Ventured into the unavoidable void of the west side on
Friday, where broken bottles twinkle like suicidal stars and women on the
financially motivated stroll ask for the time as a ploy for money. It’s bleak,
I tell you. But within this shabby Shangri-La beat the hearts of two excellent
venues pumping out real American music to those who live there, and those that
come from the surrounding burbs to get down.
With the wife and her sidekick in tow, we hit Sandra’s Saloon
on Smith Street, where the Mike Snow Band was laying down a flurry of
country and western in this beautiful urban honky-tonk. Snow draws from the
Willie and Waylon and George and Buck songbooks of rural bang ‘n’ twang, and he
is the most country-ist cat this town has to offer
since Dave Donnelly died in 2011. What a voice.
As if that weren’t enough, we climbed into the midnight caboose
and headed over to Smokin’ Joe’s on Lyell for some
down and dirty blues from Dan Schmitt & the Shadows with special
guest Joe Beard. The place was packed. The steam heat fogged the windows
like a Roman bath house on Valentine’s Day. Schmitt solos with and around lush
chord patterns. The music swings for sure, and it jumps, too. It served as a
perfect back to Beard’s forth: a bare-bones tone that is both soothing and
sinister. And though Beard intoned, “I feel like a stranger in my own home
town,” there was nowhere else any of us needed to be but right there at Smokin’ Joe’s with the blues and the Shadows and the steam.
The good folks at Gig Link threw an all-day party Sunday at
the Firehouse Saloon on South Clinton to benefit the families of the victims of
the Christmas Eve shootings in Webster. The place was already jumping by the
time I made the scene. Funk Nut was rocking a deep-dish groove full of
jazz, soul, and funk. Moon Zombies followed with a multi-media
extravaganza that at times resembled a tantrum. Again this was funk, but with a
breakneck edge and abandon. The band stomped around as if it were trying to get
the flubber on their soles
to kick in. Give it time and I predict this band will be playing air born.
This article appears in Jan 2-8, 2013.
Without Flubber we would still be on the Moon.