The Bad Boyz of the Senior Circuit
One of the rules of a little local string band, especially one starting up, desperate for gigs, hungry for monetary applause, is that you take most everything that comes ambling down the musical highway. The South End String Band is no different. Maybe it’s even more so…. We’ve played Tyee and Elger Bay Stores’ parking lots in the exhaust of cars left idling so their owners can run inside for that pack of Marlboros or the six pack of 16 oz ice beer. We ‘ve played next to the ATM machine at Haggen’s, for reasons lost in the fog of memory now, as vulnerable as a child between the food sampling booths of CostCo and 300 pound hippo shoppers salivating toward free snacks. We’ve performed for Senile Centers and we’ve played for American Legion dinners. Weddings. Father’s Day events. Anniversaries. Performing Arts Centers. You name it, we’ve blasted it with banjos. Pride is an expendable virtue in the music biz….
Every year for the last seven or so we played a couple of nights for Lights of Christmas. Snow, sleet, ice, rain and bad gravy, we put on a half hour show five times a night with half an hour in between, a brutally prolonged evening of music while clean-cut families crowded in out of the weather and the psychedelic light displays, a hometown Disneyland out on the outskirts of Stanwoodopolis. Every year we hauled out our gnarly South End Christmas carols, all our drinking songs and gambling ditties and whoring tunes and murder ballads, then entertained the Disney besotted masses while they gnawed on ribs or slurped clam chowder, hungry for clean wholesome entertainment and hearty unhealthy food.
About the 7th year, last year, the director sat down with us before the 4th night’s first set. “We’ve never gotten complaints about a band before,” he stated sadly, shaking his head, obviously not happy to spoil the holiday cheer of the evening. “Couldn’t be us, could it?” I asked, glad I’d left my beer in the truck rather than in the go-cups we usually kept full through the long evenings.
He said we’d signed a contract to do 10% Christmas songs and we hadn’t done any. And worse, our songs were, oh …. He searched for the right words. Gnarly? I helped. Then I mentioned in our defense that we really hadn’t read the contract, kind of a habit the band doesn’t want to fall into. He said –no, he demanded –we play some damn Christmas songs.
Sadly, we didn’t know any. But, I said cheerfully, how about we maybe leave off Whisky Before Breakfast and Won’t Get Drunk No More and a couple of murder songs and we’ll call it good, finish out the night, maybe assume we won’t be coming back next year. Wearily, eyes rolling, shoulders hunched, he said okay. And that’s how we were branded as the first band to be 86’d out of the Lights of Christmas. Bad to the bone, baby, bad to those crummy rib bones that we’ll never have to eat again so help me Jingle Bells.
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