 "Photo: Courtesy of Whiskey Business")
Staggering through tobacco clouds at 90-proof an hour, Austin’s musically confederate band, Clyde and Clem’s Whiskey Business, fills up a lovingly abused back patio table at the Hole in the Wall.
The night’s hair-of-the-dog special at $3 a shot faithfully warms everyone up for the evening’s irreverence.
Hunkered around the solid and worn wooden patio tables, like the storytellers of an old ship crew, the band starts emptying pitchers and filling ashtrays. Clyde Clowe, Clem Cowan, Skwerl, Smokin’ Guns, Ole Red and Boxcar Stanley are the names of the band characters that never miss a binge of moonshine-fueled humor.
The patchwork stereotypes are all present and accounted for: The grizzly beard, the ball cap with too much time behind the wheel of a tractor, someone nicknamed Skwerl, the brazen washboard pilot and the mandatory harmonica doing its best to be a diva.
The band is the stuff of tall tales and whiskey-running frontier legends, a spectacle told by your favorite alcoholic uncle. The answers I get all come in yarn-spinning stanzas of yesteryear.
“We’ve been together for many a year, since me an’ Clyde’s mammas got married after falling in love with their mutual hatred of our pappy. I think that was sometime durin’ the reconstruction period after the Civil War. You ever heard of them Grateful Dead fellers,” Clem name drops, pointing off into the past with his pint glass, “Them boys opened fer us once.”
“That was before them boys took all that acid,” Clyde inserts, to distance the good name of Whiskey Business from an illegal substance they haven’t worked into a song. Yet.
The Miller Lite Girls arrive, armed with free koozies and beer, flirting their product onto the thirsty table and derailing the interview with threats of spilling out of their tank tops.
I watch the no-holds-barred humor that has captured every other Tuesday night at the Hole for a year and a half explode into action. I step away from the interview and watch the band in its natural National Geographic habitat of rowdy humor.
Each character blazes with personally tailored stage light and begins a reflexive impromptu performance just for the girls. Each member of Whiskey Business is lost in the moment, thinking of nothing else but making the girls laugh out of their flirtatious jobs and into the real world.
With two indoor stages and an additional stage outside, Hole in the Wall sees its fair share of local and touring talent. Nate Hill has managed the venue for two and a half years, and almost jumps over the bar to talk about his experience with the Whiskey Business riot.
“Some of the funniest bluegrass I have ever seen,” Hill chuckles across the table. “I wouldn’t say they were the best band I had ever seen when they first got together, but I got to watch them grow and progress into something amazing. Their songwriting is incredible and it’s hilarious. [Whiskey Business] gets the whole crowd into their show. These guys are comedy set to music, and it’s comedy you want to dance to.”
As the band pours red-blooded humor and blue-collar ethos from wide-mouthed shot glasses directly into unwashed microphones, I watch Whiskey Business size up the crowd gathered to laugh and drink from that place in your mind you would rather be entertained by than apologize for. The place that would love a song like “Kill ‘Em All Just Like Jesus Said,” a Whiskey Business classic.
Buried in side-stage table shadows, I watch the crowd bestow one of the rare social rituals of greatness: Audience members begin to sing to each other. Few, if any, are mindlessly regurgitating verses like the average, faithful zombie fan. Whiskey Business fans are a seamless part of the show.
Whiskey Business plays Wednesday at Beerland with The Bread and The Van Buren Boys. Show is 21+, tickets are $5.
