Sunday, September 7, 2008

Southern man don't need me around anyhow? Thank Jeebus.

So I know I haven't properly written about Memphis yet but this....interesting night out in Jackson freaking Mississippi is still fresh in my mind so it wins. Memphis was more 'fun camaraderie' type stuff so it can wait in lieu of bass ackwards Southern duh-hyuck-derp-ness.

Well I guess it didn't start that way. The crowds here have been just great. Near capacity crowds every night and super responsive. No complaints there.

But tonight Brian and I decided we needed to experience the Jackson first hand. We started at this Irish Pub called Fenians which was actually quite good. Nothing really to report there. We probably should have stayed put.

We moved on to the "main drag" which is hidden back in a bunch of awkward one-way streets and shady industrial buildings. We were going to try the "Fire Club" in spite of the musical equivalent of a diarrhea tsunami pouring out through the doors into the night. We had snatched our ID's back from the doorman before he had even finished saying "$15 Cover". This is the same Cletus looking deliverance extra John Deer Stockholder that gave me this nugget advice the previous night when I asked what else there was to do in Jackson:

"Well....'round the corner dere's our sister club..........::lowers voice ominously:: but a lot of blacks go in there. It's more of a black club. ::hint hint wink wink knowwhattimean knowwhattimean::"

Riiiiiiight. I keep forgetting we are in the heart of active KKK territory.

Anyway, we jumped across the street to 'Hal and Mal's' where there was an aging guitarist with a band trying to pull off a crappy imitation of John Scofield. It would've been almost tolerable until they broke into a "version" of 'Purple Haze". Apparently to cover that song you don't really need to know any of the words. Just say 'Purple Haze' at the beginning of a few mumbled phrases and cap it off with a " S'cuse me while I kiss this guy" and you're golden.

Next.....

Martin's..... After much coaxing from the doorman how this was the hippest spot in town and how they had this amaaaaaazing funk band with tonnnnns of people inside, we coughed up the $7 cover and headed in.

Gah. It was like combining Gooskis, Belvedere's, and Dee's minus everything cool about those spots, mixed with a giant pile of elephant dung and some tiger piss. That was Martin's.

A good way to judge that a funk band is going to be atrocious: more than half of the band are skinny white dudes with long hair wearing reeedonnkulous sunglasses. Add a drunk ass hippie dufus behind the mixing board twiddling knobs at random like he's playing some modular synth, factor in the fact that he is oblivious to the fact that he's blaring all mid range frequency that would be considered unbearably loud in a room twice as big, and top it off with the drummer wearing those stupid shades, a retarded white boy gangsta cabbie hat and using nothing but shoulders to play with and sporting the "I'm such a bad ass" puckered lip face and you'll maybe almost empathize with the pain we were experiencing. These fools were in dire need of a headbutt apiece.

We headed back out to the dark dingy (but non-aurally painful) part of the bar. Some drunk ass rail thin hippie who looked like a cross between the singer form System of a Down and Weird Al from the 'Amish Paradise' video leaned back on the rain and almost fell onto our table. Brian said something like "wow that dude almost fell on us" which is apparently considered a severely offensive statement in 'drunk ass hick hippie-ese'. The dude struggled to turn around and then kinda sorta almost flipped us off. After some mumbling and hand gestures we determined he was demanding to know how we thought the rest of the football season would pan put if we were so smart.

At some point we had convinced him we were Canadian which brought on this onslaught: "Fucking Cannucks....Fuck Canada!!" ::mumble mumble:: ::stumble stumble::. This whole scene went on for aboot ten minutes with us laughing our asses off and playing along.

We tried to go listen to the band one last time and were treated to something that aimed for Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" territory,but failed miserably. Instead of a guitar quoting "Jamie's Crying" they broke into kindasorta part of the riff from "Iron Man" with the one dude rapping worse than Snow over top of it. The other guys in the band did the arms crossed, puckered lip, head nod thing almost in time like they were part of the anti-drug troupe that came to your Junior High Schools and rapped about how cool it was to not smoke, drink, or do drugs.

There were a few cute girls there but after all of that we just had to leave.

Now I know not everyone is like this in the South.....just the people I encountered.

If I ever ever hear any of you Pittsburgh people complain about anything in that city, you'll have a headbutt waiting for you upon my return.

Good Grief.