Raleigh
Temple Grandin
Quail Ridge Books–Grandin, a Colorado State University professor and New York Times bestselling author, is also one of the world’s most noted autistics, a scholar who applied her inquisitive mind and her gift for storytelling to 1996’s Thinking in Pictures, one of the world’s first glimpses inside autism. Her latest, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, explores the minds of animals through attempted empathy. She reads at 7 p.m.
Robert Randolph
Disco Rodeo–Village Voice has called Derek Trucks’ six-string slides “the holiest guitar in the west,” but I’m more interested in the sacred-cum-secular sounds of Robert Randolph, a New Jersey hotshot whose 13-string pedal steel guitar evokes the ebullience of the House of God church in which he was raised (and from which “sacred steel” emerged). Randolph’s Family Band (composed of his cousins and friends) rolls like a brotherhood, potent and possessed of a single drive, pushing songs about marching on into sweaty celebrations. Preach. The $20 show begins at 8:30 p.m. with Steel Train. —Grayson Currin
