Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Here’s the note from loyal reader Blake:
hi ashevegas
shake it like a caveman big band @ bywater wed may 25 7pm. with asheville’s pleasure chest to open show.
pleasure chest is kip from hip replacements and el hub from man or astroman fame. gonna b a smokin free show.
shake it like a caveman new release – “white bread & Golden”
any coverage would be great!
thanks
peace
blake
And there’s this recent hit from Charleston City Paper about the band:
Like a wild mountain man on a rampage, songwriter Blake Burris is known in the Asheville, N.C. scene as the wide-eyed, fuzzy-headed, one-man band Shake It Like a Caveman. Over the last four years he’s stomped, jumped, strummed, and hollered like a maniac on stages around the Southeast.
“When I started out, I initially wrote a song called ‘Shake it Like a Caveman’ and played it opening for a friend’s band. I booked it as the Blake Burris Blues Machine. When I played the song, a bunch of river rafters there went wild and started dancing around. They all looked like cavemen, dancing drunk around a campfire. I thought it worked well as a name,” he says. “The caveman thing is really just a connection with the root of saying, ‘Fuck it. Let it rip.'”
Burris grew up near Kingsport in the Appalachian corner of eastern Tennessee. He settled for a while in Asheville, but in recent years, he’s maintained a fairly nomadic lifestyle, traveling around the Southeast and across the country in a customized Dodge van.
…
Shake It Like a Caveman’s shows still pack a ton of riffy blues renditions and hell-raising originals, but Burris has added some glam-rock gems by the likes of T Rex and David Bowie to the set list as well.
“I still love all the dirtiest, most beat-up Hill Country blues, like Elmore Williams and Paul ‘Wine’ Jones,” says Burris. “But I’ve been listening a lot to Mark Bolan and a lot of old, rugged, hot, raw soul and funk compilations, too. The shows will have the same rockin’ vibes as the one I’ve done before.”
