Countdown to the Battle of the Jug Bands

(my card)

Alright, now that the Super Bowl is over, America can focus on its more pressing business — The Annual Battle of the Jug Bands!

As I described earlier, it takes place at the Cabooze in Minneapolis on the first Sunday after every Super Bowl Sunday, which I’m told was yesterday (I watched the Puppy Bowl instead).  Like the equinoxes and solstices, the Battle of the Jug Bands will continue to happen on that Sunday even after the cockroaches have long ago taken over the world. 

And that’s fine with me. One night last June, my wife and I had martinis and frickles at the Town Talk Diner. Afterwards, we drove north up Hiawatha and took the 94 West exit to get back to our Uptown pad.  As you take that exit, you get a commanding view of the Cabooze, as if you were circling the bar in a helicopter.  At the sight of it, I was suddenly very wistful — I yearned for the Annual Battle of the Jug Bands and I wished it was February right then and there. February in Minnesota. And I wished this in June.

The first year I attended The Battle, there was a jug band that had a toddler in its line-up.  She was maybe 2, I guess, and during each song she sat on stage trying to out-shout the band with her high-pitched babbling. I believe she was singing.  In any case, the sound almost exactly reproduced that of the old Skillet Lickers recordings from the 1920’s, with Gid Tanner singing his falsetto backup, all out of tune and off tempo.  It was uncanny, as if something long dead had inadvertently been brought back to life.

In 2007, the Battle will be a quarter century old and it’s bigger than ever. And lately, it’s actually evolved into a real competition. For a long time, the 20 or so bands that competed over the 8-hour show were really more like 10 bands, with a lot of promiscuous recombination going on to make it seem like more bands.  But the last two years, more real bands entered the competition than the Battle could accommodate, and they literally put names into a hat and randomly chose the entrants. 
 
The judging has changed a bit, too. Now — for the first time — last year’s winning jug band chooses this year’s panel of judges. I gave those so-called “winners” multiple copies of my card at last year’s Battle, but they still have not contacted me. And, well … I will most definitely be judging them anyway, believe you me.

This year’s winners be forewarned: Choose me as thy judge, lest ye be judged with a can of genuine Celestial Monochord whoop-ass!

See you there …

Editor’s Note: This must be the hundredth installment … no, wait, it’s the 5th installment of The Celestial Monochord’s attempt to post one entry every day for an entire month. What was I thinking???