“don’t be afraid to look like a fool”: Cowboy Mouth in concert Feb 17 '05    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line My final recommendation is: put your hands in the air, just to show you care. All right! “Welcome, everybody at Epinions! We’re Cowboy Mouth, and we’re from New Orleans, land of Southern Comfort and Mardi Gras! Are you ready to have fun tonight? ”Yow! I’m happy to see so many familiar faces here tonight! But for those of you who don't own any of our records, I want to promise you right off: that doesn’t matter. We play every night, and when Cowboy Mouth tour your home state, we want you to be there, making noise with us. Can you do that? I said, can you do that? Louder now, I can’t hear you; before I even show you what we sound like, I just need to know if you like to feel alive. When we tour, can you be there? … Alright! “I want to thank Stickboy for being such a great opening act tonight. I know there are people who put down the whole Green Day/ Blink 182/ Sum 41/ New Found Glory school of punk-pop when it bleeds in over the radio, but damn, those guys had good beats, nice harmonies, gleaming bald skulls, and beautiful goofy faces. We know MTV only signs bands like them, so let's all feel good that MTV is signing a band as _good_ at the genre as they are. Give it up for Stickboy! Louder! And when you helped them sing ‘Blister in the Sun’ and ‘I Want You to Want Me’, we could hear you all the way from our trailer. Give yourselves a big hand, right now: I can tell you’re gonna be a wonderful audience. “So this is John, on lead guitar. Everybody make him feel welcome and say ‘Hi, John!’… yeah! And this is Paul, on rhythm guitar. Everyone say ‘Hi, Paul!!!!!’ … and I’m Fred. Everyone say ‘Hi, Fred!!!!!!!!’ … thank you! All right! And this girl here, this is her first time in North Carolina. She’s our new Assistant District Attorney and bassist. Last time we were here, we had that stunning blonde, Elisabeth Rohm as Serena Sutherland, remember her? Wasn’t she great? But then, when that famous rapper was murdered, she got too emotionally involved in the investigation, and decided who was guilty almost at once on almost no evidence? Her hunch turned out to be right, but that simply was no way for an Assistant D.A. and bassist to behave, so at the end of the episode we had to can her. Now we have a stunning brunette bassist, a graduate of St. Mary’s Catholic School for Girls: Sonja! And we’ve been telling her all along: LiveJournal is gonna be fun, and Blogspot is gonna be fun, and the comment sections of the Daily Kos and Television Without Pity are gonna be fun, but Epinions is gonna be _really, really_ fun. So come on, everyone, make Sonja feel welcome! “All right! You’re awesome. Now Sonja is gonna show you all what she can do. Hit it, Sonja … … … now, there we go. What do you say, Epinions? Can we keep her? Let me hear you! “All right. Now everyone, I need you to put your hands in the air. Put your hands in the air, and give us a rhythm. Give us a rhythm… yeah! Now on the count of four, John here is gonna play his guitar as loud as he can, and Paul is gonna play as loud as _he_ can, and I am gonna hit these motherfuuckin’ drums LOUD and FAST and HARD. One! Two! Three! … Three-and-a-half! … Four! Yeah! We are Cowboy Mouth, and we want you to help us give you the best, the most energetic, the loudest and rootinest and tootinest concert since the last time Cowboy Mouth came to Epinions! Can you do that? I said, CAN YOU DO THAT? “Now, I want all of you screaming as loud as you can right now. Go crazy! I don’t think that’s the best you can do: be crazier! Whoo! I do not want you worrying who, exactly, this music is reminding you of! But if you were worrying, then hey, this is our concert side, our party side: we’re sounding something like Kiss! Something like Tom Petty! Something like George Thorogood and the Destroyers! Something like a young Elvis Presley if that boy had had proper _amplifiers_! "We don’t have any of that jazz piano on our this here tour: that jazz that gave our rock a touch of eccentricity when your friend Jen was playing our CD for you in the car, that jazz that some of you recognized from Mardi Gras while some of you – yeah, I see you, skinny boy with floppy dark hair, drumming on your thigh – some of you were thinking ‘this must be jazzy, because it reminds me of R.E.M.’s “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1", kinda’. We don’t need it, because jazz is for listeners, and this concert is about all of us getting together and making some noise! Every single one of you is just as much a part of Cowboy Mouth as we are! Your royalty checks will be in the mail on Friday! “Now for this song, I need your left hands, high in the air, like that. And now, I need your right hands in the air too, and let’s have another rhythm. Now, don’t be scared, but we’re gonna need you to multitask here. Keep up that rhythm, we need that rhythm. But for this song, we need you to sing along – I want you singing along with every word here. And if you don’t know any of the words: sing louder! (“I’ve got no reason for the things I fear Like my wheel’s resistance when I oversteer Aruba, Jamaica, they gonna fry my brain And it’s so lonely in the state of Maine Otters ate my pencil, that was sort of lame I s’pose this line should rhyme now, going going came I’m throwing oranges at an apple cart Stop me up, stop me up, and never start!”) ”Otters ate your ... huh! Those of you who didn’t know the words were being more literal than usual. That’s the spirit: give yourselves a hand! And now, on the count of four, I want everyone to start jumping up and down! One! The square root of two! Two! e! Pi! Twenty-seven sevenths! FOUR! Higher! I can’t see you! “You there, in the front row, in the pink shirt. What’s your name? Stacy? You seem a little shy tonight. We don’t want that! Come up on stage, now, here, next to me. Come on, encourage her everyone: we want Stacy to come up and help us out, right? Stacy, here’s an extra pair of drum sticks just for you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish. Don’t worry, I don’t bite – or if I do, you’re gonna love it. Everyone, give her some support now, loud as you can. Don’t scare her: I’ve done that enough myself. All right! Now here, Stacy, you can hit the cymbals, or the snare drum, or the bass drum, or any of them … hey! That’s great! Louder! See, I knew you could do it. Let’s everyone give it up for Stacy! “Now, slow down here. We’re gonna get country a moment: let’s have another hand for our guitarist John Thomas Griffith, and he’s gonna sing for us. Yes, I said John Thomas Griffith: that’s right, you bought his solo album Aluminum for $2 a couple years back, and you thought it was a darned good slice of southern rock and whatnot, and you didn’t have a clue he was part of Cowboy Mouth, did you? Well, let’s hear it for pleasant surprises … and then let’s even rest for a moment and _hear_ the pleasant surprise. There, wasn’t that a nice song? "And now we’re even gonna do a pretty ballad – which, trust Jen on this, we do several times per studio album for your home-listening pleasure – and here you are thinking hey, they have maybe a Gin Blossoms influence, or no, wait, the melody is much subtler and more sophisticated in its beauty than that … why, Elvis Costello could be proud to write it and _donate_ it to the Gin Blossoms. Right? Thank you, thank you. Raise your hands high! Can you give it up for pretty ballads? Louder! I can’t hear you! I said, I can't hear you! I’ve been playing these shows for ten years, and I’ve got tinnitus like you wouldn’t believe! Louder! "Do you feel good tonight? Do you feel good putting down your worries and being among all these wonderful people at Epinions? Do you feel glad you’re alive now? All right! “What I want you to do right now is turn to the person next to you. I don’t care if you know that person; I don’t care if you like that person. What I want you to do is ask yourself: doesn’t that person look like one of those filthy Jews that are selling out our country from the inside? Doesn’t that make you _furious_??!?! “Ha-ha, just kidding. Boy, you’re a great audience, you’re participating beautifully. But right now I want you to help stuff your neighbor’s gall-bladder back inside that gaping hole you made in his abdomen, and I don’t care if you know him or care about him, I want you to give him a big hug and a kiss. There you go! Because we’re all here to celebrate tonight, to shout out the joy that most of us are still alive right now! Are you having a great time? Louder! Louder! YEAH! “Now, you there, in charge of the lighting, I want you turning all the lights off. (Light dims) No, _all_ the lights. (Light dims further, creating a dramatic, cavernous twilight) Wow, you’re really slow, aren’t you? If you can’t turn all the lights off, we’ll pull the plugs ourselves. We’ll do it, you know. (Lights go off) Okay, I want everyone to get down. Down to the floor, down so your butt is cramming into the shoes, or better, of the person behind you. Get down! And I want you to think about any frustrations you might have: anything making you unhappy at work. Anything making you unhappy in your love life. Have any of you men out there ever been treated badly by a girl? (Huge roar of acknowledgement) And have any of you beautiful, wonderful ladies ever had a guy treat you like he wouldn’t trade a speck of dirt for you? (Higher-pitched, even huger roar) Well, I want you to know that whoever did that to you, it’s THEIR LOSS. And when I lean into my drums and hit them as hard as I can, I want you to take that frustration and say 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!' Pretend you're at a window and scream 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!' Then take all that frustration, and ball it up, and let it go. Let it go! Let it go! Let it go!!!!!!! “Look, you guys have been just a fantastic audience tonight. I hope you’ve all had as fantastic a time as we have. You guys, you’re amazing: you’ve been louder than those guys in the Fray at Slate, louder than the guys at Diaryland, louder than the reviewers at Amazon. Sometimes I think you’ve even been louder than the great people of New Orleans. “I’m sure you’re very bright people, but for tonight, I want to thank you for turning off your thinking caps. I want to thank you for joining for being here and celebrating being human together. I want to thank you for venting the same emotions with which I could have asked you to accept me as your personal savior, or to pledge to sell 5000 boxes of band candy, but instead we just made a wonderful party. “I want to thank you for turning off your nagging brain and screaming as loud as you could for us, even though your wife noticed midway through that you’d ripped open one of the stitches on the roof of your mouth and were bleeding onto your chin. I wanna thank you for _enjoying_ that screaming, even though I'd said ‘Don’t be afraid to look foolish’, not ‘Don’t be afraid to look like a vampire with lousy table manners’. "I wanna thank you for rocking out! Now remind me: what is the name of this band? (Better than Ezra!) Right city, at least! Try again. What is the name of this band? (Cowboy Mouth!) What did you say? (COWBOY MOUTH!!!) WHO did you say we were? (!!!COWBOY MOUTH!!!!!!!) “That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”

Read all comments (10)|Write your own comment

Write an essay on this topic.