Last Saturday night, four UT alumni took the stage in Market Square.
Since four out of five band members met during their time at UT, The Black Cadillacs have adopted Knoxville as their hometown. However, this was the band’s first local performance in six months.
The Black Cadillacs performed on Saturday as the headliners of BLANKFest, a festival put on by Blank News to promote the local music scene.
Throughout the day, musicians performed on three different stages: Preservation Pub, Scruffy City Hall, and Market Square. Festival attendees floated freely between venues, often with a drink in hand.
When The Black Cadillacs took the stage at 8:30 p.m., the Square was filled with people in folding chairs or on blankets who had been enjoying the shows all day and with newcomers who showed up to see the band themselves.
The crowd increased in intensity the closer you got to the stage. After weaving through families on the outskirts and passing by the tailgate atmosphere of the day-long campers, the standing crowd hugged close to the stage and was there to dance.
The Black Cadillacs have a hard blues rock sound that allows for plenty of instrumental solos and improvisation. The band’s two guitarists switched off playing lead and rhythm guitar throughout the set, keeping things lively and varied.
A few songs into the set, lead singer Will Horton called out to the crowd, “Come on up – I can barely see you all back there.”
The band kept up a comfortable dialogue with the crowd throughout the performance with attendees shouting out song requests or calling out to the band. John Phillips, one of the guitarists, gave the crowd a shout-out in return.
“You guys are awesome,” Phillips said. “You talk to us. You tell us what you want. Thank you very much.”
Although the performance started off uncharacteristically flat, as the crowd warmed up to the band, the members amped up their performance in return.
Jacqueline Chavez, a biomedical sciences student from Texas A&M, returned to her hometown Knoxville for the summer and attended BLANKFest to catch some local bands before returning to school.
“I thought they did really well,” Chavez said. “I got there pretty much at the beginning of the show, and it was pretty quiet in the back as far as the crowd goes. We worked our way up and the crowd was more lively.”
The band covered songs from their newest EP, from their most well known album “Run,” and released brand new material they have been working on the past few months.
Horton reflected on the band’s performance after the show and felt good about their homecoming concert.
“The new songs, the unreleased songs, it felt really good to play those live, because we’ve just been cooped up in our practice space playing those to each other,” Horton said. “To have that response from the audience was gratifying.”
After their last song, Horton confessed to the audience, “to tell you the truth we’re pretty tired of the whole leaving the stage, pretending not to play, and coming back thing.”
The band proceeded to cover “Fearless” by Pink Floyd, one of Horton’s favorites.
After the show, the band moved off stage to join the crowd in going to the rest of the BLANKFest performances continuing on until midnight.
