaratively. “That’s a big part of the spirit of what we do, that group experience and camaraderie.”

Says Wystrach, “We’ve poured our hearts and souls into writing and making these songs and are extremely proud of what we’ve been able to create.”

With On the Rocks, Midland have captured a sound decades in the making that is just right for today.