The life of a honky-tonk musician is filled with many sordid little tales. Trying to pry a living out of the bars of northern Montana can be tough at times and one has to have a pretty thick skin to deal with the numerous pitfalls of dealing with bar owners, drunks, bums, karaoke singers, musicians wanting to sit in, jitterbuggers, and whatever trouble comes down the pipe. Working in a band has the advantage of numbers. Most troublemakers will leave four guys, armed with microphone stands, drumsticks and guitars, alone and I have rarely seen a whole band get into a brawl with the crowd at a roadhouse. If trouble does bubble up, the crowd seems to sense that beating up the band will lead to no more music and hence, no more fun. Growing up in Conrad, Montana in the 1970’s, I saw plenty of glorious barroom brawls. It really wasn’t much of a night if someone didn’t get punched out and some blood was spilt on the floor or the sidewalk outside.
My dad, Rib, was a notorious fighter and I still hear stories today from old guys that saw him in his prime. After a week of hard work mending sick horses, cows and pigs, he would sometimes disappear for a day or two and show up back home with a black eye and a swollen jaw. At the Fourth of July rodeo in Choteau back in the 1950’s, he had won the bulldogging and had a pocketful of cash. A guy bummed 20 bucks off of him to buy a pack of cigarettes and never brought the change back. On the way home, Ma and Pa stopped in at the Rose Room in Pendroy to have one more drink before they got home. The guy who had bummed the twenty bucks off of Rib happened to be in the bar spending his newfound treasure. My mom walked into the front door just in time to see the thief’s teeth flying across the room, courtesy of Rib’s big fist. Rib bit another guys ear off in Shelby after the guy bet him 20 bucks he could make a “thirty six foot” standing broad jump. No one can jump 36 feet so Rib laid his money on the bar. The guy jumped two feet, and said “that’s a third of six feet” and grabbed the money. The fight was on. The jumper was a tough old metal worker in the Shelby oilfields and was quite a handful. He was running with a pack of oilpatch roughnecks and Rib felt outnumbered so he ended the fight quickly by biting the guy’s ear off. In the 1990’s I was playing at a bar in Cascade and the owner, after finding out my last name, asked me if I knew Rib. He told me his dad was the guy with the missing ear. He filled me in on all the lurid details of the fight, as Rib had never mentioned it. Two years after the jumper had his ear sewed back on he was working sheet metal one day and a piece of it slid from a roof and cut the same ear off again. He never had it sewed back on, as he felt it must have been ordained to stay off of his head for good.
I’ve been working in the bars for many years, and seen lots of great fights. The most horrible one I ever saw was when two biker chicks went at it on the floor of Luke’s Bar in Missoula one night. If you’ve ever seen the Tasmanian Devil cartoon on the Bugs Bunny Show, it looked a lot like that. Hair and pieces of clothes were flying out of the maelstrom and no one dared to break it up. I just kept on playing music, but the screeching from the fight easily overpowered my PA. Another time, at the 44 Bar north of St. Ignatius, I was playing with a band and there was a fight going on outside the bar in the parking lot. Since everyone in the place had cleared out to watch the fight, we took a break and joined in the fun. Two big Flathead Indians were going at it on the gravel. They were rolling around in the dust, and not much damage was being done. We all went back inside and started up the music. After another 40 minute set, we stepped back outside and the fight was still going on. I don’t know how long it lasted. While we were loading out the gear at the end of the night, we found big patches of long black hair with white roots and bloody scalp that had been pulled out during the fight.
If you spend enough time in the honkytonks, the odds will eventually catch up to you and you’ll find yourself in a tussle with some honyocker. I’ve had a handful of incidents that broke down into violence, and I am not proud of any of them. Once in Bozeman a big hairy biker-type kept grabbing my mic stand. It was only a twelve-inch tall stage and the crowd was pressed up against it as they danced. The hairball was all by himself and jacked up pretty good on something. I asked him nicely three times to leave the mic stand alone, as it’s pretty easy to loosen your incisors when a Shure SM58 windscreen gets rammed into them. After the third warning, I punched the guy as hard as I could. I caught him pretty good on the jaw and he went down for a few seconds. By the time he recovered, the bouncers had him by the arms and out the door. I coldcocked another galoot in Havre at the 300 Club in the early 1980’s after he put his big mitts on my wife’s ass. After a gig at Sean Kelly’s in Missoula a few years ago, a hopped up hippy decided to play my drums after my last set. I asked him very politely to keep away from the gear, as that was how I made a living. He was on ecstasy or something, and didn’t seem to get the picture. The next time he pounded on my kickdrum, I grabbed him by his puka shell necklace and choked him down to the floor. I was very surprised at the strength of the wire in that necklace. I figured I’d break his pretty little jewelry and give him something to think about. The bouncers pulled me off of him and I never saw him again. 10 years ago at the Lariat Bar in Conrad I broke my right index knuckle when I punched a big doofus college kid in the forehead when he was coming after me with his fist in the air. A couple of his buddies had decided to play music on my gear during a break and when I came back into the bar I tossed them both off of the stage. Never hit a Norwegian in the forehead, always go for the nose or jaw. I played two more songs with a broken hand, then went to the emergency room and had a cast put on it. I decided after that to never throw my fists, as I can’t afford the damage and the loss of income.
Five years ago I was playing a beautiful June Sunday afternoon after the Belt Rodeo. The sun was shining in through the windows and the open front doors and everyone was having a good time. Things were going great, and then Dwight rambled into the bar. He was hanging around a table full of people near the front of the stage and I figured he was with them. After watching the action for awhile I figured out that he was trouble. He kept wandering from table to table, annoying anyone who would pay attention to him. Some people just got up and left the place. Feeling ignored, he decided to join the band. He pulled out a harmonica and stood immediately in front of the stage and started blowing. Of all the musical wannabe’s that pester musicians, harmonica players are the worst. I’ve had so many guys come up to me and tell me they played harmonica with Elvin Bishop, The Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters and every other band you can think of that ever recorded a song with a harp on it. That’s usually the first warning sign. Then you ask them who they’ve played with locally and they invariably reply…”Everybody”. Through experience, I can guarantee that about 99.9% of these jammers suck, and suck hard. The ones I have the most fun with are the ones who don’t even have a harmonica. I go through about 4 harmonicas a month, and I usually have a few out of tune ones in my gearbox. I hand them one of these and let them blow a few notes. Then I ask them if they have any communicable diseases. They usually reply, “No, why do you ask”… and I give them the bad news. “I just got over an outbreak of herpes and the doctor told me my Tuberculosis wasn’t too catching, as long as I wasn’t spitting up blood”. Well, Dwight had his own harmonica, so that tactic wasn’t going to work with him. He was dressed in his full cowboy getup. I knew his name was Dwight, as he had it emblazoned on the back of his belt. He had a pair of dirty Levis on, a light blue cowboy shirt and was topped off with a sweat stained Stetson, pulled down over his ears. He looked amazingly like Dopey, the seventh dwarf. I let him muddle his way through a song, then when it was over, announced to the crowd…”Lets’ have a big round of applause for Dwight. It takes a lot of nerve to get up here and play like that… think how good it would have sounded if he had been in the same key as me”. The crowd got quite a chuckle out of it, but Dwight didn’t get the message. I leaned away from the microphone and told him I wasn’t really looking for any company that afternoon and offered to buy him a beer on the break. That usually gets them off the stage. Dwight was having none of it. He was in the band now. He played through one more song and I again asked him to put down the harp, this time with a more serious tone. After the third song, I put my guitar down and stepped off the stage. I got right into his face and told him…”Look Buddy, you’re gonna look awful funny playing that thing out of your ass, if you don’t put it away right now”. He put it in his back pocket and started walking away, but flipped me off as he headed to the bar. I really won’t put up with bad manners, and I had about had it with Dwight. As he strutted away, I walked up and grabbed his harmonica out of his pocket, dropped it on the cement floor and ground it as hard as I could with the heel of my boot. As I was bending over to pick it up and give it back to him, he caught me right in the nuts with the top of his boot. The owner of the bar and his son had been watching the action and were right there. They grabbed Dwight by the arms and hauled him outside. They had him out on the sidewalk and when I got there, he had a tough look on his face and his mouth was rounded out into a tight little “O”. I shoved the harp past his lips, the long way, and told him he could play it all he wanted out there on the street. When I got back inside, I received one of the nicest applauses I ever had. Everyone wanted to buy me a drink and we all had a good laugh. Dwight came in the next week and wanted the bar to pay for his harmonica. It was a cheapo Asian model that went for about 5 bucks at the local music store. He tried to tell the bar owner that it was a 40 dollar instrument. They tossed him out again and he left the flattened harmonica on the bar. If you want to see it, stop by the Brew Pub in Belt, Montana anytime and look up on the first post on the right as you walk in the door. It is nailed up there in all of its glory. And Dwight, if you ever read this….”Fuck You.”
