Despite being a professed music fan, I sadly don’t get to see as much live tunage as I’d like. You’ve basically got three options, so near as I can tell, for seeing live music:
- Drop the three months’ salary you’d been saving for that engagement ring and drop it instead on two tickets to your favorite megastar’s 18th farewell tour
- Drop around $40 to see an up and comer (read: one song on the radio and/or cult following) at a concert hall
- Drop $10 to see a band at a local dive bar and pray that God has mercy on your soul and protects you from seeing a truly awful band
There’s only about four or five bands I would shell out my hard-earned, extremely taxed wages to see in Category A. As for Category B, well, there’s a reason that file-swapping exists. Not that I advocate it’s use or anything. Um. Uh. Hey, look, a unicorn!
As for Category C, well, the options in Cambridge, Massachusetts alone are staggering. Until that smoking ban comes across the river, there’s only so many “smoky bars as wide as Anna Nicole’s hips with badly mixed ska-folk-trip hop-brass band groups playing” that I can take. Tonite, however, I braved the elements and headed to a bar less than two miles down the road to see…well, I had no clue what I was gonna see. A friend asked me to go to see her friend’s friends play, and well, as you know, I haven’t a life so it’s not like my Sunday night dance card was already filled.
I knew we were in a slight amount of trouble when I walked in the door. Not from the $5 cover charge, but, as near as I could tell, the population of the bar consisted of the bands…and us. Not a joke. Three of us, and 26 musicians. OK, I’m very uncomfortable. I’m also annoyed because I’d have to buy drinks. In a crowded bar, you can get away with simply taking up space and nicotine-enriched oxygen. Not so much tonite. My friend’s covered the cover charge, so I buy us a round. And the first band kicks in 10 minutes later.
The lineup? Drums, guitar, accordion, and tuba. I can’t possibly make this up. Nor could I make up the name of the group: SNMNMNM. Sound it out, you’ll get it.
Anyways, I was then treated to 30 minutes of the most un-ironic accordion rock playing in the History of Man. This dude wailed on the accordion like his life depended on it. He and the guitarist would occasionally play trumpet. Some of the hooks weren’t all that bad. If the sound mix had been better, I might have actually enjoyed it more. I took my cues from the 22 musicians not onstage, who mouthed along to all the songs.
The one sing-a-long took place when the singer brought up the drummer from another band to sing along to the following catch-phrase:
“I’ve lost my…
…Spanish Cucumber!”
Well, that instantly became my friend’s nickname. Calling her “Spanish Cucumber” gives me no end of delight. Not as much delight as constantly whispering, in a hushed voice, my favorite line from “Finding Nemo”: “ES-CAH-PAY!” Friggin’ genius. Been saying it all weekend. Excellent.
But I’m distracting you from Accordion Boy.
After we got more impassioned accordion solos, and watching a five minute tuba/drum duet (it wasn’t “Moby Dick”, but like, it was semi-impressive all the same, if for no other reason that taking a mental over/under on when the tuba dude was gonna flat out die trying to play all those notes), the second band comes onstage. Sorta a Bosstones type vibe: core of drums, bass, and guitar, with a sax/trombone/trumpet horn section.
The sax player was this gorgeous girl. I mean...HOWDY. She wasn’t gorgeous simply because she was good-looking, but because she slung the sax like Hendrix slung his axe, she would bop to the tunes, and she mouthed all the words while the lead singer sang them. And she wore a camouflage shirt. HOT, I say. HOT. 10% on looks, 90% on attitude. Take note, ladies. Most guys actually judge by attitude, despite what you think of us.
(She made up for the fact that the trumpeteer looked like Marshall from "Alias" and the bass player looked like an indie-geek Caucasian version of Nomar Garciaparra. I wish they had been called "The Nomaaaahshall Experience". Heh. I made a funny.)
Another thought occurred to me while drool collected on the floor next to me, about both this band and the Cult of the Spanish Cucumber opening act. Here were these two bands, having traveled from Brooklyn to do a Northeast swing tour, who all had to travel to NYC after the gig to work their 9-5’s tomorrow. Here were groups playing their heart out to maybe 15 people. Playing as hard as they could, and having fun, so near as I could tell, doing what they loved to do.
The whole scene reminded me a touch of what I try to do here. (It all gets back to me, you see. It's very convenient that way.) An audience, yes, is important, and any blogger who says it isn’t is a liar. We often wish we had a bigger one, but we don’t slack off simply because of a low turnout. We’re all in it because on some level, we love writing. And many of us dream eventually to spend our days writing, as opposed to the 9-5’s we have which sometimes make us too tired to write as well as we’d like. But we keep writing all the same. Keep trying as hard as we can.
I guess, what I’m trying to say is: we’re all Spanish Cucumbers, man.
Rock on.