By Bryan Aiken
To paint a picture, it’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m recently returned home from a veritable debacle at a too-packed Star Bar, my shirt is in shreds, and I have beer-hair. Beer-hair, you understand, is similar to the unclean stiffness of beach-hair, except the ocean I crowd-surfed tonight was one of sweat and leather and PBR. Instinct is telling me to bathe and sleep, but first things first: before I wash the evening off, I need to seal it into the great electronic time capsule. I offer this review with urgency, under the constant ache and tinnitus of a job well done, to document a night well wasted in the throes of immaturity, irresponsibility and screaming, dancing fun.
My current disarray is only relevant because some stories are best begun at the end, and the end of my tale is this: tonight, I got my ass kicked by King Khan, BBQ, and three lovely country singers. But it wasn’t always this way; in fact, the evening began rather still, semi-formal, and almost polite.
Local scene pillar GG King, along with a few of his post-Carbona compatriots, popped the cork out of the gig with a glass of safe, tested punk ruisms. To their defense, the band’s by-the-book approach doesn’t give them much to work with: each song seemed to weigh the limited options of pills or drugs, “oohs” or “ahs,” or one of about three power chords. It’s the classic Cadillac rock you’ve heard before, but played here with enough professional air to have legitimacy in Atlanta’s long-standing punk culture. GG offers a clean-cut, stage-stagnant Prom picture of punk band, an image assisted by the white curtain and burgundy valence draped uncharacteristically behind the quartet. It was a fine set, to be sure, but a relative non-presence compared to the subsequent surprise birthday parties of the night’s rowdier acts.
Tennessee indie-country trio Those Darlins began their set as simply any other: by asking the crowd for a joke. “How do you get a nun pregnant?” responded an audience member. Baritone ukulelist Nikki Darlin’s response: “Duh, you fuckin’ rape her.” And so began the morally degenerative spiral of the night’s festivities.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the Darlins’ recent self-titled debut was no preparation. What was perhaps intended to be charmingly impolite honky-tonkery became a full-on, double-time, fuck-you rock show in the live setting. With blue notes colored by more than just nail polish, these ladies mean the meanest of business; when they say they got drunk and ate chicken, or scored a DUI, you’re inclined to believe them. What’s more, for all their flippant effervescence, the Darlins displayed far and away the best musicianship of the night. Jessi and Kelley Darlin routinely traded insane, dueling rockabilly guitar solos and laser-speed, pick-less bass walks, all whilst thrashing in and out of the pit through righteous windmills of hair.
But while the Darlins play staggeringly well, they certainly don’t play nice. After breaking a ukulele string with her fingers(!), Nikki sucked up a mouthful of crowd-stolen beer and spat it like a fire-breather quite directly into my left eye. It’s still uncomfortably red as I write this, but I hold no grudge. It was merely the first of my night’s many inflictions, and the moment provided the perfect descriptor of the Darlins’ live experience: dirty, attractive, appropriately confident women breaking their strings and spitting warm beer in your eye. I mean that in a good way, of course.
Not to be outdone, the night’s final act saw a manfully cross-dressed King Khan and one-man house band (read: simultaneous drummer/vocalist/guitarist) Mark “BBQ” Sultan proving why they call themselves the Show. In an effortless crack of throwback garage-rock, the duo whipped an uncomfortably stuffed Star Bar into a frisky, destructive, love-addled madhouse. Every moment of the performance was a world of energy, a mosh-pit sock-hop that I only just survived, and struggle to describe.
Perhaps the show is best captured by an itemized lists of songs, and the trophy wounds each tune afforded me. Looking around my worn, sore body, I can see the night’s set list:
• At the indignant opening line of “Zombies,” a bar-wide eruption clawed multiple fingers into the pre-existing hole in my shirt, stretching it from a whistle to a yawn.
• Over the furious course of “Treat Me Like A Dog,” I was lifted above and across the crowd, crashing against what must have been a line of swing-dancing leather jackets on the front row. At least, that’s what the hairless burn-scab on my arm suggests.
• During “I’ll Never Belong,” the venue’s sopping testosterone seethed over into random fist fight, which I only noticed amid the bouncing rumpus when one of the blows accidently caught me in the jaw.
• About midway through “Animal Party,” the aforementioned Kelley Darlin made her pit-presence known by dumping a near-full can of beer on my head (I reactively covered my left eye and pulled a hood over my beer-hair, which she hastily made into a beer-hood), marking my second beer-related incident with her band.
As chaotic as the scene became, it was never stressful; it was an sweat-on-sweat hour of love and squalor, of brother- and sister-hood, and one of the few appropriate settings to grab a good friend by the face and scream into his mustache, “Yeah, yeah! I Love You So!” And, shakin’ as real-low as BBQ would beckon, I ended the night onstage with a dozen others, a centipede of dancing embrace, with two of the greatest performers I’ve ever seen.
Or perhaps the night ends here, dictating the experience to electronic posterity. Or in only a few minutes, when I crank up the King Khan and BBQ Show and grab a well-earned nap in the shower.
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