“No audience. No show.” A Tale of DIY Triumph
Minneapolis’s Tongue Party are an unstoppable troupe of rambunctious hooligans who live and breathe DIY rock and roll. These noise rock lifers are only truly happy when they’re on the road. If you ask them why they continue to self-book month long U.S. tours despite being consistently cursed with van breakdowns and sometimes getting stranded thousands of miles from home for weeks on end, they’ll tell you that “being on tour is ALWAYS better than not being on tour, no matter how fucked the situation”.
Just last week in Memphis, fate attempted to thwart Tongue Party once again. The band was slated to play a stacked show with raucous noisebastards Pressed at a local watering hole called Murphy’s. The short version of the story is that the Murphy’s staff jerked them around with contradicting instructions as they attempted to load in, until the owner abruptly cancelled the show 30 minutes before the doors were set to open. I’ll let Tongue Party drummer Brandon Hile tell the tale himself in more detail –
“We showed up, asked them where to load. They brought us through the side door and showed us where to put our gear and left it at that. We start loading, then they yell at us for using the side door for load in. We start using the front. Then halfway through our load in they yell at us because it’s 745 and load in is 8. Again no one told us that or the door thing until halfway through load in, and we had literally just talked to them about it. Tongue Party doesn’t fuck around [with] load in, we’re pretty quick about it, so this all happened in like 10 minutes. We are kind of giving them a little attitude at this point because they are being very rude about a simple situation. And anybody who knows us, knows we are actually extremely nice, respectful people, so it wasn’t just us going zero to ten. We load in.
The other bands show up by now, and as they are loading, the owner, totally drunk by this point I might add, decides he is going to cancel the show because “we are assholes and they only do two band bills”. Again this four band bill has been confirmed with them for a couple months at this point. They knew it was a four band bill. He cancelled it because his buddies were there and they are regulars.
After some bad noise between us and the bouncer guy, the show is moved down a block to a [storage] unit and it ends up being way better than the bar could have ever done. The end.”
That’s right – when the venue cancelled, they moved to the show to a fucking STORAGE UNIT and had a blast anyway. Check out these pictures from the show that Pressed set up at the last possible second to save the day –
The story could have simply ended on this optimistic note of youthful hutzpah, if it weren’t for whatever pigheaded dingbat managing Murphy’s Facebook page jumping into a Tongue Party member’s personal Facebook thread to defend the decision to cancel a show with zero warning over a minor logistics tiff.
It’s pretty absurd to claim you cancelled a show for low turnout before the doors had even opened, but when pressed on the issue via a swarm of 1 star reviews, Murphy’s inexplicably stuck to their story.
This is the age we live in, folks. People try to save their ass from ridicule by repeating the same lie on the internet over and over again until they start to believe their own bullshit. What a time to be alive.
Check out Tongue Party here and Pressed here. Be sure to catch the most handsome twins in noise rock the next time Tongue Party rolls through your lovely town.
UPDATE
Murphy’s will no longer be booking bands.
