SMR pt. 2

Righto! The Sky Mountain Revue is in full swing, and we’ve been
rumbling across Ohio and Indiana to sing our songs and shake down
walls. On Saturday the 25th we left Cincinnati for Dayton. The drive
was gorgeous, we gentlemen let our inner redneck tendencies run amuck
and we cruised farm bordered highways with the windows rolled down,
shirts stripped off, and music turned up. We’ve been playing Neil
Young’s song “Harvest Moon” as part of our acoustic set and the
scenery was too apropos to pass up, so we pulled over by a corn field
and made a little performance video – check it out.

In Dayton we played to a rambunctious, well-watered crowd at Blind
Bob’s bar down in the Oregon district. We were joined by some fellow
Nashvillains, our friends The Avery Set, who got everything moving
with their foot-stompin country rock. Once again, we were happy to see
new fans and old faithfuls in the crowd.

As we were wandering the Oregon district and investigating thrift
stores and music shops I met a homeless man named Mark August, the
“poet of Oregon [district]”. He’s been selling his poems on the corner
for many years. I’ll reprint one here, with his permission:

“Patience”
I sit here, I look down in my hands that used to work so hard and
provide for my family
And come home and hug the prettiest woman in the world
And sit down and play kid games with my kids
But now I can’t.
But if I ain’t got the patience of a tall boat mast holdin’ the sails of life
The boat mast will break
And the sails of life will blow away
And I will too.
Patience.

We left the club late that night and wandered to a country home where
we met Jennifer, our hostess for the evening, and crashed thankfully
on the carpets and couches, three or so in the morning.

On Sunday we drove to Muncie, Indiana for what would be one of the
most surreal days of our lives. We arrived at Doc’s Music Hall on time
and loaded in our gear. The place was spacious, with a nice big stage
and a huge PA. In the far corner on a small raised platform a fellow
was strumming and singing his folk songs to the bartender. There was
no one else there, and the bartender didn’t know what the deal was
with the music, so we just set up and sat around reading or practicing
(our usual routine). After a while the sound man showed up, long
enough to tell us he wasn’t working that evening and that we should
use the little raised platform and forego the big stage. We crammed
our stuff into that corner as another strum and singer prepared to
play for the bartender.

With a couple more hours to kill we drove over to our couchsurfing
spot. We entered a white two-story townhouse in the student
neighborhood and were enthusiastically greeted by some dudes, who
generously cooked us burgers and made us promise to play “Boomtown”
with them that night, which they said involved pingpong balls, a cup,
and loads of beer. Then they let out their pig.

Yup, they kept a little black pig as a pet, named Porkchop. He was
their vacuum cleaner, entertainment, and sixth roommate. We threw
potato chips at him, which he ate furiously; he squealed incessantly
every time someone picked him up, and could even squeal and eat at the
same time. Porkchop’s emotional state was either one of terror or
ecstasy. Unfortunately the woman who came once a week to vacuum had
discovered the pig and complained to the landlord, and we were
witnesses to Porkchop’s last night in the animal house. They were
going to give him to a friend, although a couple of times I heard the
suggestion that we just toss him on the grill. There is an inevitable
perversity that comes with keeping a pig in America, which these guys
had completely embraced. One of them had fed Porkchop a ham and cheese
hot pocket the day before, which he’d eaten shamelessly.

The guys also had a pet snake, a red corn snake, which they carried
around all curled up in their hands. As they said, they were trying to
keep Muncie interesting. When we left they were taking stock of the
beer, sending a friend to retrieve some vodka that had somehow
survived Saturday, and trying to remember if the grocery lifted the
Sunday ban on beer sales at midnight or 3 am.

We drove back to the club, which had collected a smattering of people
for Trivia Night, which we were due to follow. There were no more than
twenty people, but a relatively diverse crowd: punks and old folks,
hipsters and hip-hoppers, drunk friends and serious loners. A man came
in with a frisky black dog that seemed to prance around in an odd way,
until we realized that it only had three legs. We entered the
competition and held our own. I thought it would be easy work and a
laugh to make poems out of trivia answer sheets:

Yellow Black Death, Alderon,
marigold timpani in Istanbul,
piccolo placebo.

But during trivia, we had a crisis. A man approached us and told us
that he was a musician, and that he had been booked to play that
evening at the same time. We were double booked. The only person
actually working at Doc’s was still the bartender, and he didn’t know
a thing about booking; the guy who’d booked us wasn’t picking up the
phone. It was a shit sandwich. They eventually gave up and left, which
made sense because 10% of bar sales split two ways on a Sunday night
aint worth scrapping over. The drummer and tour manager were really
nice (Chris said he was a weak tour manager if he couldn’t hustle us
out of the spot), but the singer was moody and pissed about the whole
situation. He was emanating bad vibes, which we tried to shake off as
we continued to put up a fight in the trivia game.

After losing trivia and putting up with the mc’s funny but offensive
jokes about Hitler and Kentucky incest we played, to a crowd of about
seven (including the bartender). We actually had a lot of fun, and
played songs from our acoustic set that we usually don’t do electric,
like “Harvest Moon” (during which a cute young couple slow danced) and
“Friend of the Devil”. We’ve also been working out a new song called
“Sky Mountain Blues”, which emerged during a studio jam, and we gave
it a whirl. During our show the drunk trivia losers danced, the three
legged dog pranced, and a man we dubbed The Growler came into our
lives. He was drunk, bearded, and ready to party. His voice was a
nearly incomprehensible growl, like a rusty tablesaw, and he roared
enthusiastic praise at all our songs. When we played “The Alchemist”
he gave an appreciative “urrrungahahhh” during Kristen’s violin
cadenza, and after the show kept shouting, “whiskey, taker shotter
whiskey whimme” at us. When Julian declined he said, “well, at least
pet mah dog”, which we were happy to do.

We loaded up and headed back to the house. Most of the fellows were
asleep. When Joey and I headed upstairs to see if we could hunt up
some brew, if not some full-on Boomtown, everyone had crashed. So we
opened the fridge, which was empty except for mustard, ketchup, and
the last two inches of a handle of Skoal vodka. For the sake of it
Joey and I quickly took two shots of the stuff, me chasing with a glob
of mustard on my finger, and Joey taking it raw. I asked him how he
could manage that, and he blamed it on Alston, where the Berklee kids
went to drink in Boston. Julian declared that we were his idols, and
we all went to bed. That night Joey and I went dream-clubbing until
dawn, when the sun rose in our dream and in real life. We left before
any of the guys in the house were awake and headed for Wisconsin,
still dazed and confused about what had just happened.

In our eardrums recently: Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Squirrel
Nut Zippers, Outkast, Beach Boys, Yes (which is awesome) [this opinion
is not endorsed by The Young Republic –ed.], Metallica, Iron Maiden

The Young Republic plays Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”

~ by The Young Republic on September 29, 2010.