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2. More Guitars Cause More Destruction We felt badly for the Everdown guys. It was nice of them to treat the fans who only saw them once a year at the slop carnival, but in the end it was way too easy much work to be ruined by idiocy. Which is usually the case for the creative endeavors of those not born into some level of relative wealth and prestige. Jason bought a card to cheer them up, one of those crusty-old-woman-who-tells-it-like-it-is formats. The front of the card was the old woman, smoking a cigarette, carrying a dog, and pushing a shopping cart at a toy store. The inside of the card read: "It's beginning to cost a lot like Christmas!" Jason chose that card over a similar one in which the old woman was shopping with the same dog and shopping cart, this time at a pharmacy. That card read: "With prices like these, who needs euthanasia?!" So Jason and I have always assumed the card touched them deeply. We ate some soggy tacos with them after the show, but they left for wherever it is they live at six the next morning. One of them had to work the second shift detailing cars. That's kind of the last we've heard from them. Someone told me they formed a new band called Linkin Bizkit, but I doubt that's true. But I think they'd agree it's really a good thing they didn't play a full tour with us. They would have killed us. What you have to bear in mind is that we didn't seriously consider ourselves a band and thus never really made a serious commitment to an actual tour in the sense of "Our band is definitely taking a month to tour, playing a certain song set at these specific places at these specific times". A tour was, like the band itself, essentially a joke we kept pushing for the sake of our own amusement. To further the joke, we put Tim's brother in charge of "booking" the "tour". Tim's brother, affectionately known as "Scrotum" or "Scrote", is presently a gourmet chef and at the time raced go-carts for a living. One Monday night Jason called to tell me Scrote claimed to have scheduled an actual show for us that weekend at the Boone County Fairgrounds opening for Henry Lee Summer. We laughed it off and met at the Arby's in Lebanon, Indiana to kick around which "songs" we would play if we ever actually played a show. After an hour or so Scrote showed up with the Western Boone Junior High/Jackson Township 4-H Club. He presented an entire list of shows he'd made the club arrange for 4-H credit, and the Henry Lee Summer show was set for Friday night. He had signed a contract stating we would play for free so long as Everdown headlined the show. Scrote said Tim, who was working an inventory count with a man named Jeremiah Dawg, already knew and Jason said he'd train down Michael (Michael was at the time caught up in some kind of racketeering scam on the east side of Indianapolis). This is how it started. Scrote's initial fee was a can of Kodiak chewing tobacco. The show. We never came up with a set list. The most important thing was getting all of our crappy equipment set up. Henry Lee Summer let us use two of his microphones since all we had were paper towel rolls and a toy car loudspeaker. You might find it interesting to know Henry Lee Summer is originally from Brazil, Indiana. Brazil is home to the famous I-70 truck stop restaurant, which boasts a 300 foot lunch buffet and a 400 foot dinner buffet (crab legs included). Brazil was also once visited by former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Jeff George. A local creepy perverted man in velcro shoes called him "Wonderbeard" during the lunch rush at Dairy Queen. George was not present at the time. Anyway, Henry was wearing a Farm Aid III bandana when he brought out the microphones. "Friends, friends, friends," he exuberantly shouted at Michael and Tim. He was eating fish sticks and cocktail sauce, the fish sticks he carried in the pocket of his green hooded sweatshirt. "This show is gowna be a SLAM DUNK!"
"I hear you guys are a new grunge band or at least that's what Keith [Scrote] told me. These fish sticks are pretty good. I got'em at the Bee Hive. [The Bee Hive was at the time a small restaurant at the Boone County Fairgrounds known for cafeteria trays and low-level malaria.] You get five fish sticks, cocktail sauce, lemonade, four biscuits and gravy, applesauce, and two peanut butter cookies for $13.99. Pretty good deal if you guys are hungry. This morning I went to some place here in town and paid twenty-seven dollars for a plate of Chef Boyardee spaghetti. Then I went to the gas station and ate a candy bar. I have Gatorade in the van, but sometimes I like to drink Pepsi. But this lemonade is pretty good too. It's too hot to eat in there though. I think it's going to rain anyway tonight, so hopefully that'll hold off for us."
In an unfitting rage, Henry threw down his cocktail sauce and yelled "AW POOP, Friends! POOP me up to high heaven!" So some guys from the hog barn helped us rig a few tarps over the stage, but it was all futile. The rains grew heavier and the show was moved into an unused exhibition hall, a poll barn made out of the same material used to construct popsicle sticks.
The sixteen people there to see Henry Lee Summer had decided to recreate that circa 2000 Woodstock II event, which created an even more odd atmosphere for a show. We set up in the corner of this poll barn filled with empty card tables, and the small group of bloated 43 year olds covered in mud-caked tank tops stoof about 100 feet away sipping some beer they brought with them. "Natty Light" is waht I believe they kept calling it. Jason thought there was no better time to run off "Pretentious Song", and it turned out to be a good idea. Except for one man(?) who called it a "pussy song", the group actually seemed to like it and asked if it was the theme from a sitcom "with Howard Hesseman and a bunch of nerds". We of course lied and said yes, and this caused about thirteen minutes of questions/down time before the next song. It felt much longer. I told them I was the Palestinian student who was really good with computers. An audience member with flabby arms told me to shutup and said I was "full of shit". Jason told them he was Howard Hesseman, and they sort of believed him. Tim finally ended it all by pulling a harmonica our of his shoe and launching into "Big Poofy Cat", which was good but over in 34 seconds. The song was a tribute to Jim Davis, a native of Fairmount, Indiana. James Dean was also from Fairmount. If you pass the town on the interstate, there's a sign where Garfield has his arm around James Dean on a motorcycle, and under the picture there's a caption reading something like "Fairmount Has It ALL!" Henry Lee Summer sat in some straw and seemed to be having a good time, but not long after "Big Poofy Cat" one of the guys from his crew asked us "exactly what the fuck" we were doing, so we decided to heat things up with "Kant Kontrol the Rok N Rol". It was pretty rough since we were just making it up as we went along, which I guess we'd managed to hide better with the first two songs. We somehow got through six verses and choruses about school lunch and mean preps, and finally all but a couple of the group left to smoke. The song was over when I started yelling "Dude it's 4:20 somewhere" after them and Henry politely told us to "go ahead and play one more" to the dismay of his crew. So we played "Brickyard Rock", which consisted of Jason screaming "Brick at the Rockyard" while I screamed "Rock Brick Yard at". This managed to get rid of everyone but Henry Lee Summer (a very nice man) and Tim finally ended the song and set by dumping half a can of someone's Natty Light down Michael's pants. We thought it was a great show. As we packed our keyboards and children's drum set into HOG (my vehicle at the time), a local teen and his skanky girlfriend walked by to tell us we were "a fucking waste". We decided to celebrate the first show of Scrote's tour by hitting the local Steak 'N' Shake for various culinary treats. Scrote by the way couldn't make the show. I think he had a go-cart race in Martinsville, Indiana. But Steak 'N' Shake was nice. I had a cherry Coke and a burger. Tim had a taco salad and coffee. Jason and Michael split a chicken fingers platter with Cokes. Two years before we'd gone to the same place on New Year's Eve and there was an actual leprochaun who wouldn't get off the payphone. But no leprochaun tonight. Just depressed people and rotten teeth and us. We wrote Henry Lee Summer a thank you note on Dilbert stationary and helped Michael write some lyrics to a new song, "Don't Tell Mom The Babyshitter's Dead". He said he wanted it to sound like an old Pulp song. It somehow never actually got recorded.
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