Under the BQE in Brooklyn (Williamsburg)
car show @ 10am, bands start around 3:30pm at Union Pool, cost still TBA
Every year somehow, WITHOUT FAIL I miss this car show. I'm always out of town or just totally out of the loop completely. It's like the cosmos doesn't want me to get within five miles of the Rumblers yearly KK&HRT because the world will implode or there are too many dudes in attendance I've slept with and having all of us in one place will cause a black hole to rip through the space-time continuum and suck all the rockabilly retards in (yours truly included).
THIS year, however, I will be there for the whole shebang, camera and sexy car-loving man friend in tow (hopefully)...I owe the world at least that much.
BAND LIST: Rehab For Quitters, Tombstone Brawlers (my friend Eric used to drum for them and their bassist Pete...well that's none of your business), Homeward Bound, the Memphis Morticians (my favorite Ghoul-a-billy, or what have you, band in NYC), Sasquatch and the Sick-a-Billys and the Turbo A.C.'s.
The next event, happening for four days over Labor Day weekend is the Coney Island Rockabilly Festival. And like clockwork, I will be out of town that weekend communing with nature in a bikini and filled with substances swimming around in a lake in New Jersey. SO somebody else will just have to go enjoy this for me. Give me a choice between Rockabilly scenesters and hanging with my friends for a weekend in a log cabin on a lake? The choice basically makes itself.
There are so many bands playing - including most of them from the Rumblers event the weekend before) that I can't even list them all. Should be fun times, even though I firmly believe that burlesque and roller derby are horribly dated, been-there-done-that uninteresting excuses for fat chicks to wear their underwear in public. (Of course, I'm all for excuses to wear your underwear in public, not that you need any.) It's a terrible replacement for missing female self-esteem and something that, when it was first conceived, was more like a sexy ladies comedy song and dance troupe than whatever it has deteriorated into today.
But you should still go, because maybe you are still excited by, you know...that. Maybe if the burlesque was happening on top of a pit filled with vipers or on the back of a galloping horse I might be intrigued.
My main beef with events like this is that they are so fucking predictable, the whole "Rockabilly Festival" thing. Throw a few "fill in the blank"-a-billy bands, a couple zoftig chicks in pasties, a "Reverend So-and-So" and a set of fire batons and POOF - instant Rockabilly "fest" satiation. Do I have any suggestions of what I'd like to see more of that's a little less predictable? No. But then again, that's probably why I've never been swept with open arms into the inner-most cliques of the heppest of hot rod scene hooligans; being predictable is my numero uno pet peeve.
Predictability is just another word for "you're not trying hard enough". Lazy, complacent, underdeveloped...those all come to mind.
So why do I still like rockabilly music and cars and all this crap that goes with it? It all comes together to resonate within me in a personal way, which is what hot rodding is all about. It's about taking something standard - something predictable - that anybody can buy or have or do and painstakingly transforming it into something all your very own. Festivals and people that resort to cookie-cutter molds of "what works" as far away from the hot rod spirit that you can possibly get.
This is why I don't organize "fests"...but perhaps maybe I should.
I probably just opened up a big ol' can of ass-kickin' there. Heh.
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