Hell's Angels used to run it -- now they do undercover beat down work for the nightclub when we need it. Bouncers cut each other in on coke deals, and that nutzo wannabee black white guy Casey found lines just sitting there in the washroom -- tested it and found his gums went numb when the white powder touched it. Benny Bennasi played here a little while ago -- got all the underground raver kids out -- and got the town PUMPING. Hilarious shit goes down in a nightclub like the Overdrive. I will never forget the night the 300 pound dude (at least) drank too much beers and ate too many burgers, shit his pants, and collapsed -- couldn't make it off the premises without the help of the ambulance. Or the new porter picks up a girl on his first night ever working in a bar -- meets her up for "movie night" (as if) the very next day. Or the bartenders are put on zero-tolerance for doing E too much. Or a pissed patron forgets his fists or a knife (which he had) -- and tries to start shit with a golf club. Or I go to clean up the bar the next day and find dried blood on the door. Routine happenings in the course of a mid-North American Top 40 Club's lifespan...
When I started at Overdrive I was working 13 hour days, if I did the day shift as well. Thing was, sometimes there wasn't actually that much work to do. Eventually I realized that I was expected to work at a much slower pace than I had anticipated. It was all good, because I was making cash 00 plus I got a tip-out at the end of the night -- but the work is pretty brainless, and like I said, there wasn't even a lot of that. So, considering the whole yuppie-cowboy thing combined with all the pop-jock car pimping fake gangsta-types didn't really catch my attention, I had a fuck of a lot of time for my mind to wander -- far away...
Often I would spend my time while grabbing freezing cold Pilsners, Kokanees and Great Western Lagers -- shoving them right to the back of the coolers, looking out over the empty dancefloor littered with broken baloons, smushed plastic mini-cool-aid shooters and bottlecaps stuck to the floor in an all-qurpose alcoholic residue of sorts -- and I would wonder what it would be like to do this out in Ibiza.
I wondered how it was like for Javier when he would have been doing the exact same shit over there back in the day on the legendary electronic-centric island full of massive beach best beats and laid back vibes. Make no mistake, I know with every bone in my body that all that shit I was doing there was just a warm-up. Just a peek in. Not to the life there, of course. Not then. But sometime. Someday. And I would spend my time thinking, maybe this could very well be the gateway. Slink and wait for the right break to come along. ou could very well go worldwide.... NO DOUBT. Just you'd have to be ready. And you'd have to want it.... But I knew that while I was stuck there, but best course of action was to just say stupid shit to amuse myself and pass the time. One box of Coors Lite at a time. I still have to get around to answering Javier's text message. He probably thinks I'm dead. Ha.
The other place my mind heads to most, especially on those boring afternoon shifts -- is to the Filipino jungle. I mean, it would make sense if I daydreamed about the Amazon jungle, since I was there just last year. But no. Even though there's nothing particularly "Filipino" about the image in my head, I always get the sense I'm thinking about a place way far off somewhere East. Somewhere in East Asia. Most Likely the Philippines.
It's heavy with thick mist everywhere. Water drips slowly from a big drooping banana leaf. I'm on some kind of a gentle incline, though I can't really see the ground for the bushes and branches, sticks and vinces in the way. And the trees rise so tall I can't see the tops of them. The air is fresh even through the dampness. The whole scene is just a pretty simple green. There's some brown striped here and there, as if with an artist's careful stroke. Nothing's too complex. There aren't really too many specifics attached to the image. No Time. No location. No reason for my being there. All I know is I'm somewhere in the Philippines. In the Jungle. And no one is going to bother me for a long long time...
Or then sometimes I'll stop to think about what makes these guys tick: the people that love to frequent this bar. A Canadian, North American phenomenon. The guys Coors Lite targets their giant beer billboards to (with catchy slogans like "available in bars much like you" or "colder than the time your girlfriend met your girlfriend"). Your buddies older brothers. The dudes you see driving cube vans for Pepsi or the local furniture store. You know, they have money, maintain a certain aura of cool, and think about nother but skinny long haird women in sherbert coloured spaghetti strap tops all day long. Just a couple years older than you.
And I wonder, am I going to become one of these guys? And would that be so terrible? They seem to be really enjoying themselves.
But then I go -- no -- wait -- I'm told that this represents a general picture of the "20-something male" (through the media, friends' comments, from coworkers, etc.), but hey, really, it's not. See, to be in the position of the "20-30 something beer market" -- from my experience and the people I have known anyways, you usually have to come from a double-income home, and if not, at least a stable one. This helps to enstill the values of materialism and (alcohol) consumption so necessary for the sale of a product that in blind tests is virtually inistinguishable from all competitors.
These are the people who generally have the best jobs in society or are on route to getting them. Diamond exporation. Factory supervisors. Cabinet construction workers. These are just a few real-life examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Top of the food chain breeds top of the food chain. So the beer market demographic basically excludes immigrants and visible minorities, whose parents are probably still trying to get a foothold in the marketplace, and don't have a ton of dolash to waste. And the fact that these males who are often portrayed as brainless oafs (as long as I can get laid I don't have to think about anything else) do have cash and are willing to spend it is the very reason so many advertisements are targeted towards them. In fact it helps the alcoholic beverage companies to create an atmosphere where all that matters is beer and blondes. A male crafted as perfect compliment to the "Cosmo girl". As I found out, the soundtrack to the place where these two characters "mate" -- well lets just say it sucks on the whole. But the "bar" or the "club" -- depending on how you want to describe it, can be a riot at the same time in so many ways -- and often for the wrong reasons.
"The Boss" Ali watches paint drip from the roof as he prepares for a chil new Tiki Bar and mural with a rad turquoise hue: "That's a Nice Blue" he says in a Scottish accent.The Music: Top 40
In Saskatoon, as in so many other small cities across the world -- when you talk about a pop-nightclub and the top-40 music they play, there arises a specific sound that starts to ring in the back of your ear. Kind of an annoying buzz. But one that makes you want to get up and move in all sorts of non-original ways and mouth very banal lyrics. It's just how it goes.
So nightly at the Overdrive, you'd hear "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain at least twice -- once to get the kids up and going -- and then the second time there at the climax (or should I say to get the girls grinding "low"). Same exact thing with Soulja Boy's "Crank That (Soulja Boy)". That Kardinal Offishal and Akon "Dangerous" track and the Lil' Wayne "Lollipop" track both added to the general mush of hip-hop meets simplistic dance tunage vibe. Of course Rhianna's "Don't Stop the Music" was frequently on my lips as was at least two of her other songs. On the female front as well, I was very stoked to hear (and even watch the music video as it was projected at the back of the dance floor) Madonna's "Hung Up" ("Every little thing that I say or do...") I'm not quite sure why. I guess the video was chill -- capturing the Asian Urban. Or maybe I just really related to the whole "Time goes by, so slowly" line that gets repeated over and over in my mind (I mean, I was kind of stuck in town when I would have rather been elsewhere). I have also mentioned previously on this blog that song "I Kissed a Girl" -- so I won't talk about it again, other than to describe the game I liked to joke about with my fellow porters. It was very simple: count the number of smoking hot chicks making out on the one chord chorus.
On top of the base "Top 40" club crap that was the mainstay of the joint, I thought it was interesting to note the other sets DJ Stickman and his beloved MC would toss on. See, playing into the whole beer drinking demographic thing, there was the occasional GenX rocker tunage put in play. I'm talking about songs like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" (which I was totally feeling...), as well as songs that SHOULD NOT survive in any respectable person's music collection, like Limp Bizket's "Rollin'". I did start to enjoy, however, Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch" song. I'm sure the girls like the music vid -- the guy's ripped.
For the women in the crowd (and I'm sure a ton of the dudes too) we'd hear old crap dance numbers -- I shit you not, "Barbie Girl" was played on an almost daily rotation. No, not the sweet punk remix (or the myriad others I'm sure are in existence) -- the original. Couldn't believe it. Or how about that old Vengaboy's track "Boom boom boom". Wasn't that on Much Dance 2000? I thought it was safely stored there. But I did hear it in South America as well. Fun enough, again, on occasion -- by why the hell was it nightly? Got the Cosmo chicks riled up and drinking beer with the dudes. Damn, I hate when I answer my own questions.
There were the "techno" songs that give electronic music a bad name like the Whistle Song by Alligator.
And in a big rural town like the S-dot we would be treated to half and hour to an hour long country set nightly -- minimum. Think Tim McGraw's "Heart Don't Forget", Keith Urban's "Someone Like You", Big & Rich's "Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy", Hawg Wylde's "Kick Off Your Boots", Shania Twain's "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under". I actually heard management chatting with the DJs about the importance of rocking these tracks for the cowboys and gals. I actually kind of liked it. Western city begets Western music eh?
But, through the thick layers of disgusting tunage and quirky sonics arises the phoenix from the ashes. Because the nightclub environment is also the one place where a dude in the middle of nowhere can tap into the almost secretive electronic music societies burgeoning around the globe -- as I was to find out by accident later on in my hitchhiking adventure.
Nowhere else have I heard the new hip-hop remix of Fedde Le Grande's "Put Your Hands Up For Detroit". It was sick and actually jammed out the place every fucking night it was dropped. And I'd never really heard that Lady Bouncer "Dirty Mary" tune before working there. And it's fucking sick dude! It's not the most layered or complex number in the books -- but it can rock a sweaty dancefloor hard. To me it was a happy medium -- gets the horny girls and dudes where they want to go, but does it with a sense of class (or at least a sense of -- "lets listen to something GOOD while we do this this time round") -- "What somebody scream, dirty Mary is never clean!". I do like that Kanye West track "Harder" -- but it is WAY overplayed, so now I actually kind of hate it (although I could never dislike the Daft Punk version I don't think).
At the beginning of the night the DJs tossed on that one Body Rox tune that features Luciana, "Yeah Yeah" -- but this was a breaks remix or something and Luciana was absent. But I don't think it was the "No No" breaks remix I had. But, surprise surprise, I asked Stickman what's up -- and he wasn't even sure what song he was playing. Dude, I looked for that track for SO LONG! I also liked the Benny Bennasi songs that would come up (ya, I had the new album before the DJs did, so unfortunately we didn't get to hear, you know, anything rad like a new Grammy award recognized track or anything) like "Satisfaction" or the other song that sounds almost identical to "Satisfaction". Freeform F'sive "No More Conversations (Mylo remix)" was played a total of three times I believe while I worked there, which was a nice treat. And I could never forget all the times I vibed out to a mix that included David Guetta on one end or the other. We're talking "Love is Gove", "Love Don't Let Me Go", and "Just a Little More Love" if I remember correctly.
Freeform Five "No More Conversations (Mylo remix)
I Fix a point upon the ceiling
Nothing to do how can I make my escape
The sudden shock, a hidden feeling
No room to breathe feels like I'm locked in the space
Coz who's got all the solutions?
180 revolutions
Where I turn it depends
Where I fall in the end
No more conversations on my own
Walking one straight line, nowhere to go
Revealing all my secrets on my own
The feeling's going down, now can't let go
Don't wanna live it like I'm dreaming
The lies are water all the decisions are fake
I've given up on hopes of leaving
A broken [bridge] on every choice that I make
Coz who's got all the solutions?
180 revolutions
Where I turn it depends
Where I fall in the end
No more conversations on my own
Walking one straight line, nowhere to go
Revealing all my secrets on my own
The feeling's going down, now can let go
No more room to
No more room to breathe
I close my eyes to
I close my eyes to see
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