Saturday night in Richmond, Robert Earl Keen playing at The Canal Club, who wouldn’t want to go?
Well the first problem is how to get there. I went with Tom, a fellow indentured servant for Honeywell, and we both live in Chester, about 15 miles or more down I-95 from our destination. Since it was just the two of us and we both wanted to drink, we decided to suck it up and take a cab. $40 later we arrived at The Canal Club. Granted I live a ways from downtown but $40? It’s no wonder people drink and drive, no incentive to take a taxi and there is no public transport option.
After getting inside and shelling out $4 for a hospital piss cup full of icehouse, it hit us. Why the hell didn’t we pregame?! I attribute it to the fact that we are out of the college setting and Chester is just plain boring. I swear living here adds at least five years to you. With no other options we decided to just empty the wallets and get hammered (luckily bottles of bud/coors were only $3 so we enjoyed that for the rest of the night).
The opening acts were each one man shows. The first guy’s claim to fame was writing some song for Grey’s Anatomy. He closed with that and no one seemed to notice until he mentioned it. The real opening act was Jalan Crossland. A solo guy from Wyoming that played guitar, 5-string, and 4-string banjo. He was pretty talented and had a nice folk/bluegrass sound. It complimented the rest of the show pretty well.
I think it was after 11 before Robert Earl Keen and company hit the stage but the wait was well worth it. It was a nice, intimate venue; the perfect kind of setting for a show like that. Some of his best stuff is when he just gets up there and tells a story and it just flows into a song about that particular story.
If you’ve never heard any REK before, I highly recommend it. Probably his most famous songs are “The Road Goes on Forever” and “Merry Christmas from the Family”. But I’d also recommend “Corpus Christi Bay”, “The Front Porch Song”, “Everclear”, and “Copenhagen”. My favorite track is probably “Feeling Good Again”.
Anyway, after the show we wandered over to Wonderland. A semi-emo bar but still one of my favorites. It has free darts, $2.75 24oz PBR cans, and nice people. Besides, there is just something great about holding a giant can of PBR.
After last call (2am) I call the cab service that brought us up. I’m standing in the middle of downtown Richmond with people exiting bars all over the place and dispatcher has the nerve to tell me “I don’t have any cabs in the area, it’ll be 20-30 minutes”. After telling them what they could do with that taxi when it arrived, I hung up and proceeded to hail one of the many other taxis driving down the street.
I didn’t get rip, roaring drunk (hard to do that on just beer) but had a good time, drank beer, and heard some good music. In the words of Robert Earl Keen, “it feels so good, feeling good again.”
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Nice post. Testing a comment from my bb.