C’mon Back to Bowling Green (Redux)
Posted by Lynnster on October 27, 2006
Following up today’s earlier post…
I can’t help it, after finding this Government Cheese treasure trove of video today, I kept grabbing seconds here and there when I could this afternoon to go watch whatever. So much fun. I must have seen these guys every chance there was in Nashville and the ‘Boro - and once in Bowling Green - until I left Middle Tennessee in 1988. These live shows were from a little bit later era, so it was a kick to see a performance I missed in later years.
As I updated the earlier post later in the day, thanks to another Cheese fan - with obviously a sharper eye and better attention span than yours truly - after I posted the original post today, I learned that Tommy now has all the Cheese masters and a lot of video shot by their label, with plans for remastering and making it all available as time allows. That’s awesome and I am SO looking forward to that now. (Thanks for sharing the love, Tim!)
Tommy’s book Cheese Chronicles: The True Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band You’ve Never Heard Of came out in the latter half of the Nineties and since that time I’ve probably purchased 50+ copies and forced it upon every musically-inclined friend, relative, future husband (just one), and others of dubious whatnot, just because it’s such a glorious read (and they all dug it). Heck, I still have two extra copies in my closet, I think.
So now I can finally not only make ‘em read about, not only make ‘em listen - but actually SHOW live Cheese to all those dozens of folks now… woohoo.
Anyway, yeah, these are great. There’s some videos there in the stable too (including a cover of “Search & Destroy”), but the real pieces de resistance are these three vids from a 1992 live performance at ye olde Exit/In in Nashville:
The Shrubbery’s Dead Where Danny Used to Fall
Skyline Rant and Somewhere Between
Skot’s 1992 hair cracks me UP. Tommy just plain cracks me up, period.
The fact that these videos EXIST for me to be able to sneak peeks at on a Friday afternoon make my world a happier place today. It seems like Government Cheese just keeps poppin’ back up in some shape, form, or fashion every few years, and as I said several years ago already - they’re just like the band that just won’t die, and I’m glad of it. Long live the freakin’ Cheese, man!
*****
Along similar Nashville lines, found another gem on YouTube today… Practical Stylists performing “Shake Some Action” at Cantrell’s in the fall of 1983. Cantrell’s!!! I’m dying here of terminal nostalgia!! You can’t see much but the sound is pretty good.
About two years after this video was shot, drummer Jim Hodgkins and I were both attendants in a wedding that was being held in the mighty huge (not) metropolis of Valier, Illinois - a town where there is absolutely nothing to do, so the bride-to-be, maid of honor, and I (the bridesmaid) ending up attending the bachelor party, the only such one I’ve ever attended (because there was really nothing to do but sit around the hotel rooms, watch MTV, and get drunk). Which none of this has anything to do with anything, except to say Jim Hodgkins was not only a great drummer but was a fab bartender too.
(Odd that so many of my posts lately are about being (having been) drunk. I don’t even drink anymore, really haven’t in years. OK, well, whatever. As you were…)
