Oom-pa!
Just back from playing the largest display of public drunkenness in the US, Oktoberfest-Zinzinnati, with the Joe Wendel Ensemble.
It was a speedy and harmless trip down, with the usual interesting musician stories. One concerned one local genius-kid trumpeter (whose name I forget) who went to to play lead for the Wynton Marsalis Band. Well, one day Wynton called him up with him for a solo, said he was going to teach the kid a lesson. Well, Wynton plays, then the kid plays twice as hard. So Wynton of course has to top the kid, plays another solo. Kid comes back fighting. In the end Wynton blew his lip out, and ended up having to cancel a bunch of gigs because he couldn't play.
Got to Motel 6 way early; they didn't even have our rooms ready. So we all went across the street to Mickey D's. There I was eating the Asian salad, surrounded by burger-munchers, preserving my rep for weirdness.
The Ranneys were coming down to sing with us, but ran into a problem: Todd had restored a '66 Mustang for his daughter's 22nd birthday. Only the restoration didn't successfully involve the fuel system, and the car began coughing south of Columbus. It's sitting in a garage in the burbs of Cincy now. They made it on time, but we had to make stops on the way back to deliver them where they needed to go.
We left for downtown with plenty of time (we thought), but instead of just letting Joe dump the van in the loading area, the cops made him park it blocks away (possibly because they saw him jockeying it around and didn't trust him). So we're setting up at the Anheiser-Busch, and no Joe, who does the sound. I wired things up the best I could (simple rig:4 speakers and a head, fed by 5 mikes, the accordion, and a cassette deck during the breaks). Joe got back with 5-10 to spare, re-did it his way. But there wasn't time for a careful sound check, and we sounded like shit all night: bits of feedback, too much treble.
Ok-fest Saturday night is just gross. Humanity cheek-to-jowl in the street, drinking, littering, shouting. And it's always the eve of the Browns-Bengals game (which we regrettably lost), so there are orange-shirt gangs shouting "Who dey?" The air reeked of stale beer. And there's my personal pet peeve: people walking behind the stage with stinky cigars, from which there is no escape if you are playing. Worst was a personal wardrobe malfunction: I broke a button on my lederhosen. they're big, as I was pessimistic about my weight when I bought them, and they're too expensive to grow out of. And the suspenders are too long, because I didn't do accurate metric measurments. So I was facing a sub-Janet Jackson scenario. But Joe tied them to a thong that allows you to let the top out, and I was good for the weekend.
Lots of kids until about 9, wanting to do the Chicken Dance, so we obliged of course. And Beer Barrel (The drunks don't know Trompeten-Echo, which is the most popular Oktoberfest polka worldwide, so Joe wasn't doing it. And he resolutely refuses to do Too Fat, even though it's in the book.) We did more slow things than I would have preferred, because we had the singers. My philosophy with young drunks is to play as much hard driving Oberkrainer polka as possible, until they puke or fall down, or the physical exertion metabolizes the alcohol. But then, pacing was important...6 hours is a long set, especially being sustained by a cream puff and 3 goetta balls (For the uninitiated, goetta is to steel-cut oats as scrapple is to cornmeal. It's a Cincy thing, and far worthier food than Cincy's other contribution to cuisine, "Cincinnati-style chili" (i.e., bad spaghetti).
Next day was much nicer: better crowd (rowdies were at the game), better beer tent (Sam Adams), better parking for the van, better sound, better food (big bowl of jambalaya for $5...we were stopping at Schmidt's in Columbus on the way back, so I knew I'd get my wurst), and only 4 hours playing.
I didn't take a camera, but here we are from some years back.
Comments