madison, oh dirty madison

Quote of the day: ‘my mother would cry if she saw where we slept last night.’

None of us have ever been to Madison Wisconsin, but everything we’ve ever heard about the place was nothing but positive niceness, an oasis of culture and progressiveness in the smiling land of cheese—but obviously they’ve never been to the klinic bar on a Sunday night. It started off with a bartender already sloppy drunk himself by 8pm, and finished with a night on the stained carpet of the ‘apartment’ above the bar, hoping that mouse won’t get bold and scamper across my face but will instead choose to settle in next to that month-old open bottle of half drunk Snapple over there in the corner. And everything in-between: from aggressive rocky, drummer for the CORN FED DAMES, to Amanda the other bartender wailing on the house drumset in an impromptu early evening jam-session, to larry-richard-something, drunker than he was fat (and he was a big boy), offering us drugs he didn’t have, extolling the virtues of Portland and—once again, its drugs—telling us how great we were while secretly trying to order drinks on our bartab, to tattoos that should never see the light of day, to the sound guy telling us after we played how surprised he was that we didn’t suck. By the way, He’ll be playing our tunes on his UW college radio show next Sunday night—‘support your scene’—so tune in or stream in if that’s your flavor.

The king hen could have fallen much much lower last night, but we didn’t embarrass ourselves, we kept our new friends at arm’s distance and we got out of there with no strange rashes.

Tonight we play the ELBO ROOM in Chicago, and will wallow here in luxury for a few long-anticipated days.