MANCHESTER, Tenn. (Peavey.com Official Website) - Two-time Grammy nominees and "world boogie" proponents North Mississippi
Allstars will bring their Mississippi Hill Country blues jams and array of Peavey amplifiers to Bonnaroo 2004, the annual music festival held on a sprawling 600-acre farm in Central Tennessee.
Bassist Chris Chew reports that he's bringing his Peavey Pro 410 bass cabinets and Pro 500 head for the band's June 11 performance, while guitarists Luther Dickinson and Duwayne Burnside will have their usual arsenal of Peavey guitar amps, from classic "silver-stripe" Special combos to 5150 heads and cabinets. "I've been on Peavey for years," says Chew. "Peavey was always the one."
The band's self-described "world boogie" is a sonic amalgam of the raw hill country blues referenced on the Allstars' debut, Shake Hands With Shorty, with Memphis R&B and even Haight-Ashbury psychedelia thrown into the gumbo. The band acknowledged all three on the follow-up, 51 Phantom, but with Polaris, the band's latest offering, the Allstars assimilate even more disparate influences, most notably pop, jam rock and, on the album-closer "Be So Glad," rap.
"We've been thinking and talking about Polaris since 1999," says Dickinson. "We always knew that number three would be our most ambitious album." The musical journey that led to them to Polaris invariably led them back to Peavey, according to Dickinson.
"If you're playing juke-joint blues or church gospel, Peavey is just the sound of that music," he says. "It's everywhere. Robert Randolph actually hipped me to the old Peavey solid state stuff, but it took me years of hanging out with him to come back to it. It's like, 'Of course I should be playing Peavey. It's what we play.' It's that clean power."
While Dickinson and Burnside are particularly fond of their classic solid-state Peavey amps, they've been known to crank 5150, and Triple XXX tube amps, and even brought out a Wiggy for a performance on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." "My favorite Peavey amp is the Special 130 combo and the Standard head," Dickinson adds. "You can run a whole band through that! Duwayne likes the Renown? But the Triple XXX and Wiggy definitely deserve their due, and I've used 5150s for years."
Bassist Chew has also played through Peavey amps since the beginning. "I started on one of those Black Widow 15" combos (such as the TNT and TKO models)," he says. "I've really been experimenting with my gear a lot lately, but I'm using the Peavey Pro 500 bass head, some Pro 410 cabinets and a GPS power amp, too."
Peavey Electronics Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments and professional sound equipment in the world. Peavey holds more than 130 patents and produces more than 2,000 products, which are distributed throughout the United States and to 136 other countries.
