Artists Only - Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food - 1978

I could niether tell you the name of the bar we were in, nor the exact location but it was pretty much what we were looking for. Despite our belief that we really owed it to ourselves to go to a Minimal House/Techno show while in the land of that sort of music, we both also realized that it wasn't really our scene and we'd have no idea where to even look.

The bar we did end up was all neighborhoody, with dark wood fixtures, low light and cheap beer. We settled in with a couple of tall ones and took in our surroundings.

Over the course of our trip, even starting as early as the airport, Anand had been talking about how he used to drink Southern Comfort all the time back in college and couldn't believe that he used to drink that shit. I agreed, though I had my own brief affair with SoCo all those years ago too. SoCo was running a Mardi Gras themed campaign over in Europe and we kept passing signs for it. As we sat down at our table, Anand looked over and pointed at a sign with prophetic certainty. It was an old metal sign for Soco...not even the promotion, but one that was clearly a fixture in the bar. This would lead to a series of Soco shots that would find their way in front of me everytime I came back from using the bathroom. Probably 4 in total. I was not pleased.

As the night turned into the early morning a young-ish German man came up to us and struck up a conversation with us. He said that he had taken his parents out to this, his neighborhood bar (keep in mind, it's 3 in the morning) and that he had been listening to our conversation for the past few hours and thought that we were really very interesting people. He told us his name was Patrick, which...as an Irish American with a German name, I was sort of amused by. Now the thing is, I wasn't sure if he was refering to conversations like our discussion of China's role in the global economic meltdown, the need for a greater embrace of government by the American people, or our mutual agreement that anal sex was over-rated. So I wasn't sure if he thought we were intellectual Americans, dirty Americans, or both...but whatever it was, he liked it.

To make matters more odd, he decided to introduce us to his non-English speaking and very drunk parents (again, 3 AM). Now, we had had several beers and at least 4 shots of whiskey, but by this point our livers were on vacation mode and we were able to make something of a decent impression of our country. At one point, Patrick's father tossled my hair. I'm 34 (Okay, at that point I was about 3 days shy of being 34, but still...) I thought I'd long since outgrown the moment when an old man tossled my hair...but then there it was.

Finally Patrick and his parents shuffled out the door, as the bar was closing shop. We settled up our stunningly small bill and headed for the hotel. A 645 wake up call and a flight to London was only a few hours away...

Some late 70's weirdness from David Byrne and company. Not their best work, but it's The Talking Heads, what else can you say?