Showtime #3 - The Men

You know it's been real fucking hot this summer but heat has never really been a bother to me, see i once spent 23 days straight working in a french fry stand that was hot as the devil's nut sack and in those 23 days the mercury did not dip below 90 one time so as you can see this summer is just like any other summer except that today for some reason i came home and started in on the beer cuz sometimes when it's hot and humid a man just wants a cold brew or two or three and really i didn't think i was gonna get around to this post tonight cuz hell three days in a row is damn near a record in these parts but one can only sit around and watch The Patriot or Deadliest Catch so many times before one starts to lose his marbles so here i am, heating pad on my creaky back (a bit to wicked of a workout) a couple of painkillers down and here goes...

Last friday these boys from Brooklyn showed up in town on their way to Chicago to play a big festival, a festival whose crowd would be infinitely bigger than the crowd they'd play to here in the burgh but since this was damn near a secret show with no advertising or announcement i figured it must have been a good stopping point between B-lynn and Chi-town, either way lucky us, see they played in a garage that supposedly is an art gallery/performance space but is really just a garage, complete with garage doors and everything, once again located in the hip little hood i used to live and play in before the burbs came calling and it's owned by a woman that the Furious one and i have known for years...

so i drove to get the Furious One, my partner in crime and the man the boyos call uncle, a finer human being you will never meet, and since due to some kind of dental mishap that caused me no grief but must of upset my endo and dendo i ended up with even more Viking ESers and so i tossed one to my partner and gobbled one myself and lit my first illicit cigarette of the night and drove on into the city to gig, of course since it was at this gallery it started late and we swung by the old roomies house, one BD Smash, and guzzled down some nice, cold PBR's and played some foosball, i bummed more cigarettes and then off we went...

Now the beauty of this gallery is that the place is BYOB, and so after spending a whopping $7 bucks to gain admission to see a kick ass band we walked down to the pizza joint where i scored a sixer of tall boy PBR's for another six and headed back to the gig to hear some local noise band and then a local punk band, sorta, see the place is tiny and loud and since the Furious One and i are getting old and we couldn't find any earplugs we decided to save our ears for the band we wanted to hear so we took our brew and ambled out and found a wall next to the joint on an alley and next to a used car lot and drank our beer and watched the cars coming and going over the Bloomfield Bridge while still being able to hear the bands and all the while basking in the hot and shitty night air, of course that was nothing compared to the sauna inside but that's okay cuz fucking rock and roll shows are supposed to be hot and sweaty especially for bands like this, it reminded me of my youth back in Clevo and the various dives and dumps and ethnic halls i traversed to see all sorts of bands both shitty and brilliant...

But in a nutshell The Men fucking rock, you see what started as a rather noisy and raucous band has become a rather refined, noisy and raucous band with almost everyone in the band taking turns on lead vocals and the guitars blazing and the bass pounding and the drummer going ape shit and it's the kind of shit that had this old man circling the kids and ready to unleash the Long Beach Strut on the goofy little hipsters, the funny thing being that there were only a few of us who even knew the sparse words to the songs but this wasn't a show about lyrics, this was a show about rawk, and man could these boys lock in, a bit Sonic Youth, a bit Krautrock, a bit 'Mats and countrified Stones when they wanted it but all of it was fucking good, hell the bass player went through two basses he was playing so hard so you know that even though the cats had big gigs the next two nights and could have mailed it in they didn't, they played to us 50 people like the did the next nights to crowds ten and twenty, say fifty times larger come sunday....

and what did we hear? well most of the new record which i highly recommend: Open Your Hear, Turn it Around, Candy (see below) Bataille, Oscillation, Animal, Ex-Dreams (see above) Cube, Lotus and a couple of more i can't remember, and since the place was small i got to hob knob wit the drummer and gee-tar player and they were swell fucking chaps, good guys who liked the old man telling them it reminded him of gigs from his youth which is the highest compliment i can give but not in some retro-fied air may i add, it was the energy and the raw power which i enjoyed and then i scored myself a $10 t-shirt, which if you've been to a show for any band these days is a fucking steal, of course since we drank all the beer and El Principal and another couple we knew showed up the Furious One had disappeared and then re-appeared with another six of High Life and we went back to the wall and say down and i bummed another smoke and we watched the traffic and basically yakked under the clear and starry sky about what a beautiful show it was...

and since my partner in crime and i were a bit in the bag, we walked over the the taco stand, the whole time drinking our last beers as we wandered down the street (which makes me long for my old hood where you could do just about anything and not get hassled for it) to score some carne asada tacos and soda to chill out with for a bit before rolling back to the burbs and calling it another great night... so far so good this summer... three bands, three different styles and not a dud in th bunch...

and since i sorta view this tune as one of my theme songs though i'm not quitting my job i'm getting the shit can i was jumping up and down when the band broke into it and it's not even a song about quitting a job more about not giving a shit and just doing what you want to do, be it write, paint, make music and the like and who really gives a fuck if you get famous or paid, really the reward is in the doing now ain't it and though it harkens towards those young days when i thought i was gonna take over the world i now know i just do what i do and what i'm most adept at doing is fucking living maaaan... i think.