The joyous sound of Edward Sharpe at The Music farm

By Stratton Lawrence

Photos by Hunter McRae

If a record label executive stumbled onto an acid-fueled Rainbow Gathering jam session and offered to sign every person there, you’d perhaps get something like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Fortunately, Sharpe and crew are a talented bunch of hippies. Even when the nine-piece mix got muddy in the Music Farm on Tuesday night, the band’s song-craft well outshined any lost vocals or bellowing bass drum beats.

“This is the start of a whole new thing,” said one friend, bewildered by the spectacle. For sure, there’s nothing else like the Magnetic Zeros. Sharpe, the alter-ego of lead singer Alex Ebert, is something like a cross between Jim Morrison, Shannon Hoon, and Devendra Banhart. Bare-chested in a white blazer and red scarf, with billows of long brown hair wrapped around his skull, it’s impossible not to compare his appearance to Jesus, an association only backed up by song titles and subtle references about thirst in the desert and forty day dreams.

Leaned out over the crowed, Ebert had to frequently extricate his scarf from the hands of front-row fans, relentlessly clutching on to the apparent musical prophet.

The show began at 9:15 with three songs from We Are Each Other, the side project of organist Aaron Embry that comprised the rest of the band minus Ebert, who sat on the floor during the set playing hand drums. Like old friends back at their hippie commune, the band began their show with high fives and casual milling about and conversing on stage.

After about a half hour break, the band reconvened at 10:15 with Ebert at the helm. Beginning with “40 Day Dream,” the lead off track from their self-titled debut album, the band gave an encore worthy performance in the first track, a trend that continued through the nearly two hour set. Under a barrage of lights (blue between every song) and a backdrop of the Emerald City, the group built into one huge drum, cymbal, trumpet, and harmonious yelling-backed crescendo after another.

Band co-leader Jade shed her white handkerchief hair covering early, revealing a classic bob cut and giddily tambourining and singing throughout the show. Between songs she’d make happy or silly comments: “I’m trying an experiment. It’s kind of embarrassing. Promise not to tell? I’m growing my armpit hair out!”

Through happily repetitive choruses like “Every part of you is just another part of me” or “We want to feel ya/ We don’t need to heal ya” the crowd sang and shouted along. The band’s nine members all seemed impressed with the sold-out energetic crowd. Ebert mentioned it was their first time in Charleston “ever” and the trumpet player grabbed his phone and took pictures of the crowd.

Culminating in a moment surely among the most memorable in Music Farm lore, Ebert left the stage for the fourth song of the encore and joined his adoring crowd. Taking a seat in the middle of the dance floor, he invited the audience to sit as well, a request they quickly complied to. From there he commented that the Farm is the site of the first passenger train station in the country, then sang the final song from the ground, while the band invited fans onto stage to sit at the edge with them. Looking around, it was difficult to distinguish the band from the crowd, until you’d see a harmonica or tambourine with a microphone emerge from a cluster.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are selling out thousand seat venues, mostly on their first visits to places like Charleston. Yet before and after the show, they’re mingling with fans outside, even guest listing many of those who happily approached them outside last night but didn’t have tickets to the sold out concert. Hopefully they can maintain that vibe, because it’s refreshing to see both confident stage presence and a humble ‘we’re just like you’ attitude simultaneously. It’s just like you’d expect a hippie commune to be.