A Case For New Orleans...

While I’m not convinced that many more folks will return to New Orleans than already have, I do now have a personnel reason to see that the city is restored to whatever state is deemed necessary and that reason is Cowboy Mouth. Saturday night our friend, the always lovely Ms. Lori Crow, celebrated her 25th birthday and we all headed down to the Roxy to check out the musically banal 13 Stories and headliner Cowboy Mouth (That's Lori's tonefully sweet voice currently featured on my avatar cheering her SC Gamecocks on). After munching on some lomticks of tasty hors devours and sipping some wonderful spirits at the birthday girls abode, we all piled into Bacon’s behemoth monster truck and headed into the heart of Buckhead for the show.

First off, I love The Roxy. It had been several years since I’d been to a show there, but it’s a great room. Perhaps a little sparse, but it does have a balcony and a large elevated stage. The Roxy is also outfitted with a great console and PA system and is manned by guys who know how to get great sound out of it. The bar area is large and separated from the viewing hall and they deploy remote beer serving stations as to not to tie up the bar with beer drinkers. Our crew relied on some standard tailgating booze smuggling tactics as well and we had ample quantities of airplane bottle whiskey to supplement our Coca-Cola's before Cowboy Mouth took the stage.

I knew it was going to be good as soon as I saw that Cowboy Mouth’s lead singer and drummer Fred LeBlanc was being set up to the front of the stage. While I don’t own any of their records (that’ll change today) I was a little familiar with this band from their hits and local popularity here in Atlanta. All that can be said is that these guys rocked the muthaf**king house down with their cajun tinged, high energy power punk set. Fred is Billy Joe Armstrong on a healthy concoction of cocaine, speed, crack, Viagra, and meth. He beat those drums like his life depended on it, at one point breaking the snare drum head. If I had a band, this guy would be my drummer. No bullshit, just hitting the things hard and pulsing the beat with his cannon like bass drum. They did a bunch of tunes off their new album Voodoo Shop (title track, Joe Strummer, Glad to Be Alive, and Misty Falls) and some killer stuff from their rather extensive catalog including their big late nineties hit “Jenny Says”. Huge chunky guitars brought to us by Paul Sanchez and John Thomas, solid bass from the very hot looking Sonia Tetlow. I love bands that give it they’re all during every show and these guys delivered that and them some.

There’s something about musicians that hail from New Orleans. It would seem that it’s impossible to separate the local musical flavors from whatever genre they play and Cowboy Mouth’s music is no exception. Cajun punk. I weird spicy blend that, as Cake magazine aptly noted, "...on a bad night they’ll tear the roof off the joint and on a good night they’ll save your soul." Consider me saved.

Now for the standard post celebration apologies… Lori, I’m sorry that your entire apartment complex had to learn that Army upset Baylor in overtime at such a late hour. I hope management and your neighbors go easy on you and no harm results do to my over zealous celebration. It was your birthday and, after all, the Cowboy Mouth show was your idea. Please let them know that the loud nature of my celebration was largely due to the fact that I could not hear a damn thing following the performance and, well let be honest, Army just doesn’t win that many football games. I was also sure that I had won the weeks college football pool something that happens as rarely as an Army win.

How good a night was it? As Mrs. Alva and I were bringing our little girl home from next door sometime in the wee hours, I turned around and saw Yoda Jacket in the back seat of his car fast asleep. Hopefully his wife had mercy on him and went back out to rescue him later. That’s a good night.


UPDATE: This is Sonia Tetlow, bass player for Cowboy Mouth. Like I said rrrroooowww!!!