Anyone going to see them?
They have an interesting story.
I think the Dubs need a form of "Rumspringa"
Six Amish men walk into a bar.
They're all dressed in the simple garb of the plain people — broadcloth slacks, suspenders and straw hats.
They get on stage, with guitars, a keyboard, microphones and amplifiers. One takes a seat behind the drum kit.
Then, after being introduced, they launch into Bell Biv Devoe's "Poison," and continue with a set that includes Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty to Me" and Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre's "G Thang."
They rap, they sing, they dance on the stage and out in the crowd. They play songs by Johnny Cash, Kanye West and Pink Floyd.
It's not a joke. It's a band — one of the hottest cover bands touring the Northeast.
The Amish Outlaws, who perform twice at Musikfest this weekend, dare you not to laugh — and have a good time.
"We have no shame," said Brother Eazy Ezekiel, bass player, singer and one of the band's founders. "Three of the guys in the band, we're used to it, we grew up wearing that stuff. You're kind of immediately the butt of a joke when you walk into a nightclub wearing suspenders and a hat."
But Ezekiel and the rest of the band — Brother Amos Def, Brother Big Daddy Abel, Brother Elijah Rule, Brother Hezekiah X and Jakob the Pipe Layer — are more than just in on the joke. They're telling it.
"I think the main thing we look at as far as picking a song is what kind of reaction we think we'll get from the crowd. For the most part, its picking things that we think people will find funny seeing us play," Ezekiel says.
"We want to make people laugh. We want to make them smile. Being goofy is a part of that. So to get up there and act like a clown isn't that far of a stretch, just from walking into a place wearing the outfits we're wearing. It definitely turns heads."
Four of the band's five founding members were raised with a strict Amish upbringing in Lancaster County, where the conveniences of modern life, including electricity and telephones are eschewed in favor of a simple, humble existence.
But in a tradition known as "Rumspringa," Amish children are turned loose in the world when they reach age 16. At that point, the teenagers are allowed to experience the "worldly" things that are forbidden in their home villages, before deciding if they want to return to be baptized in the Amish church as adults.
While most of young Amish adults do return to their villages, the core members of The Amish Outlaws did not.
During his Rumspringa, Ezekiel ultimately decided to move to New York, where he earned a GED and attended Pace University.
"It was always a possibility of going back, but once I went to college and I studied literature and read a lot of stuff, that's when I knew I couldn't unlearn all the things I had learned," Ezekiel says. "I couldn't close my eyes to all the things I had seen.
"There's nothing wrong with the Amish lifestyle. By saying this I'm not trying to say they have their eyes closed to the world. But there's a very deliberate separation from the outside world. Once I kind of had that connection and really looked into it and understood it more, I couldn't go back and shut it off."
One of those things Ezekiel explored intently was music. It was during Rumspringa that an "English" friend (English is the word Amish use to describe those who are not Amish) played for him vinyl copies of The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Pink Floyd's "The Wall."
He recalled the cutout moustaches from the Sgt. Pepper album were still inside and that his friend explained the meaning behind all of the songs in "The Wall."
"That was the first time I really realized music was more than just a pretty melody or a distraction. There was really deep meaning to it," Ezekiel says. "Hearing those two albums for the first time really got me into music."
According to the band's website, the core members of The Amish Outlaws met in 2002 while attending the "Rock and Roll Hootenanny" in Pocono Vacation Park. Ezekiel and Brother Amos spotted Brother Hezekiah and Brother McMullen (who has since left the band) dressed in their Amish garb.
The appearance of the two newly defected Amish men "drew snickers and stares from most of the crowd," according to the web biography. Amos and Ezekiel invited them to sit down and friendships were quickly formed.
Soon, the band biography says, the men became "like brothers, sharing not only the bond of having left the Amish life behind, but also the deep mutual love of music, and together they delved deeply into the 16 years of American culture they missed, watching endless hours of classic MTV, listening to the radio, CDs, records, tapes ... anything they could get their hands on. But just listening and watching was not enough ... the Brothers soon decided to form a band that combined their love of the modern world and their traditional upbringing."
Though the band formed 11 years ago, it didn't really take off until three years later, Ezekiel says. Strangely, it was around the same time that the cover band market began to dry up during the financial crisis.
"There were so many bands and so many clubs, especially when we started playing around New York and New Jersey," Ezekiel says. "I think people kind of got sick of seeing the same bands playing the same songs in the same kind of shirt … and all that kind of stuff. There were a lot of great bands doing that, but we kind of came along when people were primed for something different."
Ezekiel admitted that his choice of occupation came as a "big shock" to his parents.
"My parents are cool enough that they're happy I'm happy," Ezekiel says. "Of course, at first, one of the whole ideas of the Amish is staying away from things that are worldly. Modern music is a big thing because of the morals that it's believed that a lot of it conveys."
Yes, he does occasionally go back to Lancaster County to visit. Brother Ezekiel has not been shunned.
"There's kind of a loophole in the Amish faith that you're not bound by the church's laws until you're baptized," he says. "Because I made the choice not to go back and join church, I'm able to go back and visit. I'm able to go back and see my family."
But like a lot of parent-child relationships in the modern world, not everything is completely smooth either.
"You'll get a lot of guilt trips," Ezekiel says. "The good thing is you're not going to get phone calls to make you feel guilty."