Listen up, critics.
Me and my Neil Young tribute band, The Bushy Sideburn Boys, have recently made a decision; we are going green. We will no longer be using our gasoline-powered DuroMax portable generators to play our instruments. This is a decision we feel pretty good about and was made independently from the fact that when Neil found out what we were doing, he sent the drummer from Crazy Horse to find me, made me buy him football cleats, and then used them to stomp on my neck (making it too sensitive to wear my harmonica holder). We went green because of purely altruistic motivations.
I’ll admit, at our first show without the droning hum of our generator, it was scary to launch into our rip-roaring opener, a tamborine-heavy cover of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Neil’s lawyer has been sending some rather aggressive letters lately so we’re currently experimenting with some music outside of his oeuvre). But I felt good knowing that the planet was a little bit healthier thanks to my actions.
Specifically, I hope this move will silence one of our most vocal critics, Logan Brodowicz of The Stifler Tribune, Steve Stifler High School’s paper. Logan wrote a very unfavorable review of one of our shows that took place in the Tilted Kilt on Route 9 and he has had an axe to grind with us ever since. First of all, our shows heavily utilize a vodka canon, and that’s made explicitly clear to all our performance venues to ensure the event is 21+. So I have no idea why a high school student was in attendance.
Second, I take issue with Logan’s conclusion that our show was “the most pathetic and saddest concert he had ever seen in his life.” Logan is literally like 16 years old. The only other concert he’s probably seen is some baby shit like a Hershey Park dolphin show. Of course we can’t compete with a show like that. Hershey is pouring millions, maybe even billions, into those aquatic mammals. We’re funded only by our day jobs; we travel from town to town with a dunk tank and charge people to play. The swimmer’s ear medication we have to pay for severely eats into our profits, but our only skill (aside from grooving) is being dunked. We have no other choice.
The Bushy Sideburn Boys aren’t fancy like those dolphins. We’re just a group of studs, aged 65-90, who have to technically call ourselves aural initiators instead of musicians for legal purposes because we’re not allowed to play music in America. It’s because we tried to put on a free rooftop show once, but little did we know it was on top of the building where the mayor’s niece was having her first communion ceremony. He was so pissed by our noise that he tried to stop us from ever playing music again. Luckily, we found a loophole.
In his critique, Logan also mentioned people collapsing and being hospitalized allegedly because of the exhaust from our generator. There are many reasons why someone would collapse in a Tilted Kilt. Maybe they ate a Spicy Mother Clucker sandwich and they couldn’t handle the heat. Or maybe the plaid patterns on those kilts made them dizzy. I wouldn’t even put it past this Logan Brodowicz guy to have hired those seventeen people as actors to fall down and sabotage our show. Basically, there’s no conclusive evidence to say that the smell of gasoline and the smoke billowing from our malfunctioning generator was the culprit. In fact, I would say the power of rock is the best cure for whatever mysterious ailment these individuals came down with. Yet this half-talent Logan refused to write about the healing properties of our rollicking cover of “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad,” and instead, focused on sensationalist accusations.
While I lament the loss of the richer sound that you only get when a banjo is plugged into a four thousand dollar non-CARB compliant machine, I rejoice having a new way to market ourselves. Logan, if you’re reading this, I’d like to ask that you issue a correction to your review in the next edition of the paper. Instead of calling us “a tuneless collection of geriatrics thinly veiling their attempt to date women half their age,” I’d like you to call us, “the dukes of dance who also love trees, clean water, etc.” And if I have to throw a few bucks around to make that happen, so be it. I know The Stifler Tribune is used to that sort of thing. I saw the school’s production of “Legally Blonde” last year. The guy who played Professor Callahan couldn’t act for shit. There’s no way it earned those 3.5 out of 4 Stiffies without a little economic encouragement.
Also, if you could put us in touch with whoever gets those musicals licensed for your school, we could really use some help getting back in Neil’s good graces. I don’t want to play any more 17 minute versions of “A-Hunting We Will Go.”