Brown Juice and Beyonce: The superdopekickassinvincible life of a bar band

By BRENDAN BURNETT-KURIE

It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday in an apartment two blocks from the Metrodome as Tyler collapses into bed after another shift of spinning pies at the neighborhood Italian joint. There’s just enough time for a nap. When he returns home next it will be in a race with daybreak.

It’s 5 p.m. in Bloomington and Jeff The IT Guy is punching the proverbial clock at the end of another week. A single dad with two kids, he’ll be spending his Saturday riding slides at Edgewater Resort with hundreds of other middle-aged men and their tykes. Unlike them, he’ll be peeling off purple pants at 4 a.m.

It’s 8 p.m. and Derrick is kneeling over a metallic case filled with microphones resting on the corner of a small stage in the back of one of the endless historic bars, with their walls of a thousand stares and tin roofs of a thousand tales, sprinkled across Southern Minnesota. Derrick was in sixth grade when he played his first show -- in between sets by a group churning out hits from the 50s and 60s -- and later put out two albums with the heavy metal band Cain’s Alibi before his health failed him and he became a sound tech when he wasn’t roofing. Ask him how many bar bands he’s seen and tilts his head back with a thoughtful grin.

“Thousands. They either have all their stuff together or nothing together, there’s no in between,” he says as he clears the remnants of last week’s band -- an empty bottle of Stage Haze and a ripped set list that includes one song simply titled “Something in Your Mouth” -- off an upturned table.

Derrick has worked shows with Eric Church, Luke Bryan and KISS, but tonight’s assignment is a four-piece 80s-90s-and-today style cover band called Junk FM from Minneapolis. They’re scheduled to take the stage in two hours and there’s no sign of them. Not unusual in this biz, he notes.

His fingers twist out a few more tweaks on the massive soundboard, which looks complicated enough to land on the moon, and he’s in waiting mode. His mind drifts back to his own days banging out staccato drums in the corner of countless hazy bars.

“We never made any money,” he says wistfully, then by way of explanation, “we played heavy metal.”

As if on cue a gray van pulls up to the curb; drum kits, guitars, amps and pedals packed together like the 3D jigsaw puzzle your grandma thought was a hip gift when you were 14. It’s 8:35 p.m. and out of the van spill three guys, all not far from being 30-somethings, but none looking the part. Tyler sports thick glasses over close-cropped blonde hair to go with his blue zip-up sweatshirt, gray V-neck T-shirt and jeans. His look is as understated as the handful of emails he’s sent confirming the gig.

George and Mo manage both understated and overstated. George, with shoulder-length black hair in a three-quarter part and a scruffy beard, is sporting a nauseous red sweater that Macklemore would be proud of, sleeves achingly short, and a pair of black jeans over massive high tops. He’s shed the camouflage cap he was wearing when Tyler pulled up outside his Stillwater apartment.

Mo is hitting on orange, the color of his garish rip-away track pants under a brown zip-up and a V-neck dipping deeper than necessary. It’s hard to tell if they’ve tried for this look or fell into it accidentally. George notes they don’t wear “costumes,” but it’s hard to tell.

The fourth, the self-described “grandpa of the group,” who joined up less than a year ago, is still missing. He’s a fixture in the Southern Metro bar band scene, and when asked can start rattling off band names like a waitress listing salad dressings.

“Is Jeff in your band?” asks Derrick.

“Yeah,” says Tyler. “He always shows up in the nick of time.”

It’s 8:45 p.m., about 90 minutes to showtime, and Jeff walks in the side door, looking distinctly un-rock star other than a pair of epic blonde sideburns that occupy most of his face. His Wal-Mart jeans are tucked into a pair of black boots and when he takes off a fleece he’s wearing a gray striped T-shirt that also probably saved him money every day.

They get to work, setting up drums and testing levels and calibrating pedals and firing off the smoke machine and doing all those other things they’ve done thousands of times before. “I don’t know which part I like less, setting up or tearing down,” Tyler mumbles. They talk about Avril Lavigne’s upcoming nuptials (“A nice Canadian wedding”) and things that make life easier (“Like a personal self-masturbator”).

*****

It’s 2003, and in one of life’s chance encounters, two freshmen sat next to each other on their second day at the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul. Tyler had just started a band called This World Fair (they will prove when listing off all the bands they’ve played in that any combination of words can be considered a name) and he needed a bass player. George played bass.

By 2007, the “music school geeks” hooked up with a guitarist named Mo who had been doing the music thing since middle school (“I don’t think I’m very good at everything else, except juggling”) and a singer named Bryan and a guitarist named Patrick to start ReadyGoes, which just released a new EP in 2012 and has enjoyed some modest hits, including play on MTV’s “Jersey Shore” and “The Hills”, E’s “Keeping up the the Kardashians” and Oxygen’s “Bad Girls Club.” They’ve played on the same stages at festivals with Augustana, OneRepublic, The Fray and Kings of Leon.

“I’m always surprised how much they’re just dudes,” George says of meeting the big-label boys. “You think they’re rock stars and then when you’re standing there having a beer with them they’re just like the dudes I know in Minneapolis.”

As ReadyGoes rode life on the cusp of making it, stealing those moments of success then watching as airplay came only in the wee hours of the morning and videos were shot on shoestring budgets, Mo started an acoustic gig at the Ugly Mug -- now Jackson’s Hole -- on Third Street in Minneapolis.

“But he didn’t like playing alone, so he called me,” Tyler remembers. George wasn’t far behind and they soon decided to plug in the instruments. Needing a name, they considered calling themselves Junk Drawer in homage to the eclectic cover songs they would play, but decided drunk patrons wouldn’t be able to understand them, like naming their band She Sells Seashells. They settled on Junk FM, which they admit isn’t much of a thinker. “There was no great epiphany,” Tyler chuckles.

Soon, despite some trepidation (“I always say I don’t like cover bands,” George says), they started booking gigs at bars around the state, mixing in weddings and company functions. They learned to love their Thursday-through-Saturday side gig that helps pay the bills.

“It’s a totally different game, but I have no complaints about this band, it’s a blast,” Tyler says. “I’m playing music with my three best friends. This is our bread and butter.”

They work hard to keep their two incarnations -- ReadyGoes and Junk FM -- in different worlds. Junk FM doesn’t play ReadyGoes songs and ReadyGoes don’t perform Junk FM’s covers.

“We keep ‘em separated, as The Offspring would say,” George grins.

But despite reticently coming to grips with their life as a cover band, principle refuses to allow them to lap into commonality.

“A lot of times people stand there and do gimmicks with loud amps and loud guitars,” Mo says. “We try not to be that.”

So they play a range of music wider than Kirstie Alley in a bad month. Hours later Derrick will remark with an impressed intonation on their variety of songs. One piece starts as Sublime’s “What I Got,” hangs a right into “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” takes a left into Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and rolls on home with more Sublime.

“We don’t take ourselves too serious, but our level of musicianship is high,” George says. It’s only a brief moment of braggadocio.

“The biggest plus of this is keeping up with the craft,” George adds while smoking a cigarette in his last break before taking the stage. “This band plays so much.”

Tonight it’s Faribault. Last week it was Brainerd (“That’s where we have to update our will”). Next week it’s Maplewood. The April calendar reads like a tattered Rand McNally: St. Cloud, Grand Forks, Fargo, Savage, Maple Grove, Hopkins, Inver Grove Heights.

*****

It’s 9:25 p.m. and Mo retreats down a narrow carpeted stairway into a tiny 4-by-8 room furnished sparsely with a pair of battered end tables and a peeling banquet chair. Where the plaster hasn’t chipped away the walls are a garish yellow and on one side is a mesh door that leads into a darkness they become convinced can only hold Sloth from “The Goonies.” All the groupies that have dreamed of being beckoned backstage cringe together.

Mo slips a flask out of his bag. It’s filled with Jack Daniels -- “a brown juice break,” as they call it -- then rips off his track pants like he’s been called off the bench in the Final Four. Soon his hair is teased and parted across his face, with a wide headband and a sleeveless American Flag shirt. It’s Russell Brand in a basement in Faribault.

It’s 10:10 p.m. and they take the stage in five minutes. Jeff, now wearing a black fedora, black vest and a sleeveless black T -- it quickly becomes obvious they hate sleeves but love black, presumably to hide the profuse sweating that will follow -- as he takes part in a sausage Heggies pizza with a pair of bar patrons.

It’s 10:15 p.m., and the opening B and G chords of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” rattle around the room. The tiled dance floor is embarrassingly empty. The bar on the other side is mostly full, but the unfazed faces are paying more attention to the Gophers basketball game on the big screen than the four guys jumping around on stage.

“It’s always interesting playing a new place,” Tyler had predicted less than an hour ago. “You’re not well known. You hope to keep the patrons there.”

But these guys aren’t going down without a fight. By the third song -- The Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle” -- Mo has crossed the room and is screaming out “That ain’t nothing’ but drugstore lovin’” while kneeling on the bar, slamming a shot of brown juice. Suddenly, they have everyone’s attention. The game ends and the girls start dancing. Inevitably, the guys follow.

The first set lasts an hour and it’s back downstairs -- the “fungeon” they’ve dubbed it -- for more shots of brown juice (George is swigging from his own bottle of Jamison). By the second set the dance floor is knock-your-drink-over full and the crowd is sold on a good time. Mo, George, Tyler and Jeff plug along, blasting out rap songs and R&B and country and classic rock. There are rock star moments when they leap off the drum stand or writhe around on the floor while singing Cee-Lo’s “F You.” But there are also decidedly normal moments. Mo accidentally hits a circuit breaker while trying to find a light switch and panics. Jeff runs off stage to grab his gray striped T-shirt and hands it to a patron whose overexcited beer overflowed onto her arms.

During the second break, Mo takes his gallon of Ice Mountain water – he goes through two a night, and no, it isn’t filled with vodka -- outside to smoke a cigarette. A young man who has spent most of the night in the middle of the dance floor comes over and compares his singing to Adam Levine. Mo’s face lights up; he’s sincerely complimented.

“Thanks man, thanks.”

He didn’t even sing until he was 20, when his friend Mike Murphy, who he describes as an angry Republican, tells him if he’s writing his own songs he needs the balls to sing them. He’s had no formal training.

“Just a lot of whiskey.”

The third set starts. The crowd has fallen in love. In the men’s room, one middle-aged man wobbles up to the trough.

“You ready?” He slurs to no one in particular.

“For what?”

“For more of these crazy motherfuckers.”

*****

The show is winding down and Junk FM is mashing Eminem’s “My Name Is” with Green Day’s “Basket Case.” While their set list – never the same, never written down, Tyler just calls out each song from behind his drums – is hackneyed, they’re obviously children of the 90s. They follow up with Garth Brooks, Blur, Beastie Boys and after a genuine plea for “one more song!” close it out with House of Pain.

Mo, George and Tyler escape outside for cigarettes or down to the flask of brown juice (they get free tap beer, and thanks to the flask their three tabs total just $9.50 at the end of the night, plus Mo buys four cigarettes off some woman for $3) but Jeff, the only one with a career outside music, heads into the last remnants of the crowd, getting a few more minutes with his newfound Heggies buddies.

“I love what I do,” he says. “I love both my jobs. I couldn’t ask for a better deal.”

Jeff was a fulltime musician for eight years in his 20s. Now it’s a hobby.

“This is my release,” he says, tugging at his purple pants. “I’m a single dad. A 9-5er. I can’t stop. Music is in your blood. It’s part of you. I love the volume. I love the music. I love this bar.”

Then he stops with a Cheshire grin.

“That would be a good chorus, wouldn’t it?”

It’s 2:44 a.m.