Mississippi State students looking for a more Southern sound will want to check out the Patrick Smith Band at The Grill Stage from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. at Bulldog Bash tonight.
The band, which was started 10 years ago by Patrick Smith, may be categorized in many different ways. Some call it a jam band. Others refer to it as funk-oriented.
“We like to be called Southern funk and soul,” Smith said. “We do a lot of jamming, but I don’t really consider us a jam band.”
The band came together after Smith’s previous acoustic act started to lose money, so he decided to do his own thing. The band became known as the Patrick Smith Band because Smith was not sure which other artists would be playing with him at any given time. The only other constant member is Rodney Moore, who joined the band seven years ago as a guitarist, vocalist and mandolin player and still maintains those roles today.
“I came from a musical family,” Moore said. “I had a country band with my family in high school but took a break in my college years to mess around. In the ’90s I did some cover band stuff and then jumped into this band. I’ve been playing music since I was about 14.”
The band has taken a unique stance on the instrumentalists it incorporates, often mixing in different musicians that let the band stay in a constant state of change.
“We rotate guys in and out all the time, but they’re all seasoned players that know the material,” Smith said. “We have three different drummers. Our main bass player is Anthony Rimmer, but sometimes we rotate in another one. We have three or four horn players that we play with. It’s a lot easier to keep everything new and fun by playing with new people.”
This approach allows the band to play similar sets at different venues with a different tone and feel every time, giving audiences a new experience each time they see the band, which draws influence from many different sounds, including the occasional cover.
“We don’t play covers like they are on the original record,” Smith said. “We’ll change the beats, tempos and even the chord progressions to make it into something recognizable but new.”
Moore said the covers will be mostly of other bands that have influenced them, though they will only make up about 25 percent of the show.
“We’ll probably play some Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers and some Southern rock,” he said.
The bulk of the show will consist of the band’s jazzy, improvisational sound echoing largely from Smith’s piano.
“As a group we tend to slide toward Stevie Wonder mixed in with the Allman Brothers,” Smith said. “There may even be a little Lynyrd Skynyrd in there. We mix jazz musicians with a rock ‘n’ roll groove.”
This will not be the band’s first Bulldog Bash outing. The band played in the first year of the event and had a slightly different experience than expected for this year.
“The first time we played [on The Grill Stage] it was just a little platform up on cinder blocks,” Smith said. “The whole thing was leaning to the left.”
This trip to Bulldog Bash, their third, will most likely greet them with higher tech stages and a larger crowd. Since that original show the band has released an album, Free Beer and Fried Chickn.
“I was never satisfied with what I call our first record,” Smith said. “I let it lay low and gave a few copies to people who asked, but we never marketed it. Then I started working with a producer out of Athens, Ga., and made the actual first record.”
The band will play tonight with its funky blend of jazz and rock.
Patricksmithband.tif: Patrick Smith mixes Southern rock with funky jazz in his perpetually evolving band.