Photo: Blaine Schultz
Thy Dirty Deuce
Thy Dirty Deuce
“We are back,” Rob Atwood said. “We played four days already. We are playing 6-10 p.m. tonight and then again Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That’s 34 hours of original music. It took me a day to do the math.” Atwood’s band, The Dirty Deuce, settled in for four hours of music, shoehorned into a tiny stage in the shadow of the Ferris wheel on Thursday, Aug. 8, at the Wisconsin State Fair.
The band’s sound is something of an update on the visceral music made famous by Sun Records in Memphis, Tenn. The relentless blues groove stomp is built on guitar, bass and drums. It is topped with Atwood’s yowl and Stephen Cooper’s sax. His previous band, The Probers, took a similar tack. “We weren’t sure how that would go over,” Atwood said after a rare cover, the Cramps’ “New Kinda Kick,” a special request for drummer Jamey Clark’s birthday.
It’s a vintage evening on the corner of Wetley Way and Center Street. Three TVs broadcast the preseason Green Bay Packers game (they won), a cranked-up band playing in the shadow of a Ferris wheel; you can’t swing a cat without hitting something deep fried and served on a stick. This, my friends, is the mother of all festivals, where the great unwashed gladly rub haunches with well-groomed livestock.
And The Dirty Deuce have the best gig in town. An entire evening of just digging in and playing their music to a built-in audience that is continually on the move. (I can relate. My band once played a gig during Al’s Run. More than 10,000 people saw us perform on Kilbourn Avenue, none for more than a few minutes.) Nearby, there is a healthy line of marks waiting to ride the gravity-defying “Ejection Seat”—a mega-bungee ride that flings the brave (or perhaps foolish) souls into the air like human yo-yos. As if on cue, a folksinger croons “Going 90, I ain’t scary, ’cuz I’ve got the Virgin Mary, ridin’ on the dashboard of my car.”
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The ride ends, and the carney unharnesses the youngish middle-aged woman from the cockpit who, amazingly, immediately buys another ticket and gets back in line to defy gravity again. Robert Altman and Federico Fellini together couldn’t have filmed a better movie. Every third person here looks like someone you went to school with. That is if you attended Hieronymus Bosch High School. Nuns in motorized wheelchairs carting trays of cream puffs; young women in burkas shopping for leather wallets under a wall of seriously pro-Trump t-shirts.
By 9 p.m., the songs’ tempos slow to molasses, but not the intensity. This final set is liberally peppered with new songs from the band’s upcoming fifth album. A lengthy harmonica section ends with a saxophone solo quoting from “Harlem Nocturne.” The Dirty Deuce may have downshifted, but they are far from running on fumes. After the marathon performance, Atwood coils up the cords and casually chats with well-wishers. His onstage persona has been replaced with a shrug of “it’s all in a day’s work.”
Photo credit: Blaine Schultz
On the way out, at a patio stage, an Elvis Presley impersonator sings, backed by karaoke, taking requests and adjusting his sound system. Crooning “The Green Green Grass of Home,” he strolls into the audience, gently touching the shoulders of several fans in wheel chairs. In America, we may never again agree on anything the way we agreed on Elvis.
Read more of our coverage of the Wisconsin State Fair here.
