Cavalier Theater
118 5th Ave • La Crosse, WI
608-782-2111
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Bookings via booking@cavaliertheater.com
Follow us on Facebook • Twitter
Bookings via booking@cavaliertheater.com
Hugely influential alt-country pioneers Son Volt will be stopping by the Cavalier Theater while on tour to promote their heavily anticipated new album "Union" which will be out March 29th. Son Volt's music ranges from quiet folk/country ballads reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding" album, to barhouse rockers in the spirit of Neil Young with Crazy Horse. Critically acclaimed and with a ferverant loyal following, Son Volt have been one of the most revered roots rock Americana bands over the past twenty years. Doors 7:00 / Music 8:00 $20 adv / $25 DOS All ages
Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 Todd Snider One morning near the end of August, Todd Snider was relaxing with a visitor on the back porch of his house just outside Nashville, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze while his dog, Cowboy Jim, took a nap nearby. After awhile, Snider said to his guest, “I’ve got an album’s worth of songs, and I think the songs are telling me to make a folk record.” This was a surprising bit of news considering he had spent the last six years making rock albums of one kind or another. But Snider was feeling as if he had “maybe drifted too far from the shore.” He was feeling the pull to startover, to go back to what he was doing when he first began, to return to his roots as a folksinger. If Snider needed any further evidence that was the direction he should pursue, he got it a half hour later. Back inside his home office, he checked his email and had one from his manager informing him he had just received an offer to play the 2019 Newport Folk Festival, an event he had never done. Snider mentioned he had been listening to Woody Guthrie’s Library of Congress Recordings, then crossed the room to the turntable and put the needle down on side one of the record. “Woody Guthrie sometimes gets me reset on why you do a song, instead of how, ”Snider explains of the man who has long been a touchstone for him. “When I was young, there was something about him that made me want to do it. So once or twice a year, I’ll go back to him, I’ll go back to the source.” Guthrie famously had the words “This machine kills fascists” printed on his guitar, and on several of the songs on Snider’s new album, Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3, he squarely aims his guitar at the creeping fascism he sees in America. He had been wanting to make a political record since 2016, and although only half the songs lean in that direction, there is one constant throughout the album: a man, his guitar, and the truth. Snider has long been recognized as one of his generation’s most gifted and engaging songwriters, so it’s no surprise he has returned with a brilliant set of songs — and make no mistake, Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 contains some of his best work as a writer. But what really jumps out on the album is Snider’s growth as a musician and vocalist. He plays all the instruments on the record, and his guitar work and harmonica playing are nothing short of exceptional; not only full of feeling, but highly skilled. In regards to his guitar playing on the record, Snider says he wanted to take everything he’s learned over the past 30 years and play the way he used to play really well. As far as his vocals on the album are concerned, Snider is singing with more confidence than ever, a confidence born in part from his time with Hard Working Americans doing nothing but sing. His stirring vocal performances range from slurring blues mumble to Dylanesque talking blues to gravely, honest ache. Of the five songs on which Snider serves up his humorous brand of socio-political commentary, three are performed in the talking blues style: “Talking Reality Television Blues,” a hilariously accurate short history of television; “The Blues on Banjo,” a bad case of the blues caused by the sorry state of everything from the crooked international monetary-military-industrial complex to the spineless politicians who serve it and which references “Blue Suede Shoes,” Richard Lewis, and Townes Van Zandt; and “A Timeless Response to Current Events,” a brilliant bit of wordplay on which he calls bullshit on faux patriotism, crooked capitalism, and lying politicians. Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires contributed backing vocals on the latter two songs. There are two other songs on the album featuring Snider’s socio-political points of view: “Just Like Overnight,” about the surprising inevitability of change, and “Framed,” written from the point of view of the framed "first dollar bill" in a bar, a point of view that shows doing the right thing doesn't pay. There also are three songs with a music theme. If not for the events that led to the writing of one of those songs, “The Ghost of Johnny Cash,” there almost certainly would be no Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3. After a visit to Cash Cabin Studio for a Loretta Lynn session in 2015 where she recorded a song they cowrote, Snider began having a recurring dream about the studio that featured the Man in Black himself. The dream led him to book time at the studio and ultimately inspired him to write “The Ghost of Johnny Cash,” which tells the story of Loretta Lynn dancing with Cash’s ghost outside the studio in the middle of the night. As he did on much of the record, Snider played the century-old Martin that had long been Johnny Cash’s favorite instrument on that song. Snider paid tribute to Cash’s longtime friend and confidante in another of the music-themed songs, “Cowboy Jack Clement’s Waltz. ”Inspired by the iconic recordman’s oft-quoted maxims regarding the art of recording, the song achingly laments Clement’s passing, while touchingly celebrating his legacy. The album opens with the other song with a music theme, “Working on a Song.” It’s an existential exercise, a song Snider wrote about writing a song called “Where Do I Go Now That I’m Gone,” an idea he actually has been working on for thirty years, but which remains unfinished. There are also two songs that are personal in nature: “Watering Flowers in the Rain,” which was inspired by a former associate of Snider’s whose nickname was “Elvis,” and “Like a Force of Nature,” a philosophical reflection on the orbital nature of friendships. Isbell also added harmony vocals to “Like a Force of Nature.” If Snider is anything, he is a true artist, and he reminds us of that on Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3. At a point in time when the world has never been more complicated and confusing, with people getting louder and louder, Snider did a 180, went back to his roots as a folksinger, to a simpler, quieter form of expression; and it might be what the world is waiting to hear: just a man, his guitar, and the truth. Doors 7:00/Music 8:00 $25 adv/$30 DOS All ages
The day after GGOOLLDD frontwoman Margaret Butler graduated from art school in Baton Rouge she packed a Uhaul and headed west. “I was like, yeah, I’m not going to live here anymore,” she recalls, laughing. Her first stop was Portland, Oregon, where she subsisted mostly on “ramen noodles and pumpkins people stole for me from Home Depot,” she remembers. “You sauté them down and add lots of black pepper and curry powder and soy sauce. It’s actually pretty good!” Butler was riding high on that particular sense of freedom that comes when you’ve decided your life plan is to just say yes to pretty much everything. So you don’t really care that you’re broke and subsisting on stolen jack-o-lanterns, because you’re not in your suburban high school anymore, hiding your disdain for the cheerleaders. You’re in a weird and cool new town, hanging out with musicians and designers and artists. You’re free to mess around. Explore. And just when you’re starting to get a little over living “four people deep,” as Butler puts it, in your tiny apartment, another friend says, hey, come out to Wisconsin for a while. So you do. (Because: say yes!) And a while later, when, boozy in a bar one night, you hear some beats you think you’d like to write lyrics to, even though you’ve never so much as held a microphone in your life, you go for it. (Say. Yes.) And the next thing you know, you’re fronting a dynamic, dirty, synth-pop carnival of a band, hearing your single on the radio, and touring the country. That’s Margaret Butler’s story. And that’s the story of her band, a group as inspired by the shimmery decadence of Queen as they are by the primal yowl of Black Sabbath as they are by the madcap joy of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. GGOOLLDD is one of the most resolutely celebratory rock acts to emerge in years. It’s not hard to understand how someone like Butler, a woman with seemingly limitless natural charisma and an obsession with dressing up in outrageous costumes (Halloween is her favorite holiday) would eventually find her way onstage, but the singer insists that rock stardom was never part of her plan. “I never even considered being a musician, I always wanted to be a clothing designer, or a chef,” she says. “I’ve always created with my hands.” Butler’s father is jeweler, and technically that’s what she was studying to be as well. But she learned all her really important college-years lessons bartending at the Spanish Moon, a legendary venue in Baton Rouge. “It was the only cool place to go and watch music in the city,” she says. “I got to see every amazing band as they were coming up, from TV On the Radio to Of Montreal to Dirty Projectors.” Even though Butler’s always loved music (she’s an obsessive of the first order) aside from the one time she “got really stoned and watched a John Bonham documentary then went right out and bought a pair of blue 1970s Ludwigs,” she never tried to become a serious musician. “I have great internal rhythm, I’m just too A.D.D. to sit down and actually play,” she says. “I own eight different instruments and I’ve gotten as far as like a week on each of them.” But her culture, her people, her tribe has always been connected to music. The people she met in and around the Spanish Moon were the ones she moved to Portland with, and it was through that world that she wound up, one random early fall afternoon in 2013, recording vocals, in the foyer of her house in Milwaukee, to what would become GGOOLLDD’s breakthrough debut single. “It was the first song we ever wrote and it was called ‘Gold,’” she recalls of the soulfully grimy track, on which bassist Nick Ziemann, guitarist Thomas Gilbert also played. (They added drummer Mark Stewart and synth player Nick Schubert soon after). “We were like, ‘Oh we need a name for the band - I guess it should be the same thing as the song title.” A quick Google search revealed “eight other bands named Gold,” but they were all basically unsearchable because the word is so widely used, “so we just decided to double letter it.” Thinking nothing of it, they threw the song up on Bandcamp, planning to go back to their day jobs, but that’s when the serendipity hurricane began. “Somehow college radio picks it up,” Butler recalls. “And it starts getting really good responses. And then it’s on their list of top-ten-plays list, which is just insane.” So they figured, why not keep this going for a while? “We were like, this is fun! Let’s write like three more songs, do a cover, and throw a party for Halloween where we can all wear gold costumes!” The Halloween party is now the stuff of GGOOLLDD legend. “I was Santigold, but instead of dressing up like the singer, I made an all gold Santa costume,” Butler recalls, laughing. “We played a terrible show to eight-some people crammed into our attic and it was one of the funnest nights ever! After that, people just kept asking us to play.” Butler, who had by this time opened a vintage clothing business with her friends, initially thought of the band mostly as a good excuse to express her most playful sartorial impulses. “We had our next show two weeks later so I made this weird tassled vinyl gold overlay on top of a crushed velvet gold romper,” she remembers, but it wasn’t long before they all realized this band had become more than an excuse to dress up. After that second show, CMJ picked up “Gold,” from the local Milwaukee radio station, 91.7, and from there, other college radio stations around the country began playing the track as well. The same un-mixed, un-mastered version they had made on Garage Band. “After about a year I was like, people like this a lot better and they want to pay me a lot more than they do for vintage clothing, so I think I’m just going to do this instead,” Butler recalls. “It’s been three years and we have ten songs that are out right now, and we’re working on the next album.” GGOOLLDD isn’t like other bands. They formed on whim, decided to play their first show mostly as an excuse to host a killer party, and they eschew the traditional gotta-get-a-record-deal game in favor of playing a lot of shows and releasing their own material. That sense of whimsy blended with resolute autonomy is all part of the signature GGOOLLDD aesthetic. And it feeds into their sound, especially lately. “Secrets,” their new single, is a soaring banger that conjures wind-in-your-hair glittery romanticism. Co-produced and mixed by Ben H. Allen (MIA, Animal Collective) it reflects that core tension in GGOOLLDD between winging it and great artistry. “I’m not going to lie, I’m great at writing a hook,” Butler says, and is quick to point out that her bandmates are “amazing,” musicians. “But if you ask me what I do, I’m going to tell you that I’m a performer before I tell you that I’m a musician.” She pauses and cracks up. “Unless you don’t know me at all,” she continues. “Then I’m going to say I’m a musician, because if I say I’m a performer, you’re going to automatically think that I’m a stripper, which is totally ok too but not my current profession.” Tickets available online at: Doors at 7:00pm/Music at 8:00pm $12 adv/$15 DOS All ages
Ward Davis is hot off of tours with Cody Jinks and Whitey Morgan, and part of the new crop of Nashville musicians bringing back the outlaw sound and spirit of Waylon, Willie and the rest. Having found success as a songwriter on Nashville's Music Row, as well as a road tested performer paying his dues, Ward is a rising star bringing back the authentic real country sound of roadhouses and honky tonks. Doors 7:00/Music 8:00 $20 / 4 pack for $60 21+
The world's largest touring rock-n-roll circus freak show, thrill show, sideshow & stunt show extravaganza returns! Last year they sold out the Theater and put on one hell of a show! his vaudeville freak show of wonder is brought to you by Hellzapoppin's Founder, Ringleader, Master of Ceremonies, Producer, Director and Sideshow Stunt-Man, Mr. Bryce "the Govna" Graves. Brothers and sisters, you are about to meet a cavalcade of human curiosities the likes of which the world has never seen before and may never see again. The Govna will be your shepherd and your guide on a journey of miraculous discovery through the world of the strange, the weird, bizarre, odd and the unusual.We're mavericks, trail blazers, rebels, rule breakers, outlaws...true uninhibited artists. We deliver our message through sideshow, and fuel our art through passion. Named after the most successful Broadway musical and movie from the late 30's and 40's, Hellzapoppin is a world renown theatrical circus thrill-show where some of the deadliest stunts in live entertainment are performed to loud crowd-pleasing musical tracks.You might have seen Hellzapoppin's feature performer The LIZARD MAN's life-sized wax figure featured inside Ripley's Believe It Or Not museums all over the world. The Lizard Man is a self-made FREAK tattooed from head to toe with green scales complete with a split tongue and implanted horns on his head and arms. He's appeared on TV shows all over the world and is known for his amazing sword swallowing skills!You'll see one of the world's very best YoYo artist Mr. Derek "Dirty D Hurricane" Cockrum! Derek will blow your mind and steal the show with his amazing incredible and unbelievable YoYo tricks! You'll witness with your own eyes the world's most amazing half-man Short E. Dangerously (aka Shorty). That's right, he's a half man cut in half at the waist and walks bare-handed on broken shards of glass while on fire. Shorty is featured in a 2 page spread inside the 2017 Ripley's Believe It Or Not book, Shatter Your Senses! Ripley's also has a wax figure of Shorty in Ripley's all over the world. He will be featured on Ripley's brand new international TV show (comes out late 2019). He's traveled the world over many times performing at the world's largest festivals and very best music venues, theaters and has been featured on countless TV shows.You'll see the pain-proof strong man Mr. Eric Ross! Eric is a world renown magician and sideshow performer. He performs death defying stunts live on stage known as the Fakir act. He takes long skewers and shoves them right through his biceps, the palm of his hands and even the mandible which is located directly underneath his tongue and out his throat.Last but not least, you're going to see the beautiful talented sideshow starlet, Willow Lauren. Willow is an illusionist and will perform the bladebox of death, she also eats fire along side the Govna. She even eats and regurgitates razor blades and she'll even pull a lifesaver out of her throat before your very eyes!HELLZAPOPPIN SUPPORT CREDITS:MushroomheadAVATARJohn 5Bob DylanSnoop DogBlack Label SocietyMotorheadKornSlayerMarilyn MansonIce CubeBad ReligionMudvayneStatic XHalestormMisfits (w/ original members)Gogol Bordello and more.HELLZAPOPPIN TOUR CREDITS INCLUDE:Mushroomhead Madness and Mayhem tour 2019Avatar Country World Tour 2018JOHN 5 and the Creatures US Tour 2018Riot Fest Tour (2013-2018)Germany’s Wacken Festival 2018Belgium’s Alcatraz Festival 2018Manila Philippines Dutdutan Tattoo Fest 2018.San Antonio River City RockFest (2016/17)Sweden’s Metal Town (2007-2012)Faroe Islands G-Fest (2011)Pedal to the Metal Tour (2009)Sweden’s West Coast Riot Fest (2007/08)Sweden’s Peace and Love Fest (2011)Harley Davidson & Biker Rally’sSturgis (2008-2016)NASCAR (2013-14)TATTOO Conventions, Theaters, Music Venues all over the world!