Cosmic Country celebrates five years of inclusive, trippy country music

Five years ago, the Hideout’s talent booker at the time, Sullivan Davis, teamed up with producer and musician Dorian Gehrig to start the Cosmic Country Showcase. Their dream was to bring to life Gram Parsons’s philosophy of a welcoming, expansive, and absolutely trippy form of country music, freed of its hidebound and less imaginative old wooden box. Now hosted by angel-voiced and devilishly witty crooner Andrew Sa (who released a gorgeous EP of country covers in 2021), the showcase has a decidedly queer spin, and it presented some of the final performances by Sa’s mentor, the great Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country, before he died at age 78 in 2022. That sense of history and continuity informs the Cosmic Country Showcase and gives it a torch to carry through its crowd-pleasing and occasionally crowd-baffling revues.