The Severed Cortex

There are several people at work who have varied taste in music. One of those is everyone's friend Nancy who loves punk music. For years I assumed that she grew up in the city, but several months ago I found out she actually grew up in Washington, MO. Basically, the country. Because of this we've found that we have more in common musically than just Fugazi and Black Flag. We also have in common southern fried legends Molly Hatchet. More precisely we have Gator Country. It's sort of been a joke, but then again I own some Molly Hatchet and clearly she does too.

So, when we heard that Molly Hatchet would be playing at Rib America we knew we had to go. It was just (good?) luck that Blue Oyster Cult was playing the headliner that night. Playing before Molly Hatchet was Jackyl, and opening the show was one of the Van Zandt cousins. So, as you can guess, the hoosier/redneck factor was somewhere around 2 to the 64th power. We hadn't been there more than ten minutes when we looked at each other and said, "where do all these hoosiers come from?" There were several mullets, a few fe-mullets, and we witnessed two trailer ladies tongue kiss a very old man. I couldn't stop watching but Nancy was totally grossed out by it.
Although it was hot, the crowd wasn't unruly. I attribute that to the fact that the beer was expensive. First off, you couldn't purchase anything with cash. Instead, you had to use the ticket system. And of course they screw you on the tickets. Beers were 5 tickets, but you could only get 14 tickets for $20 or roughly $1.42 per ticket ($7+/beer). However, if you wanted to get the extra ticket so that you could purchase three beers (instead of purchasing two beers and having four useless tickets), you had to pay $2 more. I love math, but even this was too much. I'm sure the hoosiers gave up trying to figure it out.

Molly Hatchet opened up with Whiskey Man and Gator Country so basically we had to wait an hour to hear the only other two good songs. As expected they finished with Flirtin' With Disaster. In between it all it was pretty uneventful, except for the part where they broke out the rebel flag. There was a black guy in the crowd too and he didn't seem too pissed off about it. Then again, he was standing in the middle of a crowd of rednecks. It would have been prudent for him to play along. I make fun, but the band did sound really tight. It's just that most of Molly Hatchet's other songs kind of suck, especially the stuff they sang off the 'new' album. There were some good things about the band even though only one of these guys is from the original lineup.

• They all played custom made guitars.
• The bass player looks kind of like this guy.
• The lead guitarist, who owns the license to use the name Molly Hatchet, has hair as good as Joe Dirt.
• The lead singer sounds just like the original guy (Danny Joe Brown), even down to the horse whistling.
• The rhythm guitarist, who is the only original member, was as fat as Dom Deluise. When I looked at him I kept thinking about the Simpsons episode where Homer learned that he could work from home if he weighed over 300 pounds. Ten more pounds and he'll be able to play gigs from his trailer in Jacksonville.

Blue Oyster Cult sucked it hard. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I wanted to hear Godzilla and Don't Fear the Reaper, but their first couple of songs sounded so terrible that we couldn't stomach anymore. Besides, we were out $50 bucks for the couple of beers we bought.

Best T-shirt of the day: Silence is Golden. Duct Tape is Silver.