Gratitude

[jancivil]

Old people story telling time, eh?

country bar with the chicken wire in front of the stage.

I had a country band for a fairly short period of time. Actually a weird group which did a few different things.
One was playing it completely straight, Hank Williams Lonesome Whistle Blow and like that*; another was progressive pop country arrangements; I had a beautiful arrangement of Wichita Lineman, which brought in another problem, its two-chord vamp where I would solo on guitar for a while. And we had other 'art' elements.
The drummer played standing up. Ok, so this before there was any trend of ironic country or anything of the sort. The drummer was married to Jill Olsen who started Red Meat a few yrs later. *We had a real-world pedal steel player who had I think only played C&W music. We cultivated an image and everything. The lead singer looked fantastic, nearly fully covered in tattoos and they were fantastic tattoos, done by Broadway Bill in SF.

But there is a point to the stupid story: a friend I worked with had a popular group locally, Short Dogs Grow (I actually saw that as the name of a wifi network in Oakland recently) so through that we got a gig opening for MENTORS. This was very wrong; but, this being a conceptual sort of project I decided ok maybe we can work with this. We did not expect to be received well by the MENTORS crowd. If youse do not know what that is... the leader was called El Duce, ok. This fvcking guy:

(Mentors' You Axed For It was released nationally in 1985 around the same time as the PMRC hearings in Washington. Senator Al Gore and his wife Tipper actually read the lyrics to the Mentors' "Anal Vapors" during the proceedings, giving them the notoriety they had been craving since their inception.)

We could not have been more wrong for this crowd. There is no way I can convey the reality of this situation, you had to be there. Google: El Duce on Jerry Springer.

We were actually working out how to get a chicken wire fence up for the gig. We expected real trouble. But something happened to me which put us out of business before the gig which is another story. A regret, I wish I could say we did this and lived. Gratitude!

[herodotus]

Old people story telling time, eh?

I found this video of my first band, the Blu Hippos. We were 15 year old punks who used to lead off for bands like the Replacements and Husker Du, and once, Fear.

Taken in 1981 by a film student at the U of M, it is deeply redolent of its time, down to the cheesy countdown at the beginning.

The video has only the guitarist/singer's name on it because he went on to a mildly successful local career before eventually becoming a (putatively) homeless person.

https://youtu.be/KZOKfxLYY4I

[jancivil]

wouldna pegged you as a punker

Closest thing to it when I was that age will have been MC5, not my thing at all. Our little band at that age may as well have been punk we were so shitty. Actually I started to get fairly good on guitar at around 15 but the first band I started, I had just started and we knew nothing.

[herodotus]

wouldna pegged you as a punker.

I wasn't. I really didn't fit at all. Did you see my hair?

But I was playing at First Ave when I was 15. That was kind of cool.

Mostly, though, it sucked.

[jancivil]

Talk about not fitting in:

I just found this in a video, from searching Short Dogs Grow.

Screen Shot 2018-06-19 at 11.23.37 AM.png

Brazos Balladeers. "From Waco, TX". Uh, ah, not so much. LOL. I fabricated a little myth about it. Rio Brazos, in Tejas, for no particular reason I can recall. We sold - profited from - teeshirts because the teeshirts were that cool. The lead singer worked in a silkscreen factory and our only cost was the shirts which we bought in bulk.

That was the gig, or not-gig for us.

Legend had it I had my middle finger cut off. I was left in charge of an office party at Perfect Courier. Unclear as to why in retrospect, other than I actually lived in the office at the time. Was I dispatcher then? DEF not manager.
Someone broke a window in between adjoining offices and I got my hand in the way. The tip of my middle finger was cut off but I lost the use of it for like 3 weeks.

[vurt]

i lost the tip of a finger once
mine was work related, less rock n roll unless you count drinking codeine cough medicine while sheet metal working rock n roll

[herodotus]

I like stories like herodotus's as we all come to obstacles and somehow our passion always finds a way to seep through and find it's way out

I like your stories too, Hink.

[Hink]

I like stories like herodotus's as we all come to obstacles and somehow our passion always finds a way to seep through and find it's way out

I like your stories too, Hink.