Notes Tagged: 'karaoke'

Karaoke, Coffee Bars and Cars

Billings, MT was a pretty foreboding place to enter at night. First, there were the typical city lights on the horizon, followed by an absolutely disgusting smell. Then we saw something that may have been a slaughterhouse, which explained part of the smell. Then, some oddly lit smoke stacks and enormous storage tanks appeared, looking like something out of the original Transformers movie. According to Daddy Wrall: that’s where the Autobots live. When we left, this morning, we discovered another refinery on the western edge of town; that’s where the Go-Bots live. They meet in the middle of town to battle meth-dealing Decepticons and whoever the bad guys in the Go-Bots were. I was going to do some research to confirm out what these places actually are, but I think I prefer this good/evil transforming robots explanation. Maybe I’ll do the research to see who the bad guys in the Go-Bots were instead.

The reason we were unable to secure a gig in Billings (and I’m not ashamed to admit this) is that the club with which we had contact has a very successful karaoke night on the only night that we could come play here. As you all can imagine, that wasn’t going to stop us from hijacking the joint. We rolled into town at around 11 PM and headed straight to the Rail Yard. We entered a modern looking smoky bar with five or six karaoke screens scattered on the walls, a caged stage area that was not the preferred singing location and an enormous karaoke station with a computer, a large mixing board, wireless microphones and two middle-aged MCs. Including them, us and the servers, there were about twenty people there. Everybody, as you must know by now, was nice. Really nice. Stupid nice. Hospitable, welcoming, nice, nice, nice. Sam’s family, basically. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but allegedly this is a very successful night. I’m not sure if that was what is meant by “successful” or if it was a slow night. Either way, the energy in the place, despite the poor head count, was palpable. Almost everyone there was chain smoking and participating in the singing. It’s certainly possible that it was more of an early night for the bar and that there had been people there earlier. The “evidence” on the front steps was a potential confirmation of this…

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Permalink / 13 Sep. '07 / Tagged: karaoke van bessie montana coffee