Who knew the Ramones were so country????

Ok, come with me now... I wanna take you to a little place in the West End - which is of course the particularly groovy & bohemian end of Brisvegas... where there are still loads of hippies, and students, and artists and musicians, bums and homeless dodgy looking dudes wandering the streets, lots of people with mental health issues, weirdos, vegans, wierdo vegans, and alternative types by the bucketload - obviously the coolest part of town!! This is a very funky little suburb tucked into a bend in the river, close to everything but not yet ritzed up, glammed out, totally fucked over and rendered soulless by dollar worshipping developers and their evil empires. This is where the best markets in Brisbane are - under the incredibly gorgeous Moreton Bay figs down by the river... the funkiest markets where you can eat a snowcone whilst listening to the barefoot jazz kids jamming on their milk crates, watching families of all shapes and descriptions play and relax... nice! This is the part of town where all the best bookshops, record stores (that's right kids - VINYL with the big fat bottom end and it's endless appeal and vulnerability), restaurants of every shape and ethnicity, a profusion of fabulous little coffee houses, second hand clothes stores, art and art supply shops, Trash Video, Bent Books, The Avid Reader, The Three Monkeys (absolute best cake on the planet), a sheisha house (big hookah-like smoking pipe thing from Turkey where you sit around it and smoke fruit tobacco's over hot coals through these long snake-like appendages), Mick's Nuts, Reverse Garbage (where you can find everything and anything) and endless other varieties of funky businesses of every shape and description. If an Egg Yolk Jellyfish were the sort of jellyfish to show discernment and taste in the parts of town that it frequents, then Brisbane's West End would be just the place it would hang out. It would eat at Cantina's and Lefka's, it would wander up and down Boundary Road checking out all the different stuff - it would probably head toward the river, finding itself in the leafier, greener part of the West End... it would quite likely find itself on Hardgrave Road ambling along cheerfully. If an Egg Yolk Jellyfish were to find itself ambling cheerfully along Hardgrave Road it would almost definitely go past Tongue and Groove at some point - which amazingly enough brings me to the point of this whole monologue.... Thursday before last I discovered 2 awesome Brisbanian things - 1) Tongue and Groove, and 2) Death Rides a Horse. Now from the street, Tongue and Groove looks like just another of the West Ends MANY funky restaurants chockablock full of tasty titbits, but as I discovered you can go downstairs to the coolest, funkiest, most laid back little bar I've been in whilst up here yet!!! Like being in someone's loungeroom if it were uber-cool and full of groovy, beautiful people. (with suitably esoteric artworks on the wall and of course a big fuck off bar in the middle of it). Down one end was the velvet half of the room - floor to ceiling red velvet drapes, fairy lights, and teensy weensy stage. There was a big old piano, lots of sofas and lounge chairs, and dreadlocked student-y types there, chatting and so forth. Down the other end of this fabulous little oubliette of cool were more lounges, more sofas, more dreadlocked student-y and musician types, and a doorway through to where you can go (semi)outside to smoke etc. So we got a drink, and made ourselves comfortable by leaning against the piano and watched Stu and Paul from fabulous Brisvegas band 'El Borracho' (one of my favourite bands on the scene here) do their 'Death Rides a Horse' thing. And lemme tell ya it's a fab, fab thing. Utterly hilarious. All Ramones, all mellow, all steel string (and some slide guitar), all perfectly delivered by Paul with Stu providing extremely amusing commentary. Now Stu happens to be one of the finest guitarists it has ever been my good fortune to come across (not to mention a drop dead SPUNK and - much like Philosophy Stu - a version of the perfect man) - so good in fact that he makes country almost bearable, and in this case extremely enjoyable. After all I love a good laugh and if you've ever heard these boys do 'Beat on the brat', 'The KKK took my baby away', 'Rockaway Beach', 'I wanna be sedated' or 'Sheena is a punk rocker' then you too would be in stitches. Who knew the Ramones were so country???? I never did, and it gave me a new perspective, and a new appreciation of one of my favourite bands. The boys were giving away their Death Rides a Horse cd, and lemme tell ya it's excellent so if you get the chance to nab one, do so! (otherwise you can come over to my place, smoke a few billys and listen to my copy). So not punk, so not cool, that it's cool!!!


Man my new fave little joint is The Tongue and Groove (they have live music there 4 nights a week and on sunday arvo's) and Death Rides a Horse were way better than Dick Desert (the guy that most people were there to see - the only thing I liked about him was his 'cousin' Daisy Desert, who was a boy in a dress who played really bad harmonica... the kitsch factor was massive there). And if a Purple Stripe Jellyfish was reeeeeeeeally into the Ramones I bet Death Rides a Horse would be it's favourite band!!! I'm totally gonna a) keep an eye out for the next Death Rides a Horse gig and b) get my arse back to the Tongue and Groove as soon as possible!