When Sally Rose and her band Shagwüf take the stage for Fridays After Five at the Ting Pavilion on June 18, they’ll be the first musicians to play the venue since Jeff Tweedy and Wilco came to town on November 8, 2019.
Wait, the what pavilion?
A lot has changed in 19 months—including C’ville’s largest outdoor venue landing a new sponsor.
By the time the pandemic hit in spring of 2020, Sprint Pavilion General Manager Kirby Hutto had a full slate of bands lined up for the venue’s Friday night concert series. He was forced to put the dates on hold and hoped that 2021 would harmonize with live music.
Fortunately, it has. With Governor Ralph Northam lifting distancing, masking, and gathering restrictions as of May 28, in-person jams are back—mostly. For its part, Fridays returns at full tenor. Hutto has booked 12 of the weekly dates, starting with opener Shagwüf and headliner Chamomile and Whiskey. September 10 and 17 are the only remaining open slots.
“That’s where I started, with reaching back out to those [2020] artists and seeing if we could get them a date for 2021,” Hutto says. “But you also had to ask the question if they were still a band, had they been rehearsing and ready to play. It made it a little more complicated.”
Take Shagwüf, for instance. Sally Rose’s rock ‘n’ roll trio wasn’t scheduled to play Fridays in 2020, but her Sally Rose Band, with its somewhat softer, singer-songwriter vibe, was. Rose has been more focused on the rock outfit the last several years, though, and the switch made sense.
Shagwüf completed a record, Dog Days Of Disco, just prior to the pandemic and was forced to release the LP digitally. After going into strict lockdown for a few months, dispensing with hopes of touring, and tracking down COVID tests as often as possible, Rose and her bandmates eased back into practicing in person. The band came up with another album’s worth of tracks by October 2020 and put out an EP on Halloween—“the most politically-charged album we’ve made, which is saying a lot for Shagwüf,” Rose says.
Then, another coronavirus surge hit and forced the band back apart.
“There are so many layers to unpack,” Rose says. “Just being able to see each other again, fully vaccinated and being able to hug each other—that takes 20 minutes to process.”
Shagwüf was also recommended by friend and Chamomile and Whiskey frontman Koda Kerl.
Much like Rose and company, Chamomile and Whiskey took its lockdown licks but came out creating (with a new bass player). The band’s latest record, Red Clay Heart, dropped last fall, and Kerl says he’s ready to get out and play—even in front of a crowd that might be as interested in socializing as listening to every note.
“Fridays is a really unique audience. It’s a really broad group,” Kerl says. “When [Kirby] called us to do the first one in almost two years, we viewed it as a challenge. We’re lucky to have fans in town, and we think we can connect with the audience and get people down to the stage.” Rose and Kerl both said their bands would be riffing new material most people haven’t heard.
Other notable 2021 Fridays acts are headlining newcomers Ebony Groove—a Charlottesville High School pep band-cum-gogo-troupe playing July 2—and indie rockers Dropping Julia, due on July 9. Mainstay Erin & the Wildfire will bring power pop on July 16, and veterans The Skip Castro Band will anchor the lineup with uptempo blues-inflected rock on September 3.
Both of the latter bands will have played the pavilion under all three of its sponsored names. “That’s part of the puzzle, getting some of those familiar bands that are going to pop off the schedule, and rotating in the new names and some you haven’t seen in awhile,” Hutto says.
Still, it won’t be all vaccines and rainbows. While Northam’s lifted the mask mandate, public health guidelines are still in effect statewide. That means the vaccinated are welcome with open aisles—though encouraged to wear masks in crowds—while the non-vaccinated must wear masks in all venue areas.
The Ting Pavilion offers the standard post-COVID suggestions to keep problems to a minimum: Stay home if you’re sick or in contact with the sick, respect others, and know the concert organizers have done everything they can to prevent the spread of the virus. That includes installing a new HVAC system in the pavilion loo, regularly cleaning high-touch areas, and adding hand sanitizing stations and no-touch food and drink ordering and payment options.
Hutto admits getting back into the swing of things might be a challenge, but he expects the spacious Pavilion grounds to make folks comfortable.
Kerl says he doesn’t mind the restrictions, and Rose just wants to see her Charlottesville friends.
“During the lockdown, I wasn’t playing shows or touring—I wasn’t seeing people,” she says. “Just being able to play loud, fun rock-and-roll with my boys again, nothing touches it…I can’t even begin to imagine what it is going to feel like stepping onto that stage.”