11:09 p.m. - 2005-08-15
great taste? or great WASTE?!
The other day, Kia and I got to play at the Great Taste of the Midwest, which is a giant beer event at a park in Madison. As you enter the grounds, you're given a handsomely embossed four-to-six ounce glass, with which you're free to wander the grounds, sampling the various micro-beers in the vendors' tents. As the glasses and wandering priveleges were our payment in lieu of actual money, I was resolved to become hammered at this event. But not too hammered, since I was playing a wedding later that evening. Fortunately, getting hammered wasn't a problem, since the microbrewers only filled up our tiny glasses partway, and since the lines were long enough that whatever buzz you contracted from your last shot of double IPA or Belgian triple was long gone by the time you were able to get ahold of the next one. In short, the whole event was predicated on the idea that beer should be savored, NOT just used to make you forget your woes.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm all for savoring things. On the other, the Great Taste of the Midwest is the kind of event I MOST need to be wasted to fully enjoy: it's out of doors, crowded, there's nowhere to sit (save the ground, and it was intermittantly raining), and not enough of those upright plastic coffins that serve as bathrooms at outdoors events.
Plus, the park was kind of hilly, which made pushing around my vibes a challenge. You see, our band, Yammer, was only one of many volunteer bands at the event, each of us instructed to rove the grounds, providing ambience. Most of the bands were decidedly acoustic and folksy, with banjoes and violins and such, playing bluegrass or Django Reinhardt music, or something appropriate for wooded areas. Not so Yammer. Yammer's a lot more at home inside with amps and mics and such, not least because so much of the impact of frontman Jonathan's songs are lost if you can't hear the words. I was standing right near Jonathan and could never hear the words. Or the acoustic guitar, or the acoustic bass guitar thing that Kia played. Most of the crowd was completely unaware of us, except for when we serenaded some of the people in the long, long porta-toilet lines. When we were serenading one man in particular, we caused him to miss his turn in the toilet, thereby slowing up the line, thereby nearly causing a riot.
AND, best of all, most people, let alone (somehow) drunk people, don't know the difference between the vibraphone that I play and a xylophone. This meant that we got to hear lots of (somehow) drunks yelling "Xylophone!" Also, we got to keep our glasses.
NEXT: Kia and Geoff comandeer a gazebo.
