3 posts tagged “el donk”

I was cheered to see this feedback today. It kinda made my day.

I've finally recovered enough to share the tale of El Donk's night at the Blue Top.

Affter some minor navigational issues--mostly involving trusting the Weavil's mapquest directions--we rolled into Stevens Point around 8-ish. We should've just looked for the sign. It turns out that Little Chubbies (formerly, The Blue Top) was more or less still The Blue Top. At least, I didn't see anything to indicate otherwise. Far from being a strip club, it was an average Wisconsin tavern, with a large banquet room where we would be performing.

Someone ordered 5 Fish Frys for the band (and Rocky, our roadie for the evening) and since I'm now a lapsed vegetarian, I felt it was my duty to eat what was a fantastic version of the Wisconsin classic dinner.

We finally started playing a bit before 10. We played great. There wasn't a huge turnout, but I think we were deceived by how friggin' large the space was--easily 2-3 times bigger than anyplace we normally play. We finished playing at about 1am. Then the serious drinking began.

I should explain. The deal for this gig was: cash, and two hotel rooms. Through some unspoken understanding, we knew that since we weren't driving back home after the show--indeed, the hotel rooms were about as far away from the stage as the bar--we were going to get Fully Kraeusened.  So we drank. We had shots of tequila, vodka, some pale ale from Janesville (which was excellent, but I don't know what it was,) until we closed the bar. We didn't pay for a thing. Not the fish fry, not the alcohol, nada. It was the full rock star treatment.

Here's where the story got weird. After closing the bar, we went back to one of the rooms for a little after party. We had a couple tag-alongs in the form of some fans who'd been hanging out at the bar with us earlier. Lest you think ill of the Donk lads, they were not groupies, instead they were a Magician, and a guy who might've been his assistant or partner. So now there's the four Donk boys, Rocky, and the Magician+Sidekick in this hotel room. We must've played really friggin' loud that night because everyone was yelling like, well, crazed drunks. Thankfully, it seemed we had that entire wing of the hotel to ourselves, otherwise I'm sure the cops would've been around. At any given time there were 3 to 4 conversations going on at once, bottle of Point beer everywhere, a ton of fine smoke-ables, and this bizarro magic show going on.

The magician seemed kindly enough. He obviously practiced his trade, as the tricks were pretty decent, but something weirded me out about these guys. I kept thinking that something Charlie Manson-esque was about to go down. Woobie finally called it quits and went to bed. I told the Falcon that I had to escape, so we went outside to get the photo of the Marquee. It was probably Zero degrees outside, so we didn't stay out long, but when we got back to the room it was 3:30 in the morning and this dude was still running strong on the magic tricks. It's not like we were begging for more magic tricks, it was more like he had to finish his routine before he could leave.

We finally got them on their way around 4 am, At which point I crashed in the other room. Falcon, Rocky and Fastlane must've crashed a little later because they started pounding on the wall about 5 minutes after I went to sleep. The bastards.

The next thing I knew it was 9am and we were preparing to get back on the road. All in all, it was a great trip.