Soapbox brow

George's blog features an epigraph extolling the combination of high and low brow cultures to the exclusion of middle brow.  I tend to agree.  I'll happily leave the middle brow to, for example, the Average Man 's proud tv-holic obsession with quality programming. 

Yet it may be I enjoy higher highs and lower lows than George.  To his low brow tendency toward esoteric punk, for example, not at all in itself a bad tendency, I prefer something more on the lines of this bar band called Soapbox I rocked to recently on my trip to Florida, whose broad appeal may not sink quite so low as tractor pulls, but defintely pleases the same impulse.

First, you have to imagine the band much later in the Bud Light night than in the (deilightfully homemade) clip below, at the point when the lead dude with his raspy silk voice and beer belly screams Hank Williams Junior's questions to the crowd, which the crowd lustily answers:

Why do you drink? To get drunk.
Why do you roll smoke? To get high.
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote? To get laid.

Second you have to realize that this band has a pretty boy fronting a couple of ridden-hard and put-away-wet female musicians fully looking the part of rockers who stay up late and party hardy, biker chicks who've chosen to ride their own electric guitars, and do it as well as the next good ol' boy.  They covered everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Nirvanna to The Beatles and The Stones to Van Morrison and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, as well as, of course, Lynard Skynard and Marshall Tucker. 

I felt I got a taste of Southern fun.  Along with everyone else (except my mother, who got a little too much fun), I had a blast.





I'll leave my argument for higher cultural highs for another post.