Tuesday, May 18, 2010

5.15.2010, oak cliff/5.16.2010, ftw

i asked for a weekend off, and for my sins they gave me one.

the stoogeaphilia show at tradewinds social club wound up being a goodun. was a little dubious when we showed up to load in, as the parking lot is the size of your ass pocket, and there was a sign warning patrons against parking in the lot across the street, as the owner of that lot was out of town and had failed to instruct his tow truck driver on the arrangement with trades. plus i forgot that every bar looks like shit in daylight.

we walked over to a taqueria to get some chow. the counter girl spoke only spanish until my sweetie spoke spanish back to her. then she switched to english. barbacoa burritos were succulent and filling.

then we discovered that tradewinds doesn't have a p.a. i saw hank tosh from the bipolar express, who'd played the night before, and he said they'd brought their own. this could have been a deal breaker, but as luck would have it, wanz dover was spinning records between sets and agreed to let us use his p.a. for voxxx. if we'd had singers less chill than ray liberio and daron beck (the latter performing in the guise of his "country" alter ego, d. wayne grubb), it might still have been a problem, but both of those guys like their voxxx low in the mix. in fact, once it was clear that wanz's p.a. was gonna be adequate for the task, daron told his accompanist dave coates (a.k.a. cut-throat thompson) to turn up.

d. wayne plays an open tuned guitar layed across his lap with a bar slide, while cut-throat strums away at the chords, using the identical rhythmic attack on every song. their repertoire was an unlikely batch of covers, starting out with iggy's "real wild child" and including some misfits toons and the motels' "only the lonely" -- the last note d. wayne sings on this one is otherworldly, like elvis' version of "blue moon" or something roy orbison might have sung. (daron says, "anything's country if you sing it low enough and slow enough.") hank tosh said they sounded like "an acoustic beasts of bourbon," and i wouldn't disagree. their between-songs dialogue was worth the price of admission all by itself.

hembree and i were sweating the size of the crowd -- not a lot of folks were there while d. wayne was playing, but a few filtered in while wanz was spinning a nice mix of garage, krautrock, and assorted oddities like beefheart's "click clack." and this:



hembree said later he counted 10 people; i counted twice that number, but some of them had come with us from the fort and some were probably regs at the trades. still, the bar must have done well, because both we and wanz got a payout -- hopefully daron too, but they cut out early -- which wasn't part of the original "pizza and beer" deal. (the pizza turned out to be excellent, too.) daniel gomez from goodwin (who lives a few blocks from the trades) was there, as were clay stinnett from the black dotz, alex atchley from naxat, and oak cliff photog david worthington.

before we hit, richard hurley said, "we're going to have to stand right here [indicating a spot in the middle of the floor]; it's gonna be a punk rock show." and for sure, it was. something about proximity to the audience makes us play harder, like we did on our stockyards extravaganza with the dangits. the sound in the room was good and tight, and we know how to balance our sound live. i could actually hear richard, which i can't lots of places we play.

the two sets we played were (i thought) a pretty good cross-section of what we do. daron guested on keys on "raw power" and "i wanna be your dog" to end the first set, while wanz blew tenor sax on "1970" and "funhouse" in the second. would dig to play the trades again, and do more shows with both d. wayne and the black dotz, when the stoogeband resumes gigging in september. (we're knocking it on the head for the summer after the fort worth burrito project benefit at lola's 6th on 5.30.)

i don't know if it was a function of the week i'd just had, which was filled with the kind of emotional highs that can be draining, even though they're good, but i wound up sleeping most of the following day, rising only to attend a graduation party at eagle mountain lake for the daughter of one of my sweetie's coworkers (who went to high school with clay stinnett and justin robertson; uncle walt was right!) and watch funny face with my sweetie later in the evening. a good weekend overall.

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