Endless Mike and The Beagle Club - Goodbye Blue Monday, 3/29/07

The picture above is Davis's kickdrum on my lap. Davis plays the drums in Endless Mike and The Beagle Club (he's also produced all their records). I think I remember him telling me that what we're looking at here is an oil painting, which isn't the most acoustically sound way to decorate your kickdrum. It is, however, clearly the raddest. Anyway, when they were loading in they sorta piled up all their shit around on and around me (those tricksters) and it seemed like as good a time as any to snap a good picture of the thing. I kinda missed and didn't get the whole thing, but my photographical philosophy has always been that mediocrity is good enough. I digress.

Drew & The Medicinal Pen opened the show. Which is really just one guy named Drew H. I didn't take any pictures but here's one that I lifted from his myspace by a fellow named Will George:
Corporeally, I'm quite sure this was the same Drew H. that opened for The Beagle Club the last time I saw them at Goodbye Blue Monday. But on stage this time, despite a sound system that snapped, crackled and popped through his first song before just rolling over and giving up, he was a new man. I'll leave it at that for now because Drew just put out a 6 song cd called Dream, Dream, Fail, Repeat that I plan on writing about in the super-near future because it's very, very good. So stay tuned.
Mike doesn't actually know how to play that banjo (or so he says).

Only a six-piece this time out, Endless Mike and The Beagle Club were probably the tightest I've ever seen them that night. But my strength has never been concert reviews (especially, ironically, when I really really like them) so I'm going to tell you instead about some good news Mike had for me afterwards:

People are showing up at shows in far-away towns knowing the words to songs. Please understand how hard it is in this Tower of Babel society in which we live to rise above the din and get people's attention. There are thousands of new myspace pages, new blogs, new sources of noise popping up every single day. I have written about this band more than any other band on this blog, but I have no illusions about the size of the hill of beans that amounts to in the grand scheme of things.

For a band without a massive hype machine behind it to get the kind of traction necessary to bring people out to shows knowing lyrics, it requires a metric shit-ton of hard work, talent, and a little bit of luck.

It made me really happy to hear that it's all starting to pay off for these guys. It couldn't happen to a nicer, more genuine bunch.

Endless Mike and The Beagle Club - Mr. Miller's Opus (mp3, right click to download)
Buy The Husky Tenor here.