Jackass Flats
Jackass Flats plays hard hitting original music with gritty rock influences and hitches the whole thing to a fast and furious bluegrass engine. They're real pickers too.
The band started out chasing their bluegrass heroes--winning state champion honors in 2002 at the Virginia Folk Music Association's annual bluegrass band contest. In 2003, the boys collected a Virginia Music Award for best Americana/Bluegrass band, but as original music began making its way to the top of the set list, and the boys began taking their music to the outside world, they realized they weren't interested in suits or even clean clothes, they preferred presenting their music like a drunken hillbilly cousin giving tattoos at the family reunion with tobacco juice and a buck knife. They bring it with rock riffs & hooks, but sometimes not so, because they like soul, blues, and mean country twang too.
The band grew out of the musical partnership of Stephen Kuester and Travis Rinehart, who began playing and singing together since before they could drive. The two met in a high school locker room and began crafting a vocal harmony attack that not only landed them in a filthy stinking touring van whose brakes smoked like Keith Richards, but also the East Coast's premier clubs, music halls, and festival stages. Early on, though, the clubs weren't so "premier" as they witnessed certain aspects of American culture that haunt them (and the tunes they write) to this day. In late 2005, the boys released their first album of songs they made up all by themselves, "Purgatory Mountain." People bought it and Bluegrass Unlimited called it "an exciting compilation of contemporary bluegrass" with "captivating instrumental work" and "magical musical moments that should earn the group an abundance of attention." Another critic, Ron Martin wrote: "Their musicianship is second to none and their songwriting is superb. This CD is filled with all sorts of songs which; incidentally; could have been played by a rock band or folk band or whatever. They're that good."
The band consists of Sweet Eddie Carlton on bass fiddle, Travis Rinehart on the banjo and guitar, Stephen Kuester on the guitar and pedal steel, Cory Potrafka on keys and harmonica, and Scott Lewis on drums. The typical show finds them playing their own songs, but they're not so uppity that they don't blaze through a bluegrass tune or two, they'll also throw some curve balls--rock tunes, blues, nothing is off limits. Live, the band is intense, spontaneous, and always out for a raucous time.
