New Town Drunks and Pimping ain’t Easy

New Town Drunks

A funny story about the New Town Drunks nigh impromptu performance at Rudyard’s last night. Roberto and Dianne are playing downstairs and they ask if they can do a second set and word comes back that they can but to wait until 12:30am so as not to distract from the band upstairs. Laughing at the bar, Roberto quips half-joking “Well, shit they need to book a better band!” But once they start its apparent why the band upstairs was a bit worried, armed with a nylon stringed guitar and Dianne’s voice the two proceed to play a riveting set of New Town Drunks material mixed a few covers. Since the show was a last minute lark, they weren’t out to impress anyone; they were simply having fun and that kind of simple joy is something more bands could use a dose of. For me, an imfamous early bird, that meant an internal struggle between wanting to see a great show and not falling asleep. In the end, their performance gave me no choice.

Pimpin ain’t easy but tediously rambling aimlessly to avoid doing work is…

Well, pimpin a show ain’t easy I tell ya what! You can hop around like a fool, put a ton of miles on your car, and make yourself a pest but, in the end, you only get a fraction the shamless plugs you hope for. Take the Houston Press for example.

The Houston Press complains about bands being a bunch of clueless losers but you can pimp the show like we’ve been doing (take the Youtube short for example) and you don’t even merit single sentence of props. Makes you wonder if there is anything you can do to get any mention these days? I had figured Something Fierce and our using youtube would have been a good and interesting hook. I guess writing articles about how much writers hate the White Stripes’ public persona, the Beatles’ being too popular to dig, or the Velvet Underground being a band nobody really listens to is more useful to readers. The funny thing is that all three writers of these articles are good writers (Cramer, McManus, and Lomax) but the hack-up-bands-everyone-praises premise of the column is so shitty. My philosophy was always to use your space to promote stuff you like but I guess that editors prefer material that provokes reader responses and stuff like this makes for easy page filler. But hell, Lomax couldn’t even be bothered to look at ours or Something Fierce’s videos. I at least would have expected a “yeah, umm that kind of bored the fuck out of me. You guys aren’t as amusing as you think.” Well what can ya do?

Luckily (despite KTRU’s local show being pre-empted by baseball and KPFT’s Radioactive doing a prerecorded show on Friday) Clinton getting a stomach bug and nixing Thursday’s rehearsal ended up being good as I was able to go on the Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour and drop off a CDR of tracks for them to play. I normally don’t get to tune-in but when I pop by who should happen to be DJing but Daniel of the Jonx. Cool. He’s pretty frazzled but I stick around long enough to chat with Scott Butt and they give us some love on the show.

So what’s my point? Nothing, I guess that I always feel a responsibility to the other bands, the club, and its bartenders to make sure we get people there and that it takes a lot of work. Sometimes the work pays off and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you are just banging against a brick wall. At least if nobody shows up, I am relieved of any guilt of not doing my share of the lifting.

Blah blah blah…