The One Day Tour #2

aka 

The Maverick's

November 4 2021

Myrtle Beach to Charleston SC. (90 miles+/-)

 A current favored band of Millie and I is the Mavericks. We’ve been hoping to see them perform live for a while now. We thought it would happen in 2019, then 2020 but china fever stopped those dates. It finally happened in November of 2021.

 

Like the twice cancelled Gene Watson concert, we had planned the Mavericks concert in conjunction with a road trip. In both cases we ended up driving to the concert and then home again the same day.

 

First the Mavericks, the best band you probably have never heard of, who are they?

 

The Mavericks is a genre-defying American band with a musical style that has been described as an eclectic mix of neo traditional country, Tex-Mex, Latin and rockabilly.

 

They’ve been around or more correctly they have journeyed since 1989 in a state of flux. They have more X members listed on Wikipedia than current ones. Only two have been with the band since the beginning in 1989, band leader Raul Malo and drummer Paul Deakin. If the bands story was written as a play it would be a melodrama.

 

Despite all the ebbs and flows of the bands success they still have a loyal fan base who embraces the group’s eclecticism. The fans, like the bands musical style cannot be pigeon holed into one group. The concert we attended had fans between the ages of say 35 and 80+. For the most part they looked well healed, but we were in the Charleston Music Hall in the downtown high rent district. High brow or not when the music started they were dancing in the aisles, or some reasonable facsimile of dance. As they were predominately white people, a lot of them were challenged in the rhythm department. By the end of the show, most everyone was standing and as spirited as the bands upbeat tempo.

 

Millie and I, no we stayed seated all the way up to the song they end every concert with, “All you ever do is bring me down.” We were seated high in the back of the theater so we could see over all the gyrating down in front and didn’t feel out of place by staying in our seats. I might add, during all this alcohol fueled teen like behavior of the crowd I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I gave up my fourth row seats when the show was rescheduled last year. I would have been pissed if we were in those high dollar seats and couldn’t see past the mob. If we ever go to another, I will pick balcony seats, well above the fray.

 

Don’t take that last paragraph in a negative light, it was a high energy performance by a fantastic band and an enthusiastic audience, we enjoyed it immensely and were thrilled that we finally got to see them perform in person.

I feel like another of our important bucket list items has been checked off; Stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon…..check, drove the Highway to the Sun in Glacier National Park….check, saw the Mavericks perform live…..check!

 

 

 

Just the facts: two hour drive from Myrtle Beach to Charleston. Stopped for dinner on the way at TGI Friday’s in Mount Pleasant.  The ride home from 10 to midnight was the smoothest trip yet in this area, light traffic and all green signals thru Mount Pleasant and an empty road most of the way to Myrtle Beach. Our tickets with taxes and ticketmaster fees were just under $100 each. The fourth row tickets I had purchased but got refunded when the show didn’t go on……you don’t want to know!