Flirtin' With Disaster at the Brat Stop
Flashing back to one of the happiest nights of my rock band days
First of all, thanks mucho to all my new Jagged Time Lapse subscribers. I appreciate you more than you can know. Second, a big shoutout to my pal Lisa Marte Stout for mentioning this legendary Kenosha establishment the other day, thus unleashing the following memory from one of the dustier corners of my brain…
It was Saturday night, and we were feeling all right — or at least as “all right” as one can feel while driving the I-94 from Milwaukee to Chicago.
My band, Lava Sutra, had just finished playing three extremely successful Wisconsin shows in less than 36 hours, and we were now on our triumphant way back to the Windy City. We’d only made our live debut 10 months earlier, in the late January of 1990, but since then we’d managed to pack nearly 40 gigs under our belt. When you play that much and that often — and rehearse another three times a week on top of it, as was our wont — you get good in a hurry, and we’d more than held our own with the more experienced bands on the bills with us during that early-December weekend. One girl in Madison to whom I’d sold our cassette-only release No Shirt, Lots of Service even said she thought we sounded like Mudhoney, which was probably the biggest compliment you could have paid us at that very moment.
“Hey, Guys!” M.C. Grane piped up from the driver’s seat, shouting to be heard over the Troggs cassette we were cranking. “There’s a place in Kenosha, not too far from here, where we can get some beer and some really good food. It’s kind of a legendary spot in these parts — Cheap Trick used to play there when they were coming up. How would you guys feel about stopping there?”
M.C. was our “road manager,” a good friend and a loyal fan of the band who often volunteered to help us schlep our gear in and out of clubs, and usually took the wheel on our road trips — a key addition to the team, especially since only our bassist Bob actually knew how to drive. M.C. was from Chicago’s northern suburbs, and thus knew the terrain; back when Illinois had jacked the drinking age to 21 and Wisconsin’s stayed at 18, Kenosha was where he and his friends would drive for just-over-the-border beer runs.
This was a world that was completely alien to the rest of us; Bob was from the Boston area, our drummer Baldo was from a Mexican neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, and my fellow singer/guitarist Jason and I (who’d met while attending high school in Chicago’s Lincoln Park area) had rarely ventured any farther north than Bryn Mawr Avenue. But M.C. was a capable and trustworthy dude, and he’d done all the driving on this trip; so if he wanted to take a brief detour for some highly-recommended post-gig grub, we weren’t about to refuse.
(Lava Sutra, 1990. Photo by Ben Kufrin)
A few minutes later, M.C. pulled our red-and-white ‘70s Dodge Ram van into the parking lot of a place called The Brat Stop — that’s “Brat” as in Bratwurst, not as in poorly-behaved child. I was expecting a little roadside dive, but once we got inside I could see that the place was huge, far bigger than any venue we had ever played. There was even a balcony level, where the hostess — who seemed oddly unsettled by our presence — took us up to and sat us at a large round table far away from any of the other patrons. A server, acting equally suspicious of us, took our orders and then scurried nervously away. We were polite and not particularly weird or scary to look at, but maybe we just had the “not from around here” stank on us.
From our table, we had a good view of the stage below, which was filled with gear set up for a rock show — amps, monitors, mic stands, guitars, drums, etc. — yet also weirdly festooned with traffic cones, wooden barricades and yellow “Do Not Cross” crime scene tape. It was all rather confusing… until a voice came over the PA system and announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the Brat Stop… ROADBLOCK!!!”
Onto the stage ambled five guys who were all probably much younger than I am now, but who at the time seemed extremely long in the tooth. They looked like local dads who got together to play the occasional weekend cookout, all mustaches and potbellies with nothing approaching charisma or stage presence. “Oh god, what are we in for?” I muttered to Jason as they started tuning up and line-checking their instruments. But then the drummer started in with a swinging, deliberate, mid-tempo pattern that my inner 14-year-old immediately recognized. “Holy shit!” I yelled, leaping from my chair and making a beeline for the balcony rail. “They’re doing Molly Hatchet!”
And lo, so they were — a note-perfect version of “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” a song I’d air drummed repeatedly to back in 8th grade. Within seconds, my bandmates and M.C. had joined me at the rail, hooting and pumping their fists wildly in the air. Good-time classic rock was being served, and we hadn’t even known until this moment that that’s exactly what we were hungry for.
Meanwhile, our server was filling our table with pitchers of beer and plates piled high with bratwurst. Could this evening get any better? Yes, it absolutely could. “TAKE ME ACROSS THE WATERRRR,” wailed the singer, “‘CUZ I NEEEED SOME PLACE TO HIDE!!!” Are you kidding me? “Stealin’” by Uriah Heep?!? Nobody even mentioned Uriah Heep anymore, let alone played their songs!
Further throwbacks to my WLUP-listening days followed in rapid succession: “Slowride” by Foghat, “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain, “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo” by Rick Derringer, “Closer to Home” by Grand Funk Railroad. I was in beer-and-bratwurst FM radio heaven, and my friends and I greeted each bong-hit classic with disbelief, high fives and raucous cheers. The songs were all so fucking boneheaded and played without an iota of irony or sarcasm, which was precisely why they worked — and precisely why, after a weekend of playing at being ‘round-the-clock alt-rock cool guys, this was exactly the kind of no-bullshit blast we needed.
The vibe derailed slightly when the band let their diminutive bassist croak out John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” — and then, when the lead singer tripped and fell over one of the barricades while belting out Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise,” we figured it was probably a good time for us to get going. But who would we pay for our meal? Our server had never returned with a check, and after waiting around for another 15 minutes we decided to go downstairs and settle up at the cash register. Only, there was nobody manning it, and no one in sight who looked like they worked there. “Do we… just leave?” Bob asked. We looked around the room again, looked back at each other, shrugged and headed for the parking lot…
Thirty-some odd years later, it’s easy for me to look back on my Lava Sutra days and impassively dissect the many reasons why our band didn’t “make it”. Likewise, I have to admit that even at this particular stage of our existence, when our fortunes and abilities were unquestionably on the upswing, problematic issues already abounded — whether it was the uneven division of labor in a band trying to exist as a democracy, a drummer whose kick-drum foot was as erratic as his temper, or the fact that we were already way too focused on trying to “get signed” by a major (or at least a well-known minor) label when we really should have just been focusing on getting our music out to the world via the DIY route. And of course, there were all the usual hang-ups and dysfunctions that occur when you put a handful of talented, sensitive, headstrong, not-entirely-evolved young men together in a creative situation.
But when I think back to that night at the Brat Stop, my overriding memory is of the pure hit of joy that was coursing through all of our veins. My bandmates and I had spent the weekend putting our dream into action, and now we were celebrating together as if the world in all its wonder and absurdity might just be ours one day. And life, for that footstompin’ Brat Stop hour or so, felt just about as sweet as it could possibly get. To paraphrase a song of ours that we performed several times that weekend, there were so many ways to be happy — and we were happy, so happy right then.
This is great! I was right there with you covered in cheese curds!
Pure gold.