A Very Special Episode of Joppa Road
Opus. Salem, MA. Joppa Road’s Thanksgiving Special.
November 17, 2017.
It was a warm weekday in mid July when I first heard of Joppa Road. I was at Spotlight in Beverly, and the guy in charge of booking the bands…wait, no.
I’ve written these words before.
They were the words that made up the intro to what I wrote the first time I saw Joppa Road play Opus back in August. It is now November 17th, and Joppa Road is again playing Opus for what they are calling their Thanksgiving Show. How will a Ween tribute group incorporate Thanksgiving into their act? I’m excited to find out. I’m obviously very high on Joppa Road. They sound amazing, they nail the “feel” of Ween, and the last time I saw them was a particularly good night for me. I was sort of hoping that night would be important; in fact, I remain cautiously optimistic that every show I go to will be an important part of my life. But that’s always in sort of in the broader, “cosmic energy and whatnot” sense. I did not expect it that would kickstart a whole chain of events that would lead to me finding new hangouts, writing for a new website, and making new friends. It was a night I participated in simply because it was something I enjoyed doing, and I ended up being rewarded for it. Isn’t that what we all want? Don’t we all want to drop our work, say fuck this, head down to the furry convention with no real intent, just going because we’re bored, and end up married to a lovely pink fox with 2.5 children and a white picket fence? That’s Ween for you: get enough people into enough weird shit together and it’s gonna be alright.
Though I suppose I did have an additional reason (aside from just wanting to hear Ween) for heading down those spooky stairs to the Opus basement this past August. I had just discovered Don’t Get 2 Close 2 My Fanzine on Instagram, and asked Ed (who, at least to my knowledge, puts the whole zine together himself, so go support him if you can) if he would want a little write up about Joppa Road. Ed seemed very excited and supportive about the whole idea, and he did an amazing job of laying out the article before throwing it up on the website in a lovely PDF. It was the first time in years that I had really sat down and put some effort into something like that (not counting the piece I wrote on Spotlight, which was rejected, chopped up, and incorporated into the article in question), and I was so pleasantly surprised with how it was received. Joppa Road themselves were ecstatic with it, and a few of them even bought me free beer for my efforts. I don’t think I’ve ever received free beer for my writing before, so that alone was enough positive reinforcement for my basic, pavlovian lab-rat mind to keep at it.
There’s a much larger crowd here this time around. Don’t get me wrong, Joppa Road definitely attracted a big crowd last time, but it was something that slowly grew over the course of the night. I was still hearing a lot of conversations regarding what “a Ween” is and why someone would want to cover them. Not this time. This time we are starting out with what was very specifically a Ween crowd, and a Ween crowd does not leave the Ween show until the Ween is over. Having this crowd as a base means the venue will only get more and more packed with those curious of the sounds emanating from the Opus basement; perhaps a couple from upstairs will decide to put down their sushi and peek their heads downward, eventually getting sucked into a mass of people singing about spinal meningitis and Japanese cowboys.
It’s easy to see how someone not hip to the brown could get confused. Hell, it even took me a minute to fully take in what was going on tonight. The guys were doing Gabrielle as the opener and I was trying to make sense of what exactly the band was projecting on the screen behind them. Old commercials? Is that Alf? Wait a minute…that’s Bryant Gumbel, and he’s in front of Snoopy and OH MY GOD they’re screening an entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as tonight’s music visualizer! That’s how they bring the Thanksgiving into this! That’s genius. Did they know that would specifically make me excited? Did they know that when they busted out their heavier-than-usual sounding Ocean Man, my friend pointed out the Garfield float making its way through the New York sky, his lifeless eyes gazing into some sort of void (maybe that’s the Rift of which Gener speaks), that I would completely break a funny fuse and need to take a minute to stop laughing?
Ocean Man isn’t the only song they go a little heavy on. I’m particularly fond of the way Joppa Road covers Awesome Sound, It’s Gonna Be a Long Night, and I Can’t Put My Finger On It. They have a bit of an edge and are perhaps pulling from the angry, fuzzy-sounding heritage of God Ween Satan. I’ve previously described Joppa Road’s sound to All Request Live, and I’m still getting that vibe, obviously from their Where’d The Cheese Go?, but also in their Stallion and Demon Sweat, the latter featuring a unreal saxophone solo which added some class to what is already a fairly swanky song. The band’s use of props also seems to be well received by the crowd. What I can only describe as “giant crying baby face” masks have become a staple of their Spinal Meningitis performance attire, and as I’m watching Willard Scott getting ready to introduce the next float while the lyrics “I’m feeling greasy Mommy/Please don’t let me die” fill my ears, I hear someone behind me responding to a friend’s greeting with “I’m feeling great, man! I’m feeling fucking great!”and I think to myself: I’ll have to write that part down.
A song or two later, I find myself in the small video game room off to the side. This is the same room I thought was a VIP Lounge or something the first time I came to Opus. Pretty happy I was wrong about that; video games should be for everyone. The Monopoly pinball machine has been swapped out for World Cup Soccer, a different pinball machine featuring some kind of cute FIFA dog and a goal in which to shoot your silver ball. Next to this is a Tekken (I would tell you which Tekken it is but the night starts to blur here). I got 10 dollars in quarters as it is the band’s break between their two sets. I score some pinball goals, win a couple rounds of Tekken (with some cheap Paul Phoenix moves), lose a couple rounds of Tekken (to some cheap Ganryu moves), and then I blow some dude’s mind by telling him he can just use the rest of the quarters to keep playing pinball. It’s the little things that sometimes make someone’s day.
On the way back to the front of the stage, I bump into at least three people. Not like “oh hi, nice to see you here!” bumping, but like “oh man I’m so sorry I just smacked into you” bumping. But nobody seems to angry about the lack of coherent body language. The whole vibe tonight is a bit lighter than the last time I was here. I wonder if things were just a bit more dire back in August. Spotlight had just closed, nazis were gathering in Boston the next day, and, being in Salem, we had to start looking out for the Halloween tourists within the coming months. Now, although we’re still on the verge of some sort of apocalypse (and we probably will be for as long as the current political climate lasts), I feel a much lighter vibe tonight; a vibe where someone may even give me free quarters to play video games. Maybe now that the tourists are gone, the crew at Spotlight seem to have landed on their feet, and Boston seems relatively nazi free for the time being (god, what a sad sentence), we’re all feeling more jovial than usual.
I always felt Ween was friendly music. Though they sometimes delve into the blues and their older stuff sometimes feels a bit fratboy-ish, I have strong memories of simply laughing with (and not at) Ween songs with friends. I remember being lost in a car with a friend of mine and calling 101.7 WFNX to ask them to play a Ween song for us, because we have no idea where we were and we could use a smile. I remember driving in a snowstorm and very slowly spinning out on an empty road while listening to Homo Rainbow, which resulted in me having to pull over because my friend and I were laughing too hard (should I just stop listening to Ween while I’m driving? Seems like bad luck). These are the memories I choose to associate with Ween, and I’m happy to be making new memories with these friendly strangers the week before Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is a nice “right before everything goes to shit” holiday for me. It’s right before the mall located not even a mile away from my house gets mobbed with angry old people who have to do Christmas shopping in stores because they hate the internet and they want their America back. It’s also right before the snow hits and those days come where it’s quite impossible for me to leave the house so I just have to put on my depression lamp and eat an entire jar of queso dip. Much like Christmas itself, these days are not the worst time in the world, but they’re not ideal, either. I’m a social creature (now), and I find Christmas to be more of a “trapped in a snowed-in house with your family” holiday, not a social holiday like Thanksgiving. People have fun on Thanksgiving. They go to bars at 9am and drink bloody marys because they’re dealing with their own shit and they’retrying to avoid the classic Planes, Trains, and Automobiles situation of strangling their friend in front their burning rental car.
My friend and I leave right before the encore. It was late, crowded, Wendy’s is closing soon and we hadn’t eaten yet. We make plans to drink at the bar on Thanksgiving. We also make plans to throw a party for everyone in town the day after, wherein we will fill a pinata with nips and take turns trying to smack it down. We do this because it is Thanksgiving, perhaps the brownest of holidays, and if you’re not having fun then you’re not doing it right.
