Maddog Report and Blinddog Potpourri

Wednesday December 1st, 1999 @ 8:43 PM

Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well

We had the pleasure of a visit from Maddog Miller at one of our recent gigs. He attended one set with his mother and sister who assisted him. He was on crutches and looked thin and anemic, but seeing him actually out and about was quite a surprise and certainly good news. He still cannot bear weight on his hips and won’t be road-worthy for a couple of months, but his progress is much better than we anticipated.

He told us stories of being turned in the hospital bed by unskilled and unsympathetic nurses who would do things like turn him for his rehab, then five minutes later come in and say they forgot to change the sheets, and turn him again. The pain was excruciating as you might imagine. Doctors peeked in and asked how he was, and before he could answer, they’d be gone, leaving behind a $90 billing for having said hello. He did have some good guys around, like the physical therapists who he admired for their skill, patience, and understanding.

Andy now faces boredom and slow mending of his many broken bones. He will, however, fully recover, we are almost certain. The margins between life and death became evident as facts came in concerning the accident. Had it been a couple of degrees colder, he would have frozen or died of hypothermia, lying exposed as long as he did. Had it been any warmer, the bleeding in his head would have caused swelling inside his skull and the damage would have been severe, even to the point of death. Had he worn his seatbelt, which I’ve seen him do many times, he’d be dead. Had he lit just a hair over this way or that his back would have been damaged far worse, etc.

When you put all the factors together, he is very lucky to be alive. What he does have to live with is no vehicle, no job, and thirty-thousand dollars of hospital debt. They never found the hit and run driver who abandoned the U-haul after running Andy down and leaving him for dead alongside the road, and of course, U-haul is balking at coming through with any money. I believe they will have to eventually, but the sweet gal who rents you the truck, and the smiling insurance man who sells people their policies are not present on this end of the deal.

Instead you have lawyers, knucklebreakers, and callused investigators, who make their living by making sure their company doesn’t have to pay. It’s loophole city.

In the meantime Blinddog has employed two bass players who take turns touring with us as their schedules allow. We haven’t been able to play many of our originals or arranged pieces, but going over some of the oldies but goodies has been fun and good for a change of pace. We can’t be as tight and polished as normal, but we are learning how to fake it really well.

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Our bus is still down. We are hating life without it as the Ford Van is falling apart and sounds like a WWII tank with damaged treads. The Van has poor shocks and pounds us over the miles like a Wagnerian Opera Soprano turned masseuse.

The bus seems to have rare requirements in its differential. We have inquired all over the country and finally found someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places, who has a collection of gears for our type of ride. You can bet we’ll be paying that guy a visit next time we are in Tulsa. He’ll be our new best friend.

Part of the reason we bought the bus was for our image. It is just so cool to cruise into your town in a colorful tour bus. People stand by and watch to see who gets out. We can make dramatic exits and stand around looking important afterward. But arriving in a fading bronze van with a plastic camping bubble on top, sounding like we were starting a civil war cannon battle, and bouncing to a halt with our muffler hanging down like a well wrung chicken’s head, is just not cool. If that weren’t bad enough, the inside gets filled with carbon monoxide and we step out cross-eyed like we’d been sucking campfire smoke from a police marijuana burning.

We hate to spend the money on the van when the bus bill is forthcoming, but–such is life on the road with a blues band.

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Good news for those who feel obligated to read the harptalk, but who don’t like essays, I’ll finish off today’s message with a top ten, blues world, pet peeve list. It is longer than you like, but it ought to be fun.

Peeve # 10: Drunken, male, water pump sytle, hand shaker’s. Why won’t these guys let go? I think they are trying to demonstrate appreciation, enthusiasm, and male bonding all in one great flapping, zig zagging, gyrating, out of synch, stupid looking, gooney bird flop, that rips the ball and socket joints apart and makes me want to amputate the dumb bastard at the shoulder. I think my solution is going to be working out with a hand grip so I can squeeze this grinning and drooling dolt until he either stops pumping or pees his pants.

Peeve #9: Drunken female hand clasper’s in yo’ face. This is the ladies counterpart to #10 and they get equal rights in my vilification. I know they are trying to express sincerity as they gaze at me with whirligig eyeballs that they are fighting to keep from tilting in opposite directions. Why won’t these ladies blink? The worst part is being able to smell fermenting alcohol on their stomachs as they talk to me close up in sentences that seem to use only the letter H: “Hello, Honey…I’m Heather, from Houston, Hail to you Handsome Hunk from Hhhhhhhhheaven…

Peeve #8: Dancing idiots who direct the band. These are the folks who think the band is there to make them look good on the floor for their imagined legions of fans who have come to watch them dance. If the band comes down in volume to build anticipation for the next crescendo, these people get impatient and start gesticulating like Zubin Meta before a Philharmonic orchestra. They raise their eyebrows in dismay at our ineptitude. Why can’t we realize their reputations as cute and bouncy party people are on the line? They shake their heads and sometimes stop dancing to put their hands on their hips and stare at us in wonderment, angst forming in the corners of their mouths as they get exasperated. They really think they are going to make us change our approach and style just for them. What they don’t realize is that all four of us are thinking the same thing as we look back at them dispassionately: “Fuck you dipshit!”*

*To my religious readers, please stay on my mailing list, just translate this into Baptist.

Peeve #7: People who think we are their personal request band.”Could you play something by Metallica?” They ask. “Whose that?” I answer with my best puzzled facial expression. “You don’t know Metallica?” They ask in shock, amazement, and feigned pity. You can substitute names like Lynard Skynard, KC and the Sunshine Band, Garth Brooks, Boxcar Willie, etc., it doesn’t matter as I have the same puzzled look for any of them.

“Is Mettalica that girl who wears the armored tits on the old Laugh In show?” I inquire.

“Come on dude, you can do it, I now yer good enough, just try, OK?”

“Really–that good?”

These thimblebrains think we rehearse millions of songs by hundreds of thousands of artists and we can switch voices and styles and special instrumentation at the snap of their fingers. To make matters worse, they come up and ask while you are singing another song or playing a solo, as though you’re just going to stop the whole band and bend down to them, and then in your immediate enlightenment and orders from headquarters, break out into death metal at a blues club.

These people need a brain transplant–doesn’t even have to be a human brain, a tulip bulb would do just fine and keep them from an early death.

Peeve # 6: People who tell you about their uncle. It starts with a compliment about our guitar player, then degenerates into a twenty minute harangue on how good their uncle is. “He played slide with Boots Randolph, man, at the Cow Pie Pavilion in Wichita Falls, 1961–with a lap steel he made out of a push lawn mower…”

Yeah, well, we don’t care about your uncle or your cousin, or even your blessed mother, you goofball. We have twenty people standing in line this break trying to buy our merchandise, we’re signing autographs, we’re trying to get the lazy-ass bar maid to get us the drink of water we asked for an hour ago, we’re trying to restring guitars and fix a broken monitor and we have to pee like the kid in the dunce corner at school, and here you are blithering about your broken-down uncle who’s probably in a nursing home playing slide on his pecker and doesn’t even remember who you are.

Peeve #5: Woman who pull us out on the dance floor. In this day and age of sexual harassment, a man can’t be too careful. That’s why I’d rather deal with an asshole man than an asshole woman any day. See, you can just bop the man on his head or have the bouncer’s throw him fifty feet into a fire hydrant. But an unstable woman is like nitro glycerin. The last thing we want is to see one of these volatile creatures go off on us in public. If a man behaved like that and remembered it the next morning, he’d do the decent thing and shoot himself. But these emotional black hole women call a lawyer and have you arrested. This is after having copped a few uninvited feels and suddenly latched both arms on your protesting body and started backing out on the dance floor like a dog with a rag in its mouth.

Nothing scares me more than this. I’d rather fight a biker with a tattoo of Attila the Hun on his forehead. One time in Greeley, Colorado, one of these unhappy wenches threw an apple at me while I was singing and hit me right in the mmh, mmh, mmh. The apple hit so hard in split in two and hit Andy as well. It took three big men to get her out of the bar while she screamed and kicked, and promised to sue them for touching her parts.

Peeve #4: Guys who run off the women. We have a rule of thumb in our band that one good looking woman in a bar attracts ten guys. A dozen of the gentler sex all wrapped tight in Levi’s and hair spray will fill your bar. That is why they have ladies night, and ladies drink free nights, and no cover charge on ladies night, etc. Now this will make some of you angry, but it’s true nonetheless, I know of bars where the doorman is instructed to evaluate how attractive a woman is and let her in free accordingly. Ugly women have to pay.

Anyway, there is this particular breed of man, closely related to mongrel humping dogs, not hunting dogs, who can single handedly run off all the good-looking women in ten minutes. He needs no help at all and unfortunately there is at least one in every bar. This poor dumb clod deserves to be locked in the town stocks and slapped by every woman who walks by for a year.

He has lines like this: “How come you don’t wanna dance, are you a lesbian?”

If you do dance with him he’ll try to hump you on the dance floor. These disgusting slimeballs who infest our nations dance halls with their greasy gazes must be eradicated. Why do bar owners let them stay inside to soil the atmosphere with their malodorous presence? They can’t possibly ever have a date. Even the women in my previous peeve wouldn’t stand for their obnoxious behavior. Notice that these guys all disappear after about age forty-eight. I think it’s because they masturbate to death.

Peeve # 3: People who come up on stage during a performance. Who are these people? Do they have jobs and function normally during the week? Or do they dwell in their mother’s basement in candle-lit shrines to George Carlin? They just climb up and start talking through the microphone or telling the band what to do. When you kick them off the stage they get mad or act totally shocked that you should treat them this way.

Sometimes they start emceeing the evening, sometimes they sing, sometimes they start telling people to applaud the band and scream out accolades and proclamations. They dance, they try to shake hands, they pick up the spare guitar, they help themselves to the tambourine or a harmonica, and they truly have an image of themselves as being the life of the party, the toast of the town. Women do it too. They are much harder to remove than the guys because you dare not touch any of their parts. The band is at the mercy of the club in a situation like this and most clubs wouldn’t know if Andre the Giant were onstage humping the bass drum. If the band throws these people off and a ruckus arises, then the owners usually blame the band for being troublemakers.

In Twin Falls Idaho, one of these stage crashers got us thrown not only out of the bar, but out of town. We can’t play anywhere in Twin Falls anymore. Now it’s true I did ease the guys pain for awhile, but he was smashing all of our CDs because we wouldn’t let him pull himself up on stage by using Jason’s leg. He then turned around and tried to sue the club and us for harassing him. Believe it or not ladies and gentlemen, this happens frequently. Who are these people?

Peeve #2: Drunken Club Owners. Talk about the blind leading the blind…

We set up for an evening in somebody else’s domain. The club owner is boss of this little realm and unfortunately some of them think it means God. Bacchus, perhaps, but little else smacks of godliness. I truly admire the bar owner who does his drinking in moderation or at home.

We’ve had to deal with owners being the jerk who walks onstage during a performance–then what do you do? We had one guy threaten to not pay us if we didn’t play an extra hour. He demanded free CDs for himself, his wife, and his friends. He ordered us about like deck hands and even told us what songs to play. Another one pulled the plug on us in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and ordered us out of his bar without pay. We had to march into his office and demand payment or else. He wrote a check, wadded it, and threw it at us. We went to his bank at opening the next Monday so he couldn’t cancel it.

We’ve had bar owners change the deal at the end of the night many times, and we’ve been unceremoniously canceled at the last minute as many times. I’d like to be able to remember how many clubs we’ve been kicked out of over the years by drunken club owners who just have to show the world who’s boss. Fortunately, we’ve reached a status where we can pick and choose the clubs we play. We also started a “Fuck You”* fund as well so we don’t have to lose our dignity because we are desperate.

Another problem with the drunken bar owner is the lady owner who thinks she gets the right to your privates because she is paying you for the night. I had one big German lady actually chase me around the room. She looked remarkably similar to Jaws, the giant actor in James Bond who had the steel teeth. She was announcing to the bar what naughty things she was going to do to me. Had she caught me, I’m not sure I could have won the fight. She was picked up for drunken driving later that night. I still have nightmares about that one.

*How would this be rendered in Baptist? The Screw you fund? No, still too rough, how about using the King James and saying “Screweth”? Thine screweth thee fund?” Just having some fun here. Don’t send me a nasty e-mail.

And at last, the number one pet peeve: Bad Blues Society Newsletter authors. I am convinced that there is a school for these people, or at least a class called “Cheese 101 or How to write with inside jokes and parenthetical statements.” If no such class exists, how can diverse newsletters from all over the United States have authors with exactly the same horseshit style of writing?

A reader recently asked me to advise her on writing for her Blues Society newsletter. I sent her what I thought was the perfect example, sure to be published immediately and with great proclaim. I made it up from a collection of actual statements I’ve read, names changed to keep me from being stoned when I come to your town.

“Well howdy blues lovers, buckaroos and buckerettes (har har), and all you out there in blues land who read Uncle Bluzer’s column every couple of blue moons or so (get it? “Blue” moon? Heh, heh). If your like me (and God knows that would be too bad, right Frank?) you ate too much at the old annual blues pig roast again this year (burp), but hell, didn’t we all? Like to thank our blues Aunt, Mable Bluezinski for bringing her bloodhound again this year to clean up the pile of bones Harold was making over by the beer keg (remember Herb, you were there all day (hey, relax, I won’t tell your pretty wife, Hazel))–sorry Harold about Bertram (the Bloodhound) hiking his leg on you, but then it was just recycled beer anyway (har).

Hey folks, did ya get to the Blinddog Smokin’ show out at the Booze ‘n Bluz Club Thursday night? Well, (If I must say so myself) you missed a humdinger. The moon was full and the ladies were out and the music was hot and you should have seen old Uncle Bluzer out there shakin’ a leg (don’t worry honey, I only danced with your sister, (oh hell, I confess, I did put a pair of Blinddog panties on my head and danced with Al Bains, but you know how it goes–he was a perfect gentleman, (harty har)). Hey I’m gone, outta here, sianara, hasta manana, and happy blues trails to all you bluz gurus out there in readerland. By the way, pick up copy of Kenny Wayne’s new CD, that boy ain’t black, but he sure is blue (gotcha!!!!!!!!) Hey the next meeting is down at Herb’s Wiener Bar, bring a deck of cards and an Albert Collins CD (Nothing’ like an Ice cold beer with the iceman, he?). Oops, wife’s calling. I’m history. Uncle Bluzer”

Posted by Carl