TopHouse with Cris Jacobs at Skully’s Music-Diner, Columbus, Ohio, March 14, 2026
It was listeners vs. talkers at TopHouse’s March 14 gig inside Skully’s Music-Diner, where the listeners - armed with lots of shhh-ing - ultimately prevailed in the long-running battle royale.
The loud Columbus, Ohio, audience benefited on the breezy “Wine or the Weather,” when the band encouraged them to yell, “I heard ‘Anglo Saxon!’” every time the band sang the words Anglo Saxon. The band suffered during quieter fare and some of their frequent stage banter when talkers overwhelmed the men on stage.
Cris Jacobs alluded to this when he opted to close his well-received, 45-minute opening set with the quiet, tender, “September” in defiance of the squawkers in the house. On his way to the finale, Jacobs accompanied himself on acoustic guitar on the unreleased “Halos” and his Billy Strings joint “Poor Davey.” Plugging in a three-string, cigar-box guitar and playing foot percussion, Jacobs turned in bluesy versions of “Samson and Delilah” and “When the Levee Breaks” that followed the respective arrangements by Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.
“You can’t AI that,” Jacobs said in underlining the importance of gathering in the name of live music.
The good-humored headliners refer to themselves as TopHouse the Band LLC and call themselves a folk band. They’re also a bluegrass band, a rock band and a comedy act. After two weeks together in the van they call Black Lung, singer Joe Larson (guitar, banjo, mandolin, keyboards, percussion), Jesse Davis (guitar, mandolin, kick drum, percussion), William Cook (fiddle) and Eli Isbell (guitar, banjo, penny whistle, keyboards, percussion) were sick, with Davis unable to sing harmonies and mostly resigned to bantering by typing into his phone and playing it back with a voice app.
“I can still whisper but it’s a little weird and I didn’t want to turn anybody on,” he said late in the 95-minute show.
“TOO LATE!,” a dude yelled.
Opening with “WDYTWH,” TopHouse ignited rabid singalongs on similarly uptempo numbers like “Drive Back Home;” dived into rock ’n’ roll on the menacing “Run” with Larson’s voice echoing over Cook’s electric violin, substituting for guitar; and shrugged at the inevitable on “Deathbed,” which transformed the diner into an arena.
On the quirky-comedy front, Cook read an excerpt from “the Hobbit” to Renaissance accompaniment from his bandmates; Isbell improvised poetry drowned out by the talkers; and “I Don’t Wanna Move On” was preceded by a shaggy-dog story about a guy named Von asking Isbell to moo.
“I don’t want to moo, Von,” Isbell said to laughter and groans.
That song was interrupted when Cook’s fiddle blew out its amp and the musicians fell out with laughter. It’s a testament to TopHouse the Band LLC that they quickly got back on track and finished the number.
It’s a professional business that creates value for its ticketholders, after all.
Grade card: TopHouse with Cris Jacobs at Skully’s Music-Diner - 3/14/26 - B+
