Sister Hazel headlines Merritt Days 2016

Sister Hazel

In recent years, the Iron Range city of Mountain Iron booked some hot act from the 1990s to headline its Merritt Days festival. This year is no exception, as the announced Aug. 13 act will be Sister Hazel.

Now, Sister Hazel didn’t leap off the screen at me, either, until I looked them up and realized they sang 1997’s”All For You.”

I heard this song hundreds of times in 1997 as a teenage disc jockey at 97.9 WEVE in Eveleth. As a new release “All For You” was on high rotation. This meant that it was always the last thing coming into a commercial break, which means that if you’re smoking Winston reds out on the deck and you lose track of time because your parents are splitting up and that girl won’t call you back, and you escape to a world ruled only by the electric night air until the cold realization that 3 minutes and 38 seconds isn’t that long, so you run into the studio still billowing smoke out your schnoz only to hear:

DEEBLE DEEBLE DEEBLE It’s alllllll for yoooooooou! JINGY JANGY CHORD

Try not to wheeze, son. They’ll hear that. Speak on the exhale, kill the mic on the inhale. “97.9 FM mmmDOUBluuE-V-E. It’s 2:40 a.m. and THAT was … (GAAAASSSP) … Sister Hazel.”

Anyway, it all came back kinda quick for me.

I’ve learned that Sister Hazel has since went country, to the degree that country music still exists as Merle Haggard or Hank Williams would have described it. Their new Billboard charting country album is “Lighter in the Dark,” which contains a song called “Kiss Me Without Whiskey.”

That’s how you know it’s contemporary country, where all songs are about whiskey, screwing or Jesus. Interestingly, I’m reading a book about medieval Europe, which was basically 500 years of whiskey, screwing and Jesus.

But I digress.

Merritt Days is August 13, with events all day. There’s a free street concert in the evening that culminates with a 10:30 p.m. start for Sister Hazel.

Find out more at the Merritt Days Facebook page.

A reminder, Merritt Days celebrates the founding of Mt. Iron by Leonidas Merritt and his many sons, the first miners to remove rich hematite iron ore from the Mesabi Range. They were riding high, until Rockefeller and Carnegie drank their milkshake.