Hey folks. Sorry about the delay in this blog posting. I’ve been putting in 12+hour days in Butte on business and have had very little time to sleep, let alone blog. My apologies.
There’s something strangly exciting about playing in small towns. (And for clarification, I mean small by Montana standards and microscopic for everywhere else.) Last year, we had one weekend in early May where we bathed in Glendive’s salad fountain (I went back for seconds!) on Friday and drank ourselves drunk in Glasgow on Saturday. It was certainly a podunk weekend, but we had a great time at both performances. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that those two towns rarely have concerts coming through town, so whenever one does, everybody and their mothers come out and dance the night away or rock the fuck out. Plain and simple. They’ll party if there’s partying to do.
Case and point: this year’s Blues and Brews Fest in Glasgow, MT, where the beer flows like beer. I didn’t engage in too many of the activities earlier in the day because I was busy driving across the 360 miles of nothingness, but from what I could smell on Josh’s breath and from what I could hear when he was talking on the mic during our set, it appeared that a good time was had by all.
There were three bands. The openers, a Helena-based band whose names I cannot recall because I was still en route, received high praise from Josh, John and Levi. They were followed by a stripped down version of the Dan Purser Band, starring Dan Purser on vocals/guitar and Leif…Smith (?) on percussion. Dan’s set is very unique because he plays a good collection of originals and cover songs, but with the cover songs so altered that they only share the lyrics and a little bit of the melody of the version done by the original artists. He plays in Billings quite often, and I highly recommend you go see him the next chance that you get, regardless of whether or not you live in Billings.
Our set was a lot of fun. Although the crowd wasn’t as rowdy as it was last year, mainly because a wedding was taking place at the exact same time, the dance floor was still fairly crowded the entire time with people who were familiar with most of our songs. There were a few times where our stage was commandeered by a handful of good looking girls eager to dance the night away with the three handsome gentlemen displayed before them with the musical instruments, which was quite nice. I’ve never been one to turn down a dance with a good looking girl. Unless, of course, she turns out to be a guy.
After our set, we had an encore with Dan and Leif from Dan Purser band, where the six of us essentially played a funky groove on a loop while Dan and John incorporated both improvised and well-known lyrics from popular songs. It was like taking a musical trip through the late 90′s and early 00′s. Now, an impromptu jam session such as that one could either end up great or totally shitty. There’s no in between. I remember when we did an all-star jam of “Hands To Yourself” with Wang Diddle Daddy for one of the M.A.P.S. shows back in 2007. It consisted of four guitar players, two bass players, a couple of singers, and I think two drummers. Cool sounding, right? Wrong. None of us could hear each other in our monitors, so it turned out to be the biggest clusterf**k of crap that I think any of us had been involved in at that point in time.
This jam session, however, was quite the opposite. We had a solid groove, Dan and John sang their asses off, and the crowd didn’t stop dancing. It was comforting to know that it wasn’t a total train wreck.
Highlights:
–Good work on the glow stick cups, Glasgow. Those were super legit.
–Josh rocked the vote like it had never been rocked before.
–Even though I drove back to Bozeman separately, I think the guys will agree with me when I say that driving down US 191 with a slight hangover is one of the worst things in the world.
Setlist:
I’m getting bad at keeping track of these. I have it in one of my suitcases at home somewhere. I’m not sure where, though. But I’ll find it!
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