Gallery/Music: Augustana Plays Pole Day at IMS

San Diego-based rock/piano rock band Augustana played the Coca-Cola stage on Pole Day for the 2007 Indianapolis 500.

Augustana is perhaps best known for their hit singles “Boston” and “Stars and Boulevards”. The band’s members currently include Dan Layus (vocals, piano, guitar), Jared Palomar (bass, vocals), Justin South (drums), Chris Sachtleben (lead guitar, mandolin), and John Vincent (keys, vocals).

Augustana is a great band, but they weren’t a great match for the venue. Much of their music is quiet and contemplative, a huge contrast with race cars going more than 220 miles an hour a few dozen yards away. I’m not an audio engineer but the Pagoda Plaza has got to be a nightmare acoustically, and I could sense some frustration amongst the band members with the sound in the first few songs they played. On top of that, they were a little difficult to photograph because they had a habit of keeping their heads down and their eyes closed. The whole thing just didn’t seem quite “right” for the atmosphere of Pole Day.

That said, I thought it was probably a good idea to have a band play in the middle of the afternoon (I think Augustana took the stage around 3 or 4 o’clock). Once the initial round of qualifiers make their runs and the track starts to heat up, there really isn’t a whole lot going on until the last hour or so between 5-6pm. But it needs to be a band with a lot of stage presence and a powerful sound to match the excitement of the on-track activity.

If you’d like to learn more about the band and hear some of their music, visit AugustanaMusic.com or the Augustana page on MySpace.

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