No Flies on the Hon-aayyy

This past weekend was pretty eventful, as you might imagine (with the biker rally and the pride parade). Lots of debauchery. Lots of noisy motorcycles. Lots of..umm...gay people? The thing about bikers is that they're, by and large, pretty old. So more noticable than all the bikers at every bar was all the old people at every bar. It was like downtown Austin turned into one of those "life comes at you fast" commercials.

Anyway, I also had a friend visiting from Dallas, and anytime you have a visitor from Dallas, you're required to make Austin look as cool as possible. None of my friends are really the "let's put on some $400 shoes and go clubbing" type, so they typically enjoy what Austin has to offer. On Saturday, I was trying to think of another kinda-cool, kinda-fun place to have dinner, so we ended up going to Opal Divine's. It's on one of the "cooler" parts of Sixth street, it's got a patio and the building itself is older, and pretty cool to look at. Cool, cool, cool. Yep. Austin is cool.

Well, (as Austin bars/restaurants will do) they had a band playing on the patio - one of those finger-snappin' New Orleans, jazzy, zydeco bands that are terrific when you're walking past the place, but excrutiating when you actually have to sit through an entire song. The cast of characters was pretty standard. Crazy drunk black guy dancing and yelling at the stage. White hippie girl dancing and smiling because "she gets it." Burnt out, bearded, ponytailed hippie strumming the guitar completely unaware of anything that's going on in the world around him (I honestly don't think his amp was on). Like I said, the first 2 minutes were pretty enjoyable. Then we realized how terrible the band was.

We came to the conclusion that this band got their start playing the bars in New Orleans that required 3-4 hour sets. We reached this conclusion because each of their songs was 5-6 minutes too long. They had a bad habit of finding one riff and one vocal hook and running with it. As we were finishing our dinner, they launched into another one of their marathon jams, which started with the soul singer belting out, "No flies on the hon-aayyy!!" (it also could have been "Shoo flies, don'tcha bother me!!!" It was impossible to tell) I turned to my friend and said, "we're gonna count how many times they play that exact same riff." So we started counting. Surely they couldn't sing the exact same three second phrase that many times, right? Wrong. The final count when the song finally ended? One hundred and forty. How is this possible?

Anyway, all in all, it was a grand old time. Over the course of the weekend, I walked head first into a tree branch, got punched in the mouth by a girl, played what had to be my worst game of pitch-and-putt ever, reunited with an old friend and watched helplessly as old biker ladies flashed the bar patrons. Yeesh.

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