MUSIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

RAISIN

DON’T PUNCH THE PRINCESS was the name of the CD/ALBUM, but it was also a battle cry one night at Hoops. We were on stage and a woman -who may have been inebriated (or had a glass eye)- dressed in what was then called a ‘wife beater’ and acid washed skinny jeans that zipped up the back and on the back of each pant leg, rushed the ‘stage’ (we were 6″ off the floor) and wrapped her arms around my waist. This included my guitar, mind you. Doing so, she also began a pelvic motion upon my left knee which, as it says in the song, has never been the same. Gretchen was bartending,
and Sarah was the Manager that night.

Sarah had become a good friend of ours over the past year, and her boyfriend Nick used to (in a good natured way) tease her that she acted and got treated like a Princess at her house by her parents. This came to my attention one night at a Ski Chalet the Roasters were playing an all night gig at….(that’s right people. This is how it used to be. You didn’t have playlists or bluetooth speakers. You hired a band to come play.) We had played all night, and as we were all winding down, Sarah and her boyfriend were starting to talk about how uncomfortable she would be sleeping in another house without her own bed and comforter. It was hard not to be involved as there was about 20 of us IN THE SAME ROOM. He sarcastically called her “The Princess” and we truly never called her anything else.
She was Princess Sarah from then on.

Back to the action:
Sarah saw that not only had I stopped playing the guitar, but the band had stopped. Then she saw why, and jumped from behind the bar to help me out of this predicament. She grabbed hold of the person rubbing the raisin in question on my knee and for her bravery was greeted with a raised fist ready to strike! The microphones were on, remember, and as I saw the fist start to come down upon Sarah’s head I yelled “DON’T PUNCH THE PRINCESS!!!” over the P.A. System. Gretchen arrived just in time to soften the blow, finally wrestling the raisin rubber off to the side so she could pay her tab and go to sleep somewhere safe. The song, after all that, was inevitable.

Out of all the songs on the Roasters DON’T PUNCH THE PRINCESS, this song was the one I was most excited about. Just like FAMILY TREE, it was a complete team effort. John Macbeth shredding guitar lines, Greg Marshall playing a funky clavinet, Mark Ahles laying down a seemingly effortless drum part (until you realize how many changes there are to maneuver), and Chucky finally has something to slap and pop to on the bass. They all did their jobs masterfully. Now we just needed to finish the vocals.

Except one day, as Moose (the engineer), and the band were in the studio listening to a rough mix, the owner of the studio came down inebriated and began to make all kinds of weird uninformed demands on what he was hearing from the playback. The band had been locked in on the process of doing the backing vocals in a mobile van/studio. we were in battle mode. We ignored what he’d said and looked back to the sound board. We just wanted to finish the disc and get ready to sell it. Our minds were elsewhen. Moose, however, heard what his ‘boss’ said and took umbrage to say the least. From his wheelchair (Moose was a paraplegic due to a car accident), he without hesitation snapped at the owner and told him to ‘get the fuck out of here….we’re working” The owner ended up going back upstairs, and Moose went back to work. He was, however, bitching about how “fucked up that guy gets in the middle of the day”. About 5 minutes later, the owner’s ‘girlfriend’ came in the door. He was right behind her. We looked at her like “now what?”. She didn’t speak English and had only been in the country a short time from the Far East. As she got closer to us, he moved out from behind her and was holding a chrome .45 caliber handgun. He pointed it towards the floor, wanting Moose to see it, I guess.

“Just so everyone here knows who the owner of this operation is….” he said, or something akin to that. Hard to remember. We were out the door SO fast after that happened. We took the rough disc mix that Moose had made us and split. Never looked back.