They say you can’t step in the same river twice, and that is also true of a club. Well, at least the V Club if you’re The Wooks.
Lexington, Ky., singer/songwriter C.J. Cain and his wild bunch of Americana newgrassers, The Wooks had been booked to play the V Club back on March 20, 2020 when Covid put the air brakes on the music touring industry. That prolonged pause gave the nationally-known Huntington live music venue the time and space needed to do an extreme – and much needed – upgrade and makeover of the club that has hosted everyone from The Avett Brothers and Insane Clown Posse to Clutch and Jason Isbell.
Re-birthed as The Loud, the club was barely recognizable Friday night to Cain, whose Wooks arguably witnessed one of the wildest nights in the club’s history back on Dec. 30, 2016 when the band (then armed with ace fiddler Jesse Wells) and fresh off of a year in which they won the band contest at RockyGrass, practically burned the club down. That epic night, of which I bore witness, featured a solo set from then meteor-rising Kentucky wonder Tyler Childers, who notched two epic back-to-back sold-out nights at the club. Cain recalled that night packed to the gills with a kinetic, rowdy mass of humanity that knew the words to every arrowhead-sharp song Tyler wrote.
While the Covid threat waves over the past couple years have made us all wonder if we would make it through and what shape we’d would be in if we did, survey says that both the club and The Wooks have emerged seemingly healthier and stronger. And damn sure still standing.
After nearly two years, the club and The Wooks got back together Friday both with a better version of themselves. Patrick Guthrie’s long-running live music venue is barely recognizable having
exorcised the demons (or whatever else) was living in that V-Club carpet. There’s a swirled concrete floor, a new bar complete with fresh taps of locally-brewed Bad Shepherd beers, a new digital sound system, expanded Biergarten outside, and Chattanooga, Tenn.-based mural artist J.W. Butts has worked his weird artistic wonders in new bathrooms, and a massive mural between the bar and the stage. Butts will be taking his work out to the streets and the exterior later this year. This past week, for the first time since the pandemic began, the club announced its most packed string of national touring shows that continue next weekend with WV touring all-stars William Matheny, El Dorodo (some of Tyler Childers’ backing band masquerading as the world’s coolest classic country act), and Massing. Looking down that long list of wildly eclectic shows (from hip hop and heavy metal, to country, bluegrass and blues), it’s hard to not feel the electric energy of normalcy blooming on a poster.
Fittingly, The Wooks rolled in tanned, rested and ready to take a new grass flight in their steam-powered aeroplane. The release date of the band’s much-anticipated third release, Flyin’ High (their first since 2018) was Friday and the Loud date (after the tour-opening night in Louisville) kicked off what is two months of upcoming shows hitting nearly every major city in the Southeast and East Coast from Asheville, Nashville and Atlanta, to Philly, NYC, D.C., and Boston with some stout, opening support from Baltimore’s Dirty Grass Players, who kicked off their Loud set with a chair-turning Lorde cover. Note that the DGP will be coming back to WV for Cheat Fest and 4848.
Whatever time and space was lost to a wonky couple years, The Wooks – like the club itself – seem to have come out of it all the better having doubled down on self-improvement. In that fertile void, they took the time to assemble a stellar stack of keepers (like “What the Rocks Don’t Know,” “Mudfish Momma,” the wild plane-crash-story title cut and many others) recorded damn-near live at Jake Stargel’s in Nashville and mastered by the legendary Bill Wolf. The band even had a beautifully-drawn animation video created by Josh Clark and, as was evident Friday night, seemingly have a renewed vigor for taking it all higher.
Armed with equally good vocalists and instrumentalists (Allen Cooke on Dobro, Harry Clark on mandolin, George Guthrie on banjo and Cain flat picking guitar), The Wooks’ blended in their tasty new songs seamlessly alongside such crowd favorites as the Tyler Childers’ written grass-burner, “Seng,” and their crowd-approved covers of Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” (the Levon Helm rocking mando version), and they crushed what maybe was the theme song for the night, and let’s hope the year: a Wook-out send-up of Robert Earl Keen’s “Feels Good to Be Feeling Good Again.” Because it damn sure does.
The Wooks are back in West Virginia on April 16 at The Purple Fiddle in Thomas, W.Va., in Canaan Valley. Go online at https://wookoutamerica.com to buy the new record and find out more info.
Go online at https://theloudwv.com to see the full list of upcoming shows and to get tickets.
