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Margaret Hair

Margaret Hair's column appears Fridays in the 4 Points arts and entertainment section in the Steamboat Today. Contact her at 871-4204 or e-mail mhair@steamboatpilot.com.

About two weeks before my flight departed for a week-and-a-half trip back South, news emerged that Ben Folds Five was going to reunite, for one night only, in the town I was visiting.

To a lot of people - most people, probably - Ben Folds Five was a one-hit wonder, releasing a wholly depressing song called "Brick" in 1997 to, as far as the radio mainstream goes, never be heard from again.

In North Carolina, Ben Folds is piano rock royalty. And so when a guy came streaming through a subterranean Chapel Hill bar the Saturday before the Five's sold-out auditorium reunion, announcing that the band was playing at the bar next door, everyone in the place followed him.

Not surprisingly, we had been duped. Ben Folds was not in this bar - he was, in all likelihood, at home in Nashville. His bassist, Robert Sledge, was there, though, and the show ended up being worth the 20-foot walk from where we had started the night.

After living in Steamboat for a little more than a year, I guess I expected my first extended trip back to the Chapel Hill music scene to be full of moments like this, where there were so many things going on that you could just accidentally stumble onto a set that included two sort-of bands that were sort-of famous in the '90s (members from the Squirrel Nut Zippers closed out the night).

And in some ways, that is what happened. On any given night, there were at least five shows going on with covers less than $5. But for some reason, that circumstance didn't feel as different from nightlife in Routt County as I had expected it would.

Yes, the options for live entertainment were greater and better known. But they weren't better attended than any decently crowded show at Old Town Pub or Mahogany Ridge or anywhere else. Maybe 50 people showed up to see Robert Sledge play. Three times that number show up for anyone with a semi-recognizable name in Steamboat. Keep in mind one of Sledge's records went platinum.

It's easy to get saturated with options in a town you know too well - by Wednesday, I had decided to skip over at least three free live shows to go to karaoke night (regrettable decision). And while it's great to have the variety of a bigger town, it's almost refreshing to avoid that saturation, and to realize it is completely impossible to stop appreciating live entertainment in Steamboat Springs.