A Tale
of a Whale, On Tap!
Once
upon a time, in a land across the water and not so very far away physically at all
though in many respects light years from the shining city of Oz that we all
know and love… there was a newly-formed band of musical brothers called JONAS,
and this little band consisted of Michael, Joseph, Anthony and Gordon. Gordon,
being very happy to have just emigrated to the land of Oz to join this merry
band, was equally happy that his beloved Greenwiche Village was but a swift bus
ride away… And so it was that JONAS put on their very first magickal musical
performance, to a full house, on a beautiful autumn Saturday night in a
raucous, bawdy little dive pub known to locals as the ON TAP, in the sunny
burban hamlet of North Bergen. Gordon was wearing shoulder-length feathered
shag hair and a pair of high-heeled platform shoes he’d just bartered for in
said Village, but aye, ‘twas but the late seventies and not yet time for the
new wave and the punk and all that wickedness, at least not for this band.
Another merry band, a group of nice young chaps he had befriended in the
saloons of Christopher Street, gamely traveled from their homeland in the
Bronx, across many systems of transit, all the way to North Bergen to join in
the fun. And it was a lovely, motley crowd of varied types indeed! As this
memorable evening turned into night, the merry minstrels delighted the people
of the Berg with one classic melody after another, finally ending their
serenade in the small hours with a rousing rendition of “White Punks on Dope,”
which became the band’s signature song and obligatory encore. A legend was
born! A small legend in a small place, but a legend nonetheless, albeit not the
legend of the brothers Jonas of the millenium, who were as yet not even ideas
in the minds of their parents. The townsfolk and goode people of the ON TAP
treated the impoverished (or, at least, humble-of-means) entertainers of JONAS
as royalty for years, or at least many many moons, to come…
Now,
many years later, the ON TAP and JONAS are to be reunited in Oz itself, in a
new publick house whose name is PORT FOURTYONE, he of 355 West 41st
Street abutting the central terminal of the aforementioned bus, on June the
Fifth. Bergers, denizens of Chelsea and of the Kitchen of Hell and all the many
hamlets of Oz , are all enjoined to partake in the merriment. Notwithstanding
rumours of the publick house’s former calling as a house of ill, or at least
somewhat scandalous, repute (it has been whispered about that when the
proprietor was a man with the name of the flower, burly men used to dance there
in straps of jock). Although, alas, JONAS is no more, the spirit of the merry
band of late is three-quarters embodied, and that I do mean quite literally, in
a kind of The Exorcist way, in the three members (though at the time they were
not yet THE PRIVATES) of THE WAVOS.
And so, a goode time
shall be had by all!
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ <- cross The Water!
Goredon
Smith
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