Southern Culture on the Skids and Five O'Clock Somewhere
Sunday, Aug. 31, at the Echo
What the hell were we doing spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon in a dark concretish box? On Labor Day weekend, for fuck’s sake?
Well, when Grand Ole Echo calls with Southern Culture on the line, we put away the sunscreen and fall in. A dark concretish box it is!
For a while it looked like we might be the only citizens answering the call, since the Echo’s usual Sunday audience of roots-ninnies and hepcats would be making the scene at the Dog & Pony Show instead. But as usual, we were so, so wrong: The kids came for Culture, and then caravanned to Safari Sam’s after, everyone in matching double wristbands, one for each good time.
Southern Culture on the Skids is a crunchy, greazy, trans-fats-filled pile o’ sugar, all bouffant hairdos and bowling shirts and yowling-good guitars. And they were fine this night, playing a mix of songs stomping nastily over their ’90s canon, from ’94’s “Biscuit Eater” and ’98’s Belafonteish “House of Bamboo” to ’99’s spooky “Zombified,” and just about everything good (which is all of it) off their biggest album, 1995’s Dirt Track Date.
But, well, last time we’d seen them (a decade in the rearview mirror) was at the late, great Foothill in Long Beach, a storm of a dancehall where Patsy and Johnny and El Vez and 00 Soul used to play, before the late owner’s son sold it for scrap, and at the Foothill, goddamn it, people would dance.
We stayed an hour, and then we hoofed it to Safari Sam’s to see Dave Alvin get his thang on.
Before Southern Culture, though, was the best thing I’d seen since I saw Ruby Friedman the night before: the juicy chicks in square-dancing minis (and their Jewy, Gram Parsonsy, open-shirt guy on guitar) of Five O’Clock Somewhere. More Mandrell Sisters than anything else, they opened up a rollicking, Demolition String Band-style set of happy, upbeat Kountry Klassics like Tammy Wynette’s “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” some Dwight Yoakam, some crap David Allan Coe (I once saw some fat chick yell along, her piggy eyes bulging, Hitler-like, with one of his many, many lyrics about “niggers”), and some of Blondie’s previously unknown country numbers. Good choices (except for the crap Coe – “Redneck,” I believe), low sultry voices, and we liked them up real purty and good.
This Sunday, Grand Ole Echo hosts Mike Stinson, 5-9 p.m. 1822 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park. $10-$12.
Published: 09/03/2008
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