Lets Get Drumtarded in Here

Date: 9/12/07
Location: The Heartland Cafe
Show: The In One Ear Open Mic with The Spoony Bards and The Lie of a Pipe Dream,
Cost: $3
Things I missed to be there: Marat 14k at People Lounge; Flosstradamus and Dude'N'Em at Subterranean; Dark Wave Disco vs. I Love House at the Note; Bomb Banks, Russian Tzarlag, Kites and Oakeater at Mister City; Stressape, Red Rocket, and Mass Shivers at Ronny's
Reason for going: My pet rat Bukowski lives in Rogers Park, and when Bukowski wants to go for a walk, Bukowski goes to where the poetry and drunk girls are***




This is a guitar, an American institution. From the twenties through the eighties it was an emblem for rebellion (until hip hop hit the suburbs and became the thing that scared our parents). It is a totem for sex, for the animal within the artist and the artist withn the animal. For over a hundred years it has turned goons and schlubs into sensitive souls and sexual gods. The nude woman poses next to it because it has a power over her, and she is not strong enough to wield it herself. It goes without saying that the ones who are, are forces to be reckoned with.



This is a keytar, emblematic of the the excess, the overzealous futurism, and the entirely frivolous, disposable plastic nature of the 1980s. It was never dangerous. The woman holding it is just as sexy as the woman next to the guitar, but she's too ashamed to show her face. For some reason, you're almost guaranteed to see a keytar player if you go to see a funk band but nearly nowhere else.



This is a drumtar. It's so dorky, that the hot girl wielding it is really just a drawing of a guy, and not a particularly sexy guy at that. I don't think I've ever seen a drumtar, until today. More on that in a bit.


It's been a while since I was an open mic regular, or even an open mic irregular. I feel kinda like I graduated. I became comfortable on stage, I made a solid group of friends, and I figured out how to make more. I didn't need to hear any more bad poetry. That's the only reason I ever went: poetry, spoken word, monologues... the occasional piece of puppetry or performance art. As bad as most of that turned out to be, the rest was insufferable. So many years. So much comedy. So much music. So many hateful men trying to be edgy, so many terrible faximile Leonard Cohens, Ani DiFrancos, Mos Defs and Nina Simones.

Thing is, I miss some of it. It's been ages since I've heard good folk music, which I can really get off on live but doesn't really do much for me on album. My old friend Blake Thomas's albums sounded wonderful, but if I wasn't taking the time to listen to Nick Drake and Arlo Guthrie, what kind of a chance did he ever have?

It was nice to see The Lie of a Pipe Dream. I didn't know it, but I really was in the mood to hear someone plucking a banjo today. They were three men gathered around one microphone, harmonizing with a guitar and banjo. They sang sci-fi folk songs and their name was a Eugene O'Neill quote (I had to google to find out that "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober" came from O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh). Their songs were pretty and they were nice, but the real treat was The Spoony Bards.

I'd seen The Spoony Bards play the Heartland before. I guess in the couple of months since the last time I came out to the Heartland and actually paid attention, they've become something of a house band. I always figured that they were a high school band. Their membership was always fluctuating by two or three people, they played videogame covers, they were newly dedicated to an open mic, and they looked like they could have been extras in Superbad.

I figured that when I saw them today, I was looking at a more cemented version of the band, because, well, they were perfect. Like I said, they could have played the self assured nerds of Superbad but they could have been the triumphant nerds of Dazed and Confused, too. The music was straight out of the seventies, in a weird way. It was the type of shit that wasn't even cool back then. It was ballads, the stuff that Kris Kristofferson was doing when he wasn't being all the way country, the stuff Steely Dan did that no one ever talks about, the stuff Neil Diamond was born to do. It didn't matter if they were only fifteen, they did it with a swagger and they did it with a DRUMTAR! They also did it well.

Unfortunately, after looking online, it looks like most of my assumptions were wrong. The Spoony Bards is a fairly huge band with rotating members, all of whom are college-aged or older, and they don't do this kind of music, this kind of slightly soul-ly rock'n'roll that doesn't rock, at least not as their bread and butter. What the Spoony Bards is, is an anime and videogame music tribute band. They play AnimeCons and GameCons all over the country playing "The Theme from The Legend of Zelda" or "a song by Yoko Kanno, that was originally done for Cowboy Bebop."

They are even COOLER and DORKIER than I could have ever imagined. They warrant unnecessary CAPS LOCKs! The only downside is that I'm not going to hear a lot more of this type of music. C'est la vie. Chances are good that I probably wouldn't like it outside of an open mic anyway.



***Oops: Apparently there was a clown burlesque show. The people who told me about it usually tell me about boring burlesque shows but this one had Lil Princess, Heather Vernon, Maiden Sacrifice and Happy the Human Pin Cushion weirding out at the Smartbar. I can miss all sorts of dance parties but I try to fill up on this kind of weirdness when it avails itself. Oh well, if I had gone, my rat would've been neglected and I probably wouldn't have gotten laid.