Okay – I'm trying to get as much of this done as I can before I head down to Honky Tonk night at the Maltese. I am excited – I'm meant to be interviewing Three Fingers Whiskey tonight. Their latest CD, “Pleasure the Drinker,” is hot off the presses and they are going to be throwing their CD-release ho-down extravaganza at Duffy's on Friday the 24th. Three Fingers Whiskey are a rarity these days – a straight up country rock band. They're not new country, alt-country, or Americana – what they are is country. But you can read more about them in the interview.
In the mean-time there is a lot to write about and sometimes blasting it off in this short span of time with a definite start and stop point can be just the way to go about it – similar to tearing off a band aid or ripping out your itching stitches. It is best to slug hard off the bottle, get your head swimming, and then do it. It is not that it will be any less painful, hell, it will likely be more painful if you follow this approach. But the decision making period will be decidedly brief. It is my firm belief that we all fear pain a lot more than we should. Like Patrick Swayze quips in the movie Road House - “pain don't hurt.” Of course the cute doctor lady ends up smirking when she is injecting Novocaine into his wound and he grimaces. Theories are just theories. Life is for the living.
Easter Blows Up!
Easter weekend was a mash-up – Saturday I guzzled hand grenades, Mickey's Big Mouths, on the east bank of the Sacramento River a little bit north of the small town that is Los Molinos. Later I gazed into the dancing flames of a beautiful simmering bonfire. I saw good friends and made new friends in spite of myself. Easter is one of those bizarre holidays – quasi-religious, quasi-pagan, entirely alcoholic these days. It has really become a post-modern event. Thanks to Johnathan Troxler's terrific and terrifying paintings I will never get the image of the crucified Easter Bunny out of my head. That and the three stooges strumming the guitar in a manger for baby Jesus and Santa Claus. This is Troxler's older work – to me it doesn't point to any particular warp or hiccup in his character – instead it asks of us a simple and direct question: What kind of sick freaks are we? We go through life thinking this craziness is normal – going to church in the morning to celebrate the resurrection of a man who was nailed to a cross, and then spending the afternoon collecting colorful, dyed, hard-boiled eggs and gorging ourselves on chocolate and Pabst. On the 69th Day God looked around and said “What the fuck have I done?” Then he took a long nap and he hasn't awoken yet. Look out because when he does finally get out of bed the Big Guy is going to be pissed!
Fire sale at Cafe Coda!
There's a benefit show this weekend for Concow-based musician Garr1son. Garr1son has been recording his own brand of the creepy Concow blues forever but things turned grim when his recording studio and equipment was all destroyed in the fires last summer. The benefit is going to be held at Cafe Coda on Sunday, April 26th, and will feature a bevy of local musicians including the enigmatic Dan Cohen, the energetic Aubrey Debauchery and her Puke Boots, and the man of the day Garr1son himself. Just to add injury to injury though it turns out Garr1son recently busted both shoulders and as a result will have a stunt double filling in on guitar. Look out – it sounds like the curse of the drummers in Spinal Tap or some such thing.
This, that, up, down, right left. You say whiskey I say coffee – maybe a little of both. It doesn't take a long time to write a decent column. On the other hand – sometimes you can spend hours writing a piece of garbage. It once took me over a year to write one of the stupidest songs on Earth. It wasn't like I really spent a whole year on it – I just thought up this really dumb chorus and then took my own sweet time in building a song around it. Songs can be allowed to percolate that way – to simmer and stew until they are just the way they are going to be. It's a process like distillation but without the precautions regarding temperature, cleanliness and time. With a column there is no such luxury. The thing has to be started and finished in a whirlwind because goddammit we are capitalists and as capitalists we have deadlines that must be met!
madbob@madbob.com
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