owl&bear

When: March 14, 2007 around 10:30 PM
Where: The Hi-Tone Cafe; Memphis, TN

I had already bought the tickets for The Hold Steady because my wife was supposed to go with me. Then, two days before the show, she decides that our marriage “just isn’t working out,” and she needs more time to find herself. Apparently, this missing part of herself resides at the bottom of a bottle of anything alcoholic.

So I’m stuck with an extra ticket. My choices are either to go alone or find someone to go with me. I choose to procrastinate, and then panic on Wednesday afternoon because I really don’t want to go alone.

I call everyone I know. Because I’m pathetic and know upwards of four people total, it takes twelve minutes.

Nowakowski is in a beer coma, his wife says he’d probably like to go, but rousing him before it’s time to leave may be more than she’s up to. Langford’s not answering his phone. McCaskill answers, but he’s working. If I just could have given him more notice.

Brandon has his son, and he’s too damn selfish to give up quality time with his boy to got to Memphis with me. Bastard. I decide to drive up to Nowakowski’s house and try to rouse him on my own. I pull the sheets off of his face and his eyes pop open. I try for a jolly (not desperate) tone, “Free ticket! We’re going to Memphis! I have prescription speed!”

He mumbles “Give me a minute,” and falls back asleep.

After about twenty minutes of this, he is out of bed and dressed, sitting sullen in a chair. Then Langford calls back. He wants to go also, even though he’ll have to pay for his ticket.

We stop at a Burger King, then a liquor store on the way out of town. Nowakowski buys a huge bottle of tequila, $35, and starts drinking it straight. I tell Langford that his ticket may be free after all, because Nowakowski may be passed out by the time we reach the River City. But he’s not, and instead he becomes more talkative.

The Thermals come on around 10:15, and they rock pretty fucking hard. They play most of their excellent new album, and some songs I’ve never heard before, which I assume came off of older albums. My left ear is about three feet from their lead guitarist’s amp, so by the end of their show I’m deaf and fatigued from the rhythmic jerking that I call call “dance.” The Hold Steady set up, then start playing around 11:30.

Their keyboardist looks suspiciously like Mario (of Super Mario fame) dressed as an Italian gangster. The rest of the guys look like a Rock n’ Roll band, with the exception of Craig Finn, who looks like a librarian. They play songs from Boys and Girls in America (review), as well as from each of their other two albums, and they rock the fuck out- but again I’m really close to the keyboardist’s amp, so I can really only hear the piano parts clearly, along with the inane between-song chatter of two guys behind me who call each other ‘lover.’ The band really puts on a good show, and I enjoy it thoroughly.

However, some people enjoy it more than I, because apparently, it’s an unspoken requirement that you know the words to every Hold Steady song written so you can shout along with Craig. It was like a fucking Raffi show, I swear to God (Google it). I’ll see them at Bonnaroo; looks like I have some studying to do.

The trip home was something else: Nowakowski realized he’d left his bottle of tequila outside the venue about 20 minutes after we left and began belligerently demanding that we turn around. We would not. He finally passed out and we talked quietly so as not to wake him.