In 2016, Yellow Cab Tavern hosted a concert built on a simple idea, could there be a concert that was purely acoustic?
"We decided it meant no amps, no mics, nothing. Just whatever power you could bring with your voices and your instruments, acoustic instruments," said Jeff Opt in an interview with WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt. "I'm a big fan of 'what happens if...' type shows like just put up some ideas and see what happens. And we really didn't know how bands would respond to that challenge."
Local bands responded well, and Pure Acoustic has had occasional outings over the years. The fourth installment will take place on Saturday, February 15 with The 1984 Draft, who performed at the first show, alongside The Boxcar Suite and Dipspit.
"Some bands that do this probably come from a background where they're writing on acoustic guitars and kind of getting the songs together and then turn it into, you know, a full band production and then others don't. For us it's cool because it sort of is reflective of the other side of the music before it gets laid down to a record or put through amplifiers. A loud rock n roll show usually starts as an acoustic guitar or a few acoustic instruments," said Tim Pritchard of The Boxcar Suite.
For Dipspit, Pure Acoustic presents a challenge that the group is excited to meet.
"It is very different stylistically. I don't know if we've ever used an a guitar to write any of our songs," said Dip, noting that Dipspit uses an electronic beat as the basis for its songs. "So to take away the essential backbone of our band, how we make people want to dance around a little bit, we're not able to do any of that."
The solution was to take Dipsit, normally a trio, and expand the band for this performance. Opt says watching the bands embrace the challenge of performing strictly acoustic is half of the event. The other aspect belongs to the audience.
"It introduced the audience to a whole different way of listening. We'd all grown up at Canal Street, where it was a listening room, and places like that didn't really exist or don't still exist in Dayton right now," said Opt. 'And by going purely acoustic, the audience also has to participate and be quiet if they want to hear. And so it made people much more focused on listening to the musicians."
