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As the stage lights transitioned from red to blue to purple, the award winning band, Spurs USA, opened up the show. They are known best for playing traditional country western and western swing music but this certainly wasn’t the Spurs USA’s first rodeo. They also opened up for The Marshall Tucker Band last year in June.
The only female vocalist of the group, Dona Frank-Federico, was full of energy, dancing, playing a tambourine, and even walking off stage and interacting with the audience. The crowd participated by singing along and after the final song, they cheered as the Spurs USA left the stage.
When The Outlaws hit the stage the crowd immediately jumped to their feet and began applauding, hundreds of cell phones lighting the dark theater.
After the Outlaws performed "Gun Smoke," the crowd erupted, whistling, shouting and applauding frantically. After taking a sip of water, lead singer, Henry Paul, acknowledged his brother, sister in-law and nephew in the audience before going on to sing "Born to Be Bad."
The crowd proceeded to cheer and stand after each song. Later that night, Paul gave a special shout out to the Outlaw’s drummer, Monte Yoho, calling him “one if the nicest guys in the group."
Both Monte Yoho and Henry Paul are the last two original members of the band and they don’t take that lightly.
“We’re still alive. That’s the highlight of everything,” Yoho said. “We’re still here to do what we did forty years ago. We’ve been through some pretty hard times just as well as the good times. It’s a good thing that we’re still out here.”
All of the other original band members passed away; Paul reflected on his earlier days when The Outlaws first began their career.
“When we were much younger we had a dream and our dreams were fairly modest; they were rather lofty compared to our peer group to think that we would be recording artists, but I think once we signed our record deal, when we were in the studio, when we made our first album, for me, that was the crowning moment of my dream,” Paul said.
The Outlaws had left the spotlight for a while but now they’re excited about returning to the limelight.
“It’s kind of like your mom when she gets older but she can still cook that one dish that everybody knows her for,” Paul said. “And she goes in the kitchen and she whips that out and when everybody loves it, it makes her happy.”
During the guitar solos, a majority of the crowd was on their feet and eventually, people left their seats and began to fill the aisles, forming a concert style atmosphere.
"Some of it's from our childhood; some of it's new but all of it’s from the heart," Paul said to the audience.
“They were great,” Dan Saraceno said. “I’d never seen them before. They were better than I expected.” Saraceno and his wife attended the show together and she said that her favorite song was “It’s About Pride.”
The inspiration behind that song is what Paul describes as a reconciliation of their participation in something bigger than themselves.
“It was a testimonial, it was a bit of paying homage and it concludes on a really optimistic note, the future,” Paul said. Sometimes the lyrics speak to the audience and in that song it speaks very clearly to the audience and they react to that…at the end of the song, I changed the lyrics. There’s a moment where I get to say the final word: and if you wonder why the outlaws still survive, it’s all about pride. And so that just throws the match into the gasoline and it all goes up.”
Before leaving the stage, Paul said, "Thanks for coming out. We love you." The drum solo at the end closed out the night as the Outlaws bowed and touched the hands of several fans. People continued to applaud even after they left the stage, encouraging the Outlaws to return to the stage for one final song, and they did just that, singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
“I’m celebrating my birthday,” Inge Dube, the owner of a nearby art studio called Driftwood Gallery said. “I enjoyed the music in the beginning. I’m not a big rock fan but I like the country music. They were great.”
Rob Keesler, a member of the Punishers motorcycle club, was in the audience as well. He said that he enjoyed old school rock music. His favorite song of the night was “There Goes another Love Song.”
“They were just as good as they were back in the seventies,” Keesler said.
For more information about The Outlaws, visit http://www.outlawsmusic.com/
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