Larry and His Flask / Black Guy Fawkes / Run Rabbit Run – Southgate House Revival, newport, KY
first saw Larry and His Flask in 2011 on the Ernie Ball Stage at Warped Tour at Riverbend Music Center. It was mid-afternoon, and in the middle of a festival lineup dominated by punk, rock and emo, the sudden sound of a banjo and upright bass playing “post-bluegrass” immediately stood out.
Larry and His Flask’s performance was pure chaos, with the band spending almost as much time playing in the crowd as they did onstage. From somewhere in the audience, an instrument would suddenly appear above the heads of the crowd. Then another. Then another. At one point, one of the band members somehow made his way to the top of the wall overlooking the stage, roughly 30 yards from where he was supposed to be.
The music was Americana. The energy was pure punk.
I bought their albums after that show, caught them at other performances and eventually mourned their breakup when the band called it quits in 2019. So when I heard that Larry and His Flask had reunited in early 2026, I was pretty excited. When I found out they were coming to the Cincinnati area — or at least Cincinnati-adjacent Newport, Kentucky — I knew I had to be there.
And they did not disappoint.
The Larry and His Flask playing Southgate House Revival in 2026 is not quite the same band I saw tearing apart the Warped Tour crowd 15 years ago. They’re not in their 20s anymore, and the stage isn’t quite as much of a suggestion as it once was. While they did make it into the crowd a few times, it felt more like part of the show than the spontaneous mayhem of their younger days. But the energy is still there, and so is the music.
More importantly, the band genuinely seemed happy to be back.
They arrived late enough that they had to do their soundcheck after the second opening act, in full view of the audience. Rather than treating it like an inconvenience, they turned it into part of the show, joking with the crowd and thanking everyone for “coming to the soundcheck, folks.”
At one point they made the sentiment explicit: “We are back. Back back. Not just trying to make money back, but really back.”
That pretty much summed up the evening.
The crowd at Southgate was relatively small, but it was enthusiastic and clearly happy to be there. It was an all-ages crowd, with some people not yet old enough to drink and others who looked like they had been drinking for a very, very long time. Judging by the limited selection of sizes left at the merch table, attendance at some of their previous shows may have exceeded expectations.
The band’s songs still have that wonderfully messy collision of Americana, bluegrass, folk and punk. “Beggars Will Ride” and “My Name Is Cancer” were among the highlights, while “Ebb and Flow” included a brief snippet of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Black Guy Fawkes, who had opened the show, eventually joined the band during the song, interacting with each member as it unfolded. His enthusiasm seemed genuine — this was clearly someone who was just as excited as the rest of us that Larry and His Flask were back.
One of the night’s funniest moments came with “I’ll Be Gone,” one of the band’s shortest songs and a definite crowd favorite. After finishing it, the band asked if everyone wanted to hear it again.
The crowd did.
So they played it again.
Then they asked if we wanted to hear it a third time.
We did.
They started the song a third time, made it a few seconds in, then broke down laughing at their own joke.
That’s the kind of evening it was.
The two opening acts helped set the tone.
Black Guy Fawkes took the stage alone with a guitar, delivering a mix of protest songs and deeply confessional material. His lyrics moved from pointed political commentary — “A little less song and a bit more war. Fuck this song, let’s start a war” — to songs about mental health, therapy and trying to heal and become stronger. He also worked in a cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” Seeing him later join Larry and His Flask onstage made the connection between the performers feel less like a typical opening-act/headliner arrangement and more like a group of musicians genuinely happy to share a stage.
Run Rabbit Run, a local band, went in a completely different direction, creating a kind of demented-circus atmosphere driven by organ and what they called a “tin-can guitar.” The layered male and female vocals gave their socially conscious lyrics an extra weight, contrasting the strange, almost carnival-like sound with some pretty serious subject matter. They were a new discovery for me, and I’ll be looking for more local appearances from them. If you are a fan of Man Man, Gogol Bordello, or Alestorm, you should too.
There was even some unexpected entertainment between the opening acts. A patron was escorted out of the venue, only to sneak back in and get escorted out a second time. On his way out, he angrily yelled at the door guy, “No wonder all y’all are getting closed down — y’all don’t know how to do it in Ohio.”
It was a particularly funny complaint considering that Southgate House Revival isn’t getting shut down and, more importantly, is not in Ohio. But judging by his accent, apparently anything this close to the river qualifies as Ohio.
By the end of the night, the biggest takeaway wasn’t that Larry and His Flask could still play the songs I remembered from 15 years ago. It was that they seemed genuinely grateful to be playing them again.
The band may have lost some of the reckless physicality that made their early shows so memorable, but they’ve gained something in return: perspective. They looked like a group of musicians who had spent enough time away to appreciate what they had — and were now having a hell of a lot of fun doing it again.
Fifteen years after I first stumbled across them at Warped Tour, Larry and His Flask are back.
Back back.
Musician, concert photographer, writer, podcast host and founder of The Hot Mic Music Magazine.
