A night at the Bama with Jackson Chase
Flora-Bama Lounge & Package | Perdido Key, Florida | August 6, 2026
Redneck Riviera
I’m married to a drummer who plays this establishment quite often and, as a working music photographer, I find myself here sometimes more than my husband. I can truthfully say there is nothing quite like the last great American roadhouse, the Flora-Bama Lounge & Package.
The famous honky tonk sits right on the Orange Beach, Alabama and Perdido Key, Florida line. The Bama, as I call it, is quite possibly the best bar-side spectating you’ll ever have while having multiple eargasms from the synchronized basslines and pure auditory euphoria of the Redneck Riviera.
Locals and sunburnt tourists. Bachelorette parties, birthday bashes, divorce shindigs and the oldies but the goodies slinging down Bushwackers. Bikinis and board shorts. Crop tops and pantyhose. The sounds of the salty sea and frosty drinks. Music spilling out across the stages. Overhead lines inside the Dome filled with bras that have been thrown as a rite of passage, or maybe just good party antics. Graffitied walls carry messages of love, longing and remembrance that somebody was there. Band stickers cover doors, walls and soundboards, little pieces of evidence immortalizing performances at one of the most recognizable live music establishments on the Gulf Coast.
You could probably clean the place up and ruin half of what makes it worth visiting.
The vibe is like no other.
There are venues where everybody seems to arrive for the same reason. The Flora-Bama has never really been one of them. Someone came specifically for the band. Someone else wandered over because they heard a guitar through a doorway. Somebody is celebrating. Somebody is recovering from whatever they celebrated yesterday. A stranger will talk to you like you went to high school together and five minutes later disappear into another room.
Then another song starts somewhere.
That was the Bama waiting on Jackson Chase.
If the Walls Could Talk
Cluttered corners and walkways of the Tent Stage were filled with gear carts, guitar cases, drum equipment, water bottles and empty beer cans. Band members were gear checking and cutting up. Nothing looked staged for effect because none of it needed to be. This was working-musician clutter, the kind that gathers around a stage when one band is tearing down, another is getting ready and nobody has much room to do either.
The thick, hot summer air and late night at the Bama were setting up for a true Bama night. The atmosphere was definitely buzzin’ and the late-night debauchery was a-brewin’.
Austin Bohannon Band was playing under the bra line in the Dome. The legendary Alabama Big Earl was upstairs in the Main Room. Dalton Bush Band could be heard somewhere in the distance, reduced from the Tent Stage to a muffled thud and rolling crowd noise coming through the walls.
At the Flora-Bama, silence never really gets a turn.
Every doorway seemed to carry another song. Every hallway had somebody moving gear, holding a drink, looking for their people or heading toward whichever stage sounded best at that particular second. The Tent Stage had its own little world forming inside all of it, cables underfoot, musicians making last-minute adjustments and the crowd beginning to gather closer.
Then came the stage swap.
Gear moved. Levels were checked. Vocal feedback squealed through the room and disappeared just as quickly. The usual little problems of getting a live band ready were handled one by one while the rest of the Bama kept roaring around them.
There is something about watching those few minutes before a set starts. Nobody in the crowd is thinking about monitor levels or cables or whether a microphone is behaving. They are just waiting for the music.
Once everything settled into place, Jackson Chase and his band were ready to give it to them.
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Southern Soul
Jackson Chase is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He has been singing since he was 3 years old, and he definitely has a flair for it. Jackson Chase’s dad, Matthew, said these guys are kinda like The Eagles meet the Black Crowes.
That’s a combo I’ve never heard before, ha!
Once the stage swap finished and the soundcheck worked out all the kinks and vocal feedback, it was on.
Chase performed a wide variety of cover songs that were reinvented enough to fit naturally into his own sound. “Santeria,” “Billie Jean,” “This Love” and “Purple Rain” were the notables. Four songs that come from very different corners of music somehow made sense together once Chase and the band got ahold of them.
It placed the crowd in the palm of Chase’s hand.
A sea of shifting faces turned toward the stage while voices came back at him word for word. You could watch people recognize a song, lean in and then stay there once the band began putting its own shape around it. The collective energy of the crowd wasn’t just something you could feel. You could see exactly where it was coming from.
Then Chase started sprinkling in several of his originals, including “Ain’t No Money,” “Purdy,” “Money Broke” and “Break It Fast.”
That should have been the point where a room full of people waiting on familiar songs wandered toward the bar.
They didn’t.
The crowd moved and vibed as if they’d listened to these songs all their lives.
That reaction said more about Chase than another cover ever could. Familiar songs may have pulled people toward the stage, but his own material kept them there. The grit in his voice, the rhythmic guitars and the Southern soul running underneath the band gave the originals enough personality that they never felt like interruptions between the songs everyone already knew.
One of those originals deserved a closer listen.
Break It Fast
Chase is planning to release his new single “Break It Fast” in September.
It is a fast-paced banger about falling for someone who might not feel the same, but the song works better when Chase doesn’t make heartbreak precious. There’s anxiety in it. Impatience too. If something is going to end badly, there is almost a plea to skip the slow torture and get on with the damage.
Chase’s lyrics describe a woman’s beauty as being “smooth as lighting”, contrasted with his heart shattering “like broken glass swept off a front porch.”
The second image is the one that stuck.
Broken glass swept off a front porch isn’t romantic. It’s ordinary and slightly ugly. Somebody still has to come along afterward with a broom and deal with the pieces. That plainspoken image suits Chase much better than some polished declaration about a broken heart. His songs feel strongest when they sound close enough to everyday Southern speech that somebody could have said the line before realizing it belonged in a song.
The lyrics were paired with an explosive backline, rhythmic guitars and Chase’s soulful, gritty tone. The arrangement kept the song moving quickly enough that its narrator didn’t have much time to sit around feeling sorry for himself. That tension between the subject and the playing gives “Break It Fast” its personality. The heart may be headed for the floor, but the rhythm section isn’t slowing down to watch it happen.
So honey, if you’re gonna break his heart, you better break it and break it fast.
The song also helped clarify what the rest of the set had been suggesting. Chase’s strongest lane isn’t pristine country and it isn’t straightforward Southern rock. There is soul in his phrasing, bite in the guitars and enough rhythmic movement underneath the songs to keep them from getting stuck in one genre.
That explains why “Billie Jean” could survive beside “Santeria,” why “Purple Rain” could show up without feeling completely absurd and why Chase’s originals didn’t shrink when they followed songs everybody already knew.
He wasn’t trying to prove he could sing anything.
He was showing what happened when everything came through him.
Afterglow
It’s always fun going back to the Bama. It’s a home away from home for me, even if it means leaving late at night, having to be at work in six hours and maybe getting four hours of sleep.
That math never looks good the next morning.
Still, the crowd is always wanting to be a part of what you are doing and what is happening onstage. It keeps things in perspective.
There is a certain point late at night when the Flora-Bama stops feeling like a collection of individual rooms. The music bleeding through the walls, the drinks moving across the bars, conversations getting louder and strangers leaning toward the stage all become one big, strange organism running on humidity, music and questionable sleep decisions.
What makes you forget about life for a while when you are under the stars on the Redneck Riviera?
Maybe it’s the bartenders pouring and serving up those feel-good drinks. Maybe it’s the sound technicians giving the bands the production they need while most of the room never thinks about how much work is happening behind those boards. Maybe it’s a band landing on the right song and bringing strangers together long enough to sing the same hook, groove, vibe and let loose.
Then some of those strangers wake up the next day, find the band’s page and buy the merch.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that transaction.
The crowd was hot and Jackson Chase brought a high-energy performance built on Southern soul, authentic groove, raw edges and driving rhythms. Those words only mean something because the set showed where they came from. The grit was in his vocal tone. The groove was underneath songs that moved from Sublime to Michael Jackson without losing the identity of the band playing them. The crowd responded just as strongly when Chase stopped leaning on songs they already knew.
They mirrored him.
There is a line in Chase’s own artist bio describing his music as sounding like “a NASCAR race being held on a track covered in duck fat.”
After watching this set, there may not be a more ridiculous description that somehow makes complete sense.
It swerved. It moved fast. It got a little greasy.
Chase’s voice and songs are more soulful than they are polished, and that is exactly where they should stay. Sanding off those rough edges would remove some of the personality that made the Tent Stage work in the first place. With new music on the horizon, if you have a chance to see him, do it.
If you have a chance to experience the Bama, do it.
There is nothing quite like the good times, good vibes and doing it right on the line. A few hours earlier, those graffitied walls, stickers, bras and battered corners were just part of the scenery again. By closing time, another band had added its noise to all the noise that came before it.
Then everybody eventually has to leave.
And when you do, always remember to push the button and look both ways before you get ready to cross the line.
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