Beerland – The Pleasurecraft

AUGUST 28, 2007

This week, Sunday night is Saturday night, so you’ll need to shift your normal Monday hangover to Tuesday. Don’t try to check the math with your Gilbert Grape finger abacus, just tap it into your BlackBerry and call it a day: Monday 8am-5pm – wicked-ass hangover. If you popped for an iPhone, don’t bother entering it into your calendar at all because you’re going to be surfing miniporn on Monday whether you’re hungover or not. Hallelujah, it’s a three-day weekend, a weekend specifically designated to celebrate your contribution to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. Unless you’re one of those scruffy persons of perpetual leisure who always hang out in front of Quack’s at 10am on a weekday shooting the shit, petting your mangy dog, and holding a slightly beat up acoustic guitar for no particular reason. For you, Labor Day is just a tiny ripple in the cosmic continuum, marked only by the annoyance of having industrious, kempt, and contributing members of society walk through your bum circle wearing the shit-eating grins of prisoners on early parole. Don’t be a hater. Come Tuesday the serenity of the eight-hour workday will return, and you and your shiftless companions can return uninterrupted to the important cerebral pursuit of creating a cogent unified field theory. If however, you’re one of those folks in the fat part of the bell curve whose employment is less cerebral but better compensated, this weekend is a rare opportunity to blow the carbon off your mental fuel injectors with some high-octane entertainment. And what, you may ask, might that be? Karaoke of course! Hell, anyone can BASE jump, street luge, or run with the bulls, but it takes some serious sack to get up on a stage in front of a roomful of (or more likely … several) auditory masochists and belt out a heinously off-key rendition of “Tiny Dancer.” For that matter it takes a certain amount of courage (liquid or otherwise) to even show up at a karaoke night. Sadly, most bars don’t have discreet parking in the rear like massage parlors and escort agencies, so if you park your racing-striped magenta Mini Cooper out front of a bar on karaoke night, you stand a good chance of being outed as a hopelessly depraved exhibitionist. That’s the kind of crazy risk your average bungee jumper will never know, and bungee jumping costs a lot more than a couple of shots of tequila and your dignity. This Labor Day you can experience the thrill of depraved exhibitionism right on Red River at Beerland, where Rock & Roll Karaoke host Nathan Black works the mic every Monday night. Close your holiday strong, and don’t worry, you can’t park anywhere close to Beerland anyway.

FRI., NOV. 21, 2003

If you really put some brain to it, this is probably your last weekend of normalcy before the shitstorm of holiday schmaltz blights the aesthetic landscape. By next Wednesday, you’ll have already begun the screaming descent into holiday hell, creeping along the slow road back to some faceless suburb in a doomed attempt to fulfill an outrageously outdated Rockwellian ideal. Even though the gun jumpers are already at work hanging lights, baking pies, knitting sweaters, and queuing up carols on the Muzak machine, there is still time for some happy commerce with the real world – one last chance to experience life that hasn’t been airbrushed to a cheesy, greeting-card gloss. If you’re looking for something real, try Beerland. There is a long list of adjectives that would describe Beerland, but gloss isn’t one of them. Situated somewhat anonymously between Elysium and Red Eyed Fly, Beerland offers cheap drinks, pool, video games, and, in their own words, “loud music” amplified to a certain extent by its cinderblock construction. What Beerland lacks in ambience, it makes up for in its bookings. Six nights a week Beerland books live music: lots of up-and-comers, first-rate punk bands, and an occasional roadshow score. This Friday is one such occasion as Beerland hosts Drag the River, a beer-soaked bar band from Fort Collins, Colo., featuring Armchair Martian songwriter Jon Snodgrass and All/Descendents frontman Chad Price. Although their roots are firmly in punk, Drag the River covers some of the same stylistic ground as current alt.country rock outfits like Wilco, Son Volt, and the Jayhawks, but with edgier lyrics and a crunchier sound. Filling out the bill are Austin punk band the Dirty Sweets, Minnesota’s the Switch, Chad Rex (who played guitar on a Drag the River CD), and local punk icon Spot. If you’re a little hesitant about a full evening of beer and punk/country, just remember that next weekend you’ll be glued to the sofa in a tryptophan coma watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.”