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3. Ain't No Guitar Wearin' No Frosted Jeans The less plot the better is what I say. But the tour started just before Memorial Day (Jason: "Funny--I always forget about Memorial Day.") and the Desolation 500 was dominating most aspects of life in the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Scrote's lackeys had managed to book us with Everdown playing the night before the race at a place called Brad's Gold Klub IV. The establishment was to be open all night, catering to the fancies of the scum of the earth until Lucifer opened the gates of Hell I mean the Indianapolis Motor Speedway the next morning. So we packed up HOG and drove down Sixteenth street for the millionth time, a street normally boasting only a Pizza Hut now packed with thousands of drunk swine buying ten dollar sausages and sexual innuendo t-shirts. Jason once tried to sell a shirt with a football on the front and the words "HOT SECTIONAL ACTION" on the back just to see if someone would pay thirty dollars for a shirt that only seemed sleazy, but his "booth" (the trunk of Michael's car strung with crepe paper) attracted and disappointed two dirty old men before the onset of disgust. When the second dirty old man stared talking about how his genital area resembled a football, Jason threw the shirt at him and said "Screw this, I'm going to Taco Bell." And so he did.
Brad's Gold Klub IV was a strip joint, of course, so it took us a good hour just to figure out how to get our stuff inside. This happened four times in a row: We all stood under a flourescent green XXX sign while Michael would go in to get some idea of what was going on. Michael would be gone for six to seven minutes and return to tell us the "manager" would be out in a few minutes to let us in. The guys at the door were no help, especially once we told them Everdown wouldn't e playing due to "lack of interest". Some guy finally came out to let us in. The manager was aparrently "too busy smoking crack with the strippers to dick with" us.
We burst out laughing and he shot us a dirty look with added explicatives. I assured him we'd be the best thing he'd ever heard, that we had just done a great show with Henry Lee Summer. He told me to "fuck off". We later named him "Sunshine". It was an ugly vibe all over and this guy was seething hatred, so one of us had to do it: Tim gave a shy nod toward the XXX sign and got out a "Hey" before he started laughing. Sunshine flashed another dirty look and Jason jumped in, also nodding toward the sign: "It's uh, it's real nice to uh, to be playing a straightedge venue." Michael and I pretended to be laughing at a stray dog walking through the parking lot. The man must have assumed "straightedge" meant "whorehouse" because he just grunted in reception and walked in to a black, closed-up utility room.
He slammed the door behind him, locking it from his side. And it suddenly occurred to us: We were to be of all things the unseen background music at what Michael delightfully referred to as "the west side's number one titty bar". It was too much. We had 74 minutes and decided we would only be doing Today Is The Day covers. "Wait a minute," I interjected. "We're not that talented." A year later during the recording sessions for Make A Friend For The Persecuted Church (ReloadII, I would note on a more personal level how I wasn't as talented as Phil Collins. Not to make any sort of comparison between Today Is The Day and Phil Collins... So due to lack of talent we decided to play material we had been "developing" for an album we were to record that New Year's Eve. We now had 61 minutes and rather than practice we decided to walk to a gas station and try our luck at the state lottery asa a means of supporting public schooling and political corruption. The clerk's name was CHUCK. He was smoking marijuana when we entered. On our way back to strip joint, Jason and I hammered out some lyrics to a new rap metal song, "Chuck Tha Dumb Fuck", and we decided it needed to be the first "song" of out "set". We thought we'd put the lyrics along with music from Disrupt's "Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish".
But for now we were up for LOTTO. Tim bought a five dollar "Nicey Dicey" and won nothing. Michael chose a two-dollar "Wild Thang" and won another "Wild Thang" which won nothing. I bought a one-dollar "Cheap Bastard" and won eight dollars. Jason bought a bottle of "Horny Goat Weed" after receiving Chuck's annoyed assurance that it would "sassify Clarence Carter's woman". As hinted by the the song we would later write about him, Chuck was oddly unpleasant to us.
I've always admired guys like Neil Fallon, a man who so hatefully screams phrases like "I have discovered the body of John Wilkes Booth" and "High Caliber Consecrator". Lyrics no doubt exist becuase of guys like him. By the time we got back Jason and I had come up with this: "You can't play if you don't win. Johnny Depp is from Kentucky and you don't look like no hooker. So Chuck works it all out on the dancefloor. I'm just like George Bailey except I have no friends and my family hates me." We were happy with it. The green light flashed on and Tim tore into the borrowed Disrupt. We kept it going until the red light came up, which made it a seven minute song or so. No one ever got around to the lyrics and apparently the powers at be didn't mind it because the green light flashed on again. We stumbled around for a moment before Jason, in honor of automobile racing in general, called out "Jeff Gordon Is A Son of A Bitch", which we all sort of remembered and sort of played behind Michael's controversial lyrics. It was pretty rough. About two minutes into it some ugly guy who looked like a Grand Canyon donkey shot his head into the room and screamed "No Rap Shit," so we just started playing "Partee Citee". Just before the third chorus the red light stopped us again and we though we might have heard some sparse applause. There was a long lull and we decided the next song would be "George of the Jungle". If you've never heard it, "George of the Jungle" consists of my yelling "George of the Jungle" over a keyboard beat while Jason shouts "I'm a monkey" in a wacky voice. We were excited until a diet pill spokeswoman came in and introduced herself as "Misty".
"Can you guys play that first song again for my show," she asked. "That sounded fuckin' cool." She looked us over and seemed a bit disappointed in our lack of band presence and/or drunken flirtation. We must have looked like a bowling team to her. We've always looked much more like a bowling team than a band, though for some reason we never joined a league, which was the obvious thing for us to do when you think about it. Jason even took a bowling class in college. He wrote a song about it that starts out "you just bowled a 14 'cause you're drunk off your ass" and ends "some day you'll see the alcohol in me". As for actual bowling stories, I have one and that's about it: But as for the sexxay eating bananas contestant and her request, we all just kind of stared at the manifestation of non-olympic competition. She was smoking something and her sunken strained neck indicated her disregard for proper nutrition. Botticelli understood this, and I'm pretty sure he'd be a huge Shag Bark Hickory fan if he were alive today. Jason stammered over some words and we all kind of mumbled out an "okay". She left and we laughed while Tim kept asking "what the hell?" while running around with a bottle of grape juice. But the green light came on and we played something like the first song again.
The show went incredibly fast and we ended up playing "Chuck Tha Dumb Fuck" five times with no lyrics due to requests from "women" fighting it out at the oversexed fruit stand for $113. Halfway throough the last rendition, one of the bouncers ran in, kicked me in the head, and called me a "fuckin' retard". No, that's not true. But some seventy-five year old guy weaing way too much jewelry and hair dye told use we were done at 1:23 am, so we packed up our stuff and left. Brad's Gold Kulb IV paid us forty dollars and we got four free griant breaded tenderloins for palying the same song, a song whose lyrics we wrote while taking an eight minute walk across a parking lot and then never used, five times in a row. The jewelry guy, this guy with a couple Navy tattoos must have run the place. He seemed disgusted with us, but I think he was just disgusted with his shriveled libido. I could be wrong but it's not bloody likely.
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