| Index Old Croak Home Photos Photos 2 Links Gig History Members Mailbag Songs |
THIS PAGE GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM!
| Index Old Croak Home Photos Photos 2 Links Gig History Members Mailbag Songs |
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UPCOMING GIGS:  West Bank Revival Over the years folks of many walks of life have picked up an
instrument, wandered to the West Bank of Minneapolis, plopped down and
called it home. History is made there as strangers and friends alike
share food, songs, and ideas over late-night jam sessions or beers at a
bar. These gatherings have made the Twin Cities synonymous with
community and have led to amazing, ingenuitive music that has cemented us as a capital of the creative arts! To celebrate this tradition and the folks who've kept it alive for 60 years, the Front Porch Sitters, volunteers dedicated to supporting local, independent artists and locally focused, independent businesses, are throwing a revival—A West Bank Revival! Friday, Sept 18 and Sat, Sept 19, Acadia Cafe, The Bedlam Theatre, Nomad World Pub, and the Red Sea are hosting more than 40 local musicians showcasing the diverse creativity Twin Cities artists offer! The Hard Times Cafe and The Weinery are offering food specials, and the newly opened West Bank Social Center will host story-telling and historic photo displays of the West Bank. The cost is $5 each day, so anyone can afford this weekend of celebration! Reconvene with your friends and neighbors and enjoy good music and good fun—welcome to the West Bank!  Hosmer was the last of four library
branches built with money donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. It
has the distinction of being the only Minneapolis Public Library named
after a librarian: James K. Hosmer, Minneapolis Public Library director
from 1892 to 1904.
And they're letting us play there. 347 East 36th Street, Minneapolis We finally have
some recordings posted.
They're set up to open in new windows and should play if you have the right plug-in in your browser-Quicktime, for instance... Sorry looks like we'll have to re-post these Meanwhile, there's one song on our Facebook Fan Page HERE Above is a 17 second
video clip here of us playing Viola Lee Blues at the 2006 Garden Tour
A slightly better copy of this - which unfortunately doesn't play on some older browsers - is availible here ~ there are 7 sideways seconds more of it here ~ (there's also one from 2007 on the Members page). thanks to Jen Moates for these clips ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Visit Our Photo Albums ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ As
if the photo pages on this website aren't enough already, you can click
on a title below to look at
even more images, unedited (meaning some, good, some bad pictures and not all of us, thankfully ). The 10th Annual Duluth Battle of the Jugbands 2006 4th Annual Victoria Jugband Battle 2006 8th Annual Edge of the Wilderness Jug Band Boogie West Bank Community Garden Tour 2006 The 12th Annual Duluth Battle of the Jugbands 2008 Minnehaha Falls June 2008 MBOTMA Festival August 2008 10th Annual Edge of the Wilderness Jug Band Boogie 2009   Duluth 2006 Battle West Bank Community Gardens 
Effie 2007
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  Goodbye to Our Good Boy Wooly Bully left this earth quietly in his sleep on October 6th, 2008. He lived a good long life-reaching the ripe old age of 17. The bi-black sheltie made several trips up to the Duluth and Effie Battles over the past few years, He specialized in getting tangled in our mic chords as well as chasing cars. The surviving Jug Band dogs attended his funeral and burial, held at People's Farm near Wheeler, Wisconsin. Goodbye old friend. BIG-TIME MOVIE STARS?
 gig
is now being screened before every movie as part of a local
music series of shorts for the Riverview
Theatre in south Minneapols. It looks and sounds so nice that you'd
hardly know it was us. A lot of it is our music behind local merchants
ad visuals. It's in rotation with a couple of other bands' videos. The
folks that put this together have posted a short clip - which I can't
get to work on older browsers. Our
Song of the Month is one we put together entitled "Ice
Cream Habit", based on an informal, biased and unscientific
study of female behaviour, and introduced after a discussion of the
about the lyrics of a certain old Memphis Jug Band tune that could be
mis-constrewed as promoting a certain habit-forming product once
marketed in drugstores across America.
click for more info about the Old Croak |
The mystery surrounding "If the Shoe Fits", the song we learned from Gordon Thorne, has finally been solved. As we noted, he couldn't recall who wrote it, and our attempts to discover the author had been in vain. The solution came to us anonymously, thanks to someone who was searching for the lyrics and landed on this web site. The song was by blues harp phenom James Harman and has the full title "If the the Shoe Fits (Wear It)". Links to this and other previous song postings are on our "Songs" page. A loose
combination of amateur musicians with years of jugband experience, Fat
Chance covers not only classic jug band tunes from Cannon's Jug Stompers
and the Memphis Jug Band, but jug band versions of classic country,
blues, early rock, and modern singer songwriters. Unlike many so-called
jug bands, we actually use a jug, as well as washboards, kazoos,
guitars, banjo, mandolin, tub bass, muted tuble, harmonica, shakers, and
occasionally, fiddle and even the glockenspiel - like metalaphone. Fat
Chance has taken home the trophy at Jug Band Battles throughout
Minnesota.
Available for bars,
coffeehouses, and other low joints, as well as private parties, country
picnics, festivals and the like. If we feel like it.Thanks for taking a look at our site. Be sure to get in touch with your thoughts and suggestions. We'll be updating now and again, so please check back often. This Here That Fat
Chance Jug Band
Website
This website is hosted by awardspace.com, a free webhosting service, except for the music files, and was originally built using the free program Mozilla Composer, (replaced in OSX by KompoZer) on a Macintosh G4 running OS9.2.2, which, come to think of it was a gift, so I guess that was free, too. And we're using Photobucket to host the picture albums. (just in case you wanted to know this sort of thing.) * * * * * * * * * * *
* * *
or by regular mail at: That Fat Chance Jugband
712 27th Avenue
South
Minneapolis, MN 55454
USA
That
Fat Chance Jugband Is (left to right
below)
(more or less)... Pam: doghouse bass, recovering
bluegrass refugee.
Bob: muted tubles, saws, kazoos,
whistles, tub bass, jug, vocal, guitar, salsa & chips Randy: vocals, guitar, kazoo, cigarettes, wine expertese Kris: washboard, vocals, kazoo, cheese, oysters Cindy: autoharps, vocals, kazoo, spontaneous interjections, carrots, grandchildren, and working on hubcap lap slide guitar... Ludwig: mandolin, banjo, tub bass, rare vocals, exotic beer Al: Kratt harmonicas, vocals, jug, washboard, kazoo, Old Croak Kentucky Straight Embalming Fluid, foot-in-mouth |
| The West Bank Boogie Book We suggest you check out the book by our very own ex-fiddle player Cindy Collins (shown with us at a get-together a few years back below) entitled West Bank Boogie at http://www.westbankboogie.com/index.php. Vintage photos, profiles and
candid interviews with over 20 westbank area musicians who have been
playing in our neck of the woods since the '60s-- such as Koerner,Ray
and Glover, Shangoya, Bill Hinkley & Judy Larson,Willie Murphy,Lazy
Bill Lucas, and Eddie
Berger, as well as folks that shaped the scene- like bon vivant Red
Nelson, or Ed Felien, publisher of the 100 Flowers newspaper during
the Great Hippie Scare.
Read about the venues that made it all happen, such as the Triangle Bar and the Viking...the foreword was written by a fellow named Garrison Keillor. It includes a 17-song CD of vintage and mostly out-of-print tracks featuring a good number of the musicians in the book. Author Cindy (Fiddle) Collins with us
back in '03 at a session at the
good ol' Seward Upstairs Clubhouse, English Sue (left) joins on maracas. |
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VIKING
BAR: LONG GONE!
 There's is a City Pages Blog and a Minnewiki Entry,
where folks have added reminiscences and stories- as well as a swell
story by Cyn Collins in the TC
DailyPlanet |
 On the night of the Viking's last stand, Randy and the
honourable gentleman were glumly wondering "now where do we goto watch color TV?
It's still sorely missed. Things are just
not the same... |
 for more pictures
from
the Viking Bar's last stand, click on either George or Jay |
You Gonna Quit Me.
