HOME    CATALOGUE    NEWS    LINKS    MAIL    FLAMING FORUM    CALENDAR

 

BJW News

 

 

Fall '07: THE ALBUM IS OUT, FERCHRISSAKE!!

 

  We are celebrating the release of the new BJW album, "Dark Ride", with a pair of shows in the Twin City area; Friday, Oct. 19th at the Blue Note Lounge in OKC, and Saturday, Nov. 17th at The Mercury Lounge in Tulsa.  BJW has decided to forgo the long period of foreplay with a semi-existent independent label followed by mass mailings, dismal sales, bitter finger-pointing and semi-mutual partings of the ways and just put the damn thing out on the edge of the stage ourselves.  Mind you, none of the icky things in the last sentence have ever happened to US, we've just heard some things about "the biz"........

 

 

HRW AND EAST COAST TOUR ‘07

 

  This was the year I had been waiting for.  HRW usually falls on or before the 4th of July, and I have to catch a plane out Sunday to catch the tail end of the festival.  Not so this time.  July 6, 7, and 8.  I drive out with the boys.  We have Virginia Beach, Richmond, Asbury Park, Coney Island, and Otto’s Shrunken Head on Manhattan.  I was also in the final throes of pulling off my end of the Okie Twist-Off, OKC’s first 12-band kustom culture shindig.  I was responsible for making sure the venue had their licensing, getting the flyers proofed and sent, confirming all the bands, and arranging production.  When I got home from the tour, the event would be 3 weeks away.  Two of those weekends we would be gigging, and on one I would be having Dexter’s 5th birthday party.  July and August seemed more tightly packed than comfortable.  I had no one to blame but myself. 

 

  I want to talk about the bands.  I’m not a music journalist.  I’ll tell some cute stories about the tour later, but at HRW it was about the bands.

 

Southpaw- All my favorite honky-tonk played by all my favorite people.  Usually no-drum quasi-acoustic country stuff either sounds weak or is played by archivists or stupid hippies.  This sounded big, loud, well-played, and joyous. 

 

The Bo-Stevens- Speaking of country, this big fucker might as well have written the book.  Does it right with a smile.

 

Iron Head- Black leather smeared mascara fist pumpin amp humpin RRROOOOCCKKKK!!!!  Not very country….

 

The Butchers- While no one was looking, these three drunk assholes have turned into a band. 

 

Jimmy and the Teasers- Wet and refreshing as always.  A long discourse on Miss Jenny Tonic shall follow in the tour section…

 

Hearts and Daggers- Floored me.  Woody Guthrie now.  It’s hard to do stuff that’s sweeping and stark and sad and powerful without looking like a cunt, and this guy didn’t for a second. 

 

Bettie after Midnight- the best kind of girl rock: the kind where you close your eyes and say, “hey, this shit is really good”, and then you open your eyes and say, “hey, they’re hot, too.”  Between songs they talked like they were in pep club.  It was neat.

 

Four Barrel Ghost- Had me scrambling to remember their name.  It rocked.  Trust me.  Buy the fucking CD.

 

Lords of The Highway- One of the only bands that deserve to have an upright bass….use it or lose it…..

 

The Heels- God fucking damn.  Creepy Scotty can play guitar like a motherfucker.  The whole band rocks. 

 

Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival- You see 47 3-D backlit Jesus mirrors on stage, hear the scratchy cheap organ gospel music intro and see the cardboard tube drum kit and all the CB mikes and megaphones, and you’re thinking to yourself, “God in heaven, I’m really wanting for this to be good but Bob Log is Bob Log and this is going to suck.”  Then these two foam-trucker-hat wearing goobers come out and proceed to TEAR IT UP!!  First, they have a full sound for one guitar and a improvised drum kit. Second, they rhymed “GATES OF HELL” with “THINGS AREN’T GOING SO WELL”.  Third, the guitar player did a two-point plant on the drum kit and the drummer’s head.  Over-the-top shtick is like an upright bass…..make it work or leave it at home…..

 

Sasquatch and the Sickabillies- Man, what a disappointment.  You see some guy put on a kickass show loaded with exaggerated self-regard and bravado(covered David Allen Coe AND Roger Miller, drawing deep from the ego-well), and you’re thinking to yourself, “man, the meat is filling the bun here, but he’s like got to be one of the biggest assholes on the planet, some front men are like that, it’s how they roll…”, and you see your bass player talking to him as he’s loading out and you force yourself to talk to him because some of the OKC contingent was really interested in having him come down and he’s like one of the nicest guys you’ve talked to all weekend.  The fucking phony.

 

The Flat Tires- Good set.  He seems like he knows how to beat THE SHIT out of his girlfriend…..

 

The Coffin Lids- One of my favorite bands from last year.  I DIDN’T GET TO SEE A GODDAMN NOTE!!!!

 

Tales From The Tour

 

  Virginia Beach-  We played at the seafood joint that Candysnatcher Larry books.  I always think I am not hungry, then everyone gets food and I decide I am hungry.  I usually do not eat, though, because if I eat very soon before going on I find what I ate back in my mouth while I’m trying to sing.  Anyway, the story is about she-crab soup.  It was a cream soup, a little thinner than clam chowder with some red spice mix that I can’t recall the name of sprinkled across the top.  The body of the soup seemed to come mostly from crab, little bits of shell and cartilage here and there, and a flavor that was just profound.  I imagine this being the bisque that Amy Wong so desperately wanted aboard the Titanic, only to be soup-blocked by her parents and the fat kid.  I hope she finds hers.  I found mine.  Oh yeah, we played a gig, too.  It was okay.

 

Virginia Beach Play Day and The Jenny Tonic Factor-  We woke up in the motor inn to address the front end noise the Winghead van had started making back in North Carolina.  Steve was frustrated and overwhelmed; I was glad we had a day off in a city that had more than a truck stop and a shady tree mechanic to deal with it.  The doorguy at the seafood joint had recommended a garage that a friend of his ran;  come Tuesday morning, the garage was unlisted and the doorguy was not answering his cell.  Pep Boys was our only option, and they had 2 days to hustle parts.  What we had hoped was a simple bearing wound up being a bearing, fried spindle and rotor, but the tab was not enough to send us into extreme depression, especially since we had decided not to press 1000 CDs before the tour.  We spent Tuesday frolicking in the sea foam like idiots and courting melanoma due to lack of sunscreen.  We ate BIG at some AYCE seafood buffet Tuesday night, which had more that sufficient tonnage of fresh oysters and shrimp but a prefab roux-heavy she-crab soup that made the bowl I had had the previous evening all the more memorable. 

  Now, for no real reason, the subject abruptly shifts to Jenny Tonic, the Teasers’ new bassist.  The four-string slot in Jimmy and The Teasers has been filled by some memorable characters:  the dirty blonde who was trouble, the pretty blonde who was no trouble at all until Dave Quick got her pregnant and she couldn’t reach around the bass any more, the REALLY pretty blonde who had a penis and then replaced the bassist in the Cogburns who didn’t, the really big guy who was cool and played like a motherfucker,  the quiet guy from California who we always liked and always will, and the girl who I never heard a note from, but whose poorly timed and poorly written note has eternally enshrined her in the Teaser Pantheon as The Fourth Wheel.

  Meeting a new Teaser bass player is always like an episode of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.  What will she be like?  Will she like us?  Will she try to drive a wedge in between us and Bill Bixby?  In all this change, will we be lost in the shuffle? 

  Jenny is tall, and doesn’t seem to feel the need to fill every room she is in.  She plays well, and I like to watch her hands when she plays because she’s crisp without being prissy. I expect to be hated by everyone I meet, and expect the band to be tolerated by everyone we meet, but by the end of the tour Jenny Tonic felt like family.  I hope she sticks around, and if she quits I hope she writes a letter with a line like, “Listen guys, it’s the bottom of the ninth inning here and it’s time to gather our clubs and punt…………..”

(Now that I think of it, maybe Jenny only LOOKS tall because Jimmy is short and Val isn’t really standing up…..)

 

Richmond- Richmond shows up, Richmond represents.  D-Ray, Meester Laguna, Catfish, all the people who say at HRW that they are going to be there ARE there in Richmond.  The club had this kickass menu with all these super burgers and fried macaroni and the girl kept telling me that the food was great and the owner really took it seriously and we waited a half an hour and she came back out and said the stove had blown up and the kitchen was closed and our orders were not going to be filled.

 

Fuck.

 

We stayed with D-Ray, who has the fattest basset hound in the known universe.  I paid my bills on his computer.  Everyone else stayed on the back porch and got smashed.  Through the course of making an honest living, D-Ray has had a lot of bad shit happen to his body and maintains both the honest living and that thing called rock.  My hat is off. 

 

Asbury Park- Going up the east coast from Virginia to New Jersey was going to take 5 hours by standard estimates.  The fucking hellhole that is I-95 took us eight hours and change.  I was certain we were going to show up and get yelled at and told to go home.

  Not the case.  The soundman was new, as I remember, but knew his shit and told us to get on stage as quickly as we could.  The stage occupies the center 3 lanes of the Asbury Lanes, which is about a 15 lane center next to an old movie theater next to a bunch of crumbling deco hotels next to a nearly deserted seaside resort that got all fucked up during a nasty and lengthy race riot in 1970.  The Asbury Lanes are ‘50s boomerang beautiful from in to out and end to end.  We had a good show with a pack of kids enjoying us, and after our set I went to get a coke and this young black scenester girl starts telling me that she enjoyed our set and the way I finessed the theremin I was probably a great lover.  Two days later, I came up with my response:

 

“Darlin’, lovin’ with me is like a straight edge comp:  Minor Threat, Seven Seconds……..”

 

  While Jimmy and The Teasers were playing they were showing The Big Lebowski on the screen behind them and they played well and after the show we bowled until three or four am and then went to sleep in the vans on the street in front of the club and then woke up and a guy who was with the movie theatre next door was showing films for a black film festival and showed us the projection room and all this stuff from the ruins of the casino and the theatre he had in the basement and he worked for the Stone Pony as well or some shit but urban ruin exploring is the greatest especially in a town that is mostly ruins and we got caught in a fireman’s funeral procession leaving town.

 

Coney Island- We got to Sean’s then went somewhere and did something and then went to Coney Island and I honestly don’t fucking remember.  It is all a blur.  I remember Val bought a Nathan’s hot dog that was full of either weave shavings or cat hair.  She thought it was disgusting.  I thought it was free lunch.  I am Dr. Zoidburg, god dammit.  Eddie Lee caught up with us, Marilyn Kreiss and her new beau Eric caught up with us, we caught up with local boy Donny Vomit who now MCs the Coney Island Freak Show, we caught up with Insectavora, we played at Cha-Cha’s on the boardwalk, the owner of Cha-Cha’s was about to kill all of us but mostly Sean because he thought it was going to be a country-rockabilly night instead of whatever Jimmy/BJW/The Butchers could be construed as, and while it would be very entertaining for me to rip on the owner of Cha-Cha’s because he’s such a character, I refuse to because HE PAID US WHAT WE ASKED HIM TO WHEN HE DID NOT LIKE US AND HAD NO SELF INTEREST REASON TO DO SO.  It was a bumpy ride, but so was the Cyclone and the fireworks show was better than the one I saw in OKC on the 4th.  I hope they don’t destroy Coney Island, it is a gas.

 

Manhattan-  We fucked around NYC daytime Saturday(that may be when I got the free Nathan’s furburger), and then found our way from Sean’s Brooklyn pad to Otto’s Shrunken Head on Manhattan.  We pulled in front of the club just as parking was switching from metered to free, so we all got FREE STREET PARKING IN MANHATTAN!!!!  If that happens, the gig and the 4 before it can suck and the tour is technically a success.  Otto’s is the coolest tiki bar in the world.  Butch got their signature Shrunken Head cocktail in the Elvis-meets-Frankenstein shrunken head tiki glass with all the fruit wedges and plastic monkeys and tinsel garnishes and they take it serious but not too serious and do it right.  Adam was there, Lanceomatic the atheist was there, The Memphis Mortician was there, a bunch of Japanese tourists were there, and the set was one of the funnest I’ve ever played, one of the ones where you finish and say, “Okay, THAT is why I’m 44 years old and losing money driving all across the goddamn country doing this stupid shit!  That set right there!  That is why!”

  As a non-drinker, I am often the designated driver from the venue to wherever we are staying.  In the olden days, I would drive the Teaser van and Steve would drive the Winghead van.  Now that Steve has added heavy drinking to the list of things that he does with much gusto but little aptitude(you know, like he plays the saw), a driver has been taken out of the Last Call Crawl.  This problem was solved by taking only one van from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but on the way back to Brooklyn the true level of human debauchery plumbed by my cohorts would be revealed.

  As I stated earlier, I am a designated driver.  I refuse, however, under any circumstances, to navigate from a map.  Give me clear, crisp, “right on 89th, left on Prospect, left again on 85th Place just past Home Depot” on paper or a front passenger seat, “go right here, it will be a couple of blocks, get right but not yet because it turns into a right only lane before you want to turn” verbal and I will do anything.  Jimmy promised to be this man.  Everyone else was in the back of the van giggling like Cub Scouts on their first night at Camp Itchanookie while Jimmy was trying to do me back to Brooklyn from memory and failing miserably.  Then out comes the map.  Jimmy squints.  Jimmy gets close to it.  Jimmy gets far from it.  Jimmy has me pull over so he can get under a lamp pole in a park and look at it.  Then everyone else gets out to look at it.  I am beyond amused.  Jimmy is too drunk to read a map.  It would do everyone more good if it was in Braille. 

  After much squinting, belching, and a few phone calls to Sean, we wound up back in Brooklyn.  I think it is five am.  We load the Winghead van, do sloppy goodbyes, then get Sean’s simple directions for getting to the Holland Tunnel.  But we miss it.  Twice.  Then we find it, and the cops tell us we can’t go through with a trailer.  So we have to go to the Lincoln Tunnel.  Which we can’t find.  When we do, the big funnel onto the Jersey Turnpike has a big sign that says “FREEWAY MATRIX CLOSED-USE” blah blah someshit drive through Hoboken and almost get sideswiped by some stupid bitch who doesn’t know how a two-turning-lane intersection works.  Didn’t mean to involve you in all that, Sparky.  No more drama that I can remember, we’re all back now.

 

 

 

 

 

06/07:  ATTACK OF THE COCONAUTS!!!

  This summer, look for BJW to play monthly tiki sets in the Silver Dollar Lounge at the 66 Bowl under the moniker The Coconauts, featuring none other than Mike Haynes on percussion and the return of DJ Eddie Lee on sonic enhancement, intermission interludes and guest vocals.  The volume is lower, the tempo slower, and the boys dig deep into their "travestia at the trattoria"-era sets for mood manglers by Martin Denny, Herb Alpert, The Chantays, The Rivieras, Les Baxter, and the Mighty Phil Spector. 

 

 

 

News Archive: Almost 10 Years of Pointless Crap!