I just realized that the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz is at Famous Dave's on Saturday night. I didn't think they let the man travel above the Mason-Dixon Line.

The cross-dressing, keyboard-pounding head of the First House of Polyester Worship is kind of like Jeff Foxworthy crossed with Mark Mallman. He writes songs about trailer park encounters with aliens and honky tonk hermaphrodites. My personal favorites are "Mennonite Surf Party," "The Girl on Page 63," and "Get off My Lawn!" 

Wirtz's schtick can get tiresome on albums, but live he whips up some inspired lunacy. My pal David Pulizzi penned an excellent Wirtz profile a few years back.

Wirtz on his early days:

"Ya know, there was just a need at the time for a six-foot-five, heavily tattooed guy in a nurse's dress to sing songs about surfing Mennonites and mentally masturbating while watching Marcia Brady."

Read the rest here.  

I attended the Minnesota Thunder's first-ever "school-day game" this morning. Roughly 3000 hellions were terrorizing the stands.

Lord knows why I drove to Blaine to take in this match. The Thunder were playing the Sioux Falls Spitfire, a team that is only nominally professional and, literally, not in the same league as their Minnesota counterparts. The game meant nothing. But it was a gorgeous day.

I departed around the 70th minute, with the Thunder leading 2-0, when the kids began a dangerous stampede while attempting to secure t-shirts from Thor. It was on the verge of disintegrating into a Hillsborough- or Heysel-like situation. The chaperones and security guards seemed oblivious to the danger.

Personally I've always assumed that there's a guy in a brown monkey suit around town who swoops in to rescue people in their hour of need. (Scroll down to April 24th and start reading.)

Perhaps "Tigerbeard Matt" is really Jayson Blair.

Cribbed from Radosh.

How do you follow up a two-hour, two-disc Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute/opera?

That's the inevitable question I was contemplating before listening to the new Drive-By Truckers album, Decoration Day. After all, 2001's Southern Rock Opera, propelled them from anonymous road dogs to semi-stardom, drew raves in the press, and was picked up by Lost Highway, home to the first couple of alt-country. It was also, by my estimation, a freakin' masterpiece. A tough act to follow. 

Decoration Day opens with a beautiful song about incest. I'm not sure which is more unlikely to be associated with beauty: incest or the Drive-By Truckers. Bombast is more their style. "By the time you were born there were four other siblings, with your mamma awaiting your daddy in jail,"  Patterson Hood croons. "Your oldest brother was away at a home, and you didn't meet him 'till you were 19 years old." The song's based on a true story about a girl who falls in love with her much older brother. They hit the road, have four kids-- and get seven years in jail for their purported sins. Hood's voice is so raspy that it sounds like he massaged his vocal chords with sand paper. It has a Waits-ian beauty, though, and is oddly affecting.

The second tune, "Sink Hole," is also based on a true story, about a farmer who dispenses shotgun justice after the bank forecloses on his land, but I want to talk about the drumming. Somebody should check Brad Morgan's sticks for cork! The guy's crashing the skins with such force and swagger that it sounds like he's trying to break into heaven. (Huh?) I felt like I was 14-years-old again hearing John Bonham rip into "Rock and Roll" for the first time. Then there's the bass line on "Sinkhole." It's so relentlessly funky and propulsive that it could make John Frusciante's socks roll up and down. 

I single out the drums and the bass because they're surrounded by so much guitar firepower that they often get overlooked. Okay, that statement's true of every band on the planet, but the Truckers' three-guitar attack is particularly riff-a-licious. (Granderson's threatened in the past to start a guitar-less Van Halen tribute band, one of the most inspired drunken brain farts of all time.)

I won't subject you to a song-by-song dissection of the album, but I do want to point out one more aspect of the Truckers' genius. These boys toss off some of the best rock n' roll one-liners of all time. They should be teaching Rock n' Roll Philosophy 101 at some technical college. Here's a couple:

"Well, my daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologized. Rock and roll means well, but it can't help telllin' young boys lies." -- from "Marry Me"

"Sick, tired, pissed and wired, you never thought about anyone else. You tried in vain to find something to kill you. In the end you had to do it yourself." -- from "Do it Yourself"

Buy this album now! Oh shit: it's not available until June 17th. Sorry.

Every once in awhile you read an article that serves to highlight exactly how banal and shallow your own work as a journalist is by comparison. On many occassions I have had this insight after reading the work of David Holthouse. For those not familiar with his work, Holthouse is a long time New Times staff writer, first in Phoenix, now in Denver. Here's the first sentence of his most recent gem.

Somewhere at the bottom of Grasmere Lake is an Egyptian-made assault rifle with an empty clip.

Who the hell is not going to read that story?

While I'm on the topic I might as well point out that Holthouse wrote the definitive chronicle of Meat Puppet Cris Kirkwood's tortured descent into druggie hell. Here's an exerpt:

Regardless, according to his brother and close friends in the Valley, Cris Kirkwood is lurching pell-mell toward the reaper, track-marked arms open for the embrace. He's smoking cocaine and shooting heroin in death-wish quantities. Overweight from binging on Ben & Jerry's ice cream, he's pocked with the sores and boils that result when a junkie misses a vein and shoots impure, infectious heroin directly into muscle tissue.

Now I will stop writing because having my prose stacked up against Holthouse's is depressing.

If that headline doesn't make any sense to you stop reading now. For the rest of you poker geeks: If you just can't wait for the ESPN rebroadcast, for a mere $29.95 you can watch the final nine players butt heads at the World Series of Poker live from Binion's Horseshoe via webcast. The cards start flying at 2 p.m. CST.

The appropriately named Chris Moneymaker is the chip leader with $2,344,000.  

I'm going all in (bad poker pun!) for a DVD player and will have to wait for the rebroadcast. Don't tell me who won.

More Veronica Paysse:

All you new soccer enthusiasts can catch the Minnesota Thunder at home this weekend against defending A League champs Milwaukee. (Using the words "Milwaukee" and "champs" in the same sentence is a bit disorienting.) 7 p.m. Saturday at the National Sports Center in Blaine.

Still not converted? These teams hate each other. Sometimes they fight. You can pretend it's hockey.

Cecile "Blue Oyster Cult" Cloutier points out that Deep Discount DVD is selling the Homicide DVD for just $37.21. (That's $15 cheaper than Amazon.)

Granderson says the key to successful blogging is random Lynyrd Skynyrd references.

And the cherry vodka and champagne cocktail at Moscow on the Hill makes life tolerable--at least temporarily.

One of the great tragedies of recent memory was the cancellation of Homicide: Life on the Streets. I'm not even talking about the cessation of new episodes but rather the foolhardy decision to stop broadcasting reruns on Court TV.

I used to have three opportunities daily to catch episodes of, by my estimation, the greatest television program ever. (Hailing from Maryland, I may be biased: I also believe Eddie Murray is the greatest baseball player of all time and that the anniversary of Len Bias's death should be a national holiday.) I would estimate that I've seen each episode, on average, roughly 2.3 times.

Apparently Homicide can still be seen on TV in Canada. This fact is of little consolation to me.

Finally, some good news. Next Tuesday, A & E Home Video will release the first 13 episodes of Homicide on DVD. These shows feature arguably the best cast ever assembled on Homicide, with mainstays Yaphet Kotto (certainly the darkest-skinned Sicilian in the history of network television), Andre Braugher, and Richard Belzer, along with short-timer Ned Beatty. It's also the time period that I'm least familiar with: for whatever reason, the Court TV reruns tended to focus on the later years.

Until Tuesday, devotees of the show can satiate themselves by checking out this insanely obsessive glossary of all things Homicide. Unfortunately, it's missing an entry for my friend Quinn Hanchette, so I'll write it myself.

Hanchette, Quinn. Episode 108. Played seedy motel clerk in episode that featured a teenage couple who murdered their unwanted baby behind the motel.