I went to the Pure Gut album release show last night and by around 12:50am when the dudes wrapped up their spirited set, I had realized that life as I knew would never be the same. The thing was advertised to start at 9, so like the total fucking goober that I am I showed up promptly at 8:50, just as the early show was wrapping up and before any of the band members for the late show had even arrived. I spent the next hour or so nursing the first handful of the many beers that I would consume that night, tweeting about Chuck Grassley and Selena Gomez, and occasionally making incredibly awkward eye contact with people that are much cooler than me.
The opening act was none other than local children’s choir, Quick Piss, and they were just as awesome I I hazily remember them being at 80/35. My first introduction to Quick Piss was at around 12:30 in the afternoon on the Fourth of July when I arrived late, and already drunk, for their set on the Kum & Go Stage at 80/35. Right as I stumbled up to the crowd I saw a sweaty, sandy haired kid dressed in garishly patriotic getup burst through the back of the crowd carrying a large drum and a stool. He got all set up and spent the last 10 or 15 minutes of the show encircled by enthusiastic teenagers while some dude up on stage shouted about how he was going to fuck my shit. It was awesome.
My true introduction to Quick Piss came later that night when they opened for Surfer Blood in The Basement. This was still back in the day before the remodel, back before the couches and the modern art, back when the basement resembled John Connor’s home office rather than a bar or a venue. This was where Quick Piss belongs. This was where we all belonged. Fast forward to last night where they literally melted my face off in the Vaudeville Mews. One great little moment from the show, which I am going to keep around as an anecdote whenever I need to yell at someone about how and why Des Moines is the greatest fucking city on the planet, came when one of the guitarists broke a string (or something like that) and Pat Tape Fleming, my current musical hero who was standing in the front row, ran up and took the dude’s guitar into the back, loaned him his own guitar, and after two or three songs brought back the original guitar in working condition. God damn neighborly of him, if you ask me.
There were a bunch of polished old dudes that also played last night after Quick Piss but before Pure Gut. Then just shortly before midnight, Pure Gut came on. I had never seen Pure Gut before. At the beginning of their set they noted that the aforementioned polished old dudes had been a band for 22 years and that that number was exactly 20 more than the number of practices that Pure Gut had held that year. While the old dudes showed every minute of their 22 years together, in good ways and bad, Pure Gut’s unrehearsed mayhem felt so much more real because of their self-proclaimed unpreparedness. Put simply, their lack of polish allowed them to shine so much more brightly. This is not to say that it was a amateurish show by any stretch of the imagination. Fleming has professional skills and, above anything, he is a natural performer. The rest of band felt undeniably at home up on stage and with each other, it almost felt like we were just chilling in somebody’s basement watching these guys fuck around with each other while playing really, incredibly good punk rock music and drinking a lot of beer. It was easily the best live show I've seen in Des Moines this year that didn't feature a trumpet (here's looking at you, Gloom Balloon and Trombone Shorty).
If you’re reading this, there’s a 95% chance that you’re me, and if that’s the case, stop it, you already wrote this, not to mention you were at the fucking show that you’re talking about, so just stop reading this again and go do something else productive. If you happen to be one of the incredibly small handful of people that accidentally read my blog every once in a while, you unfortunately cannot download their new release or listen to it on Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or any of that shit. You gotta have a tape deck (or one of those nifty download codes that came with the cassette that was included in the cost of the cover for this show) to listen to this great band. Luckily I tracked down a grainy recording of their debut performance at an 80/35 after show in 2012 where they performed my personal favorite track of their release, “Where Are We Going”, starting around the 4 minute mark. It's fucking awesome. This performance, which I now really wish I had attended, opens with an incredibly spirited version of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" as well as a cover of The Beatles "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" that will make you sweat just from watching it on a 13-inch laptop screen. This is what music feels like.