Night of the Living Beef

(The following was written by E.L. Zorko on July 22nd about the Bluffsbrai event. Enjoy!)

The Beef Curtans’ Friday, July 17th show at the Stir Concert Cove at Harrah’s Casino in Council Bluffs was a thing of beauty. Rejoined after a four year hiatus, the band never sounded better. On a stage as broad as the spectrum of the band’s musical style, drummer Clint Fuckworth (Quinn Sikora) and bassist D-evil Lovespear (Brad Dienstbier) laid a foundation both solid and intricate throughout the nearly hour-long set. Lank Badly (Perry Fulfs) appeared ebullient at the percussive vocal ramblings of Groovüs Dü (Mark Wolford) whose lead guitar riffs brilliantly accentuated the folksy styling of Badly’s acoustic strumming, while King Dick (Kent Pendarvis) showcased his vocal versatility as he interspersed harmonica fills as searing as ever. Sir Badly and HRH Dick were pitch perfect in their harmonies and beyond distraction, even when the show became something of a conceptual art piece as friends of the band snuck up with push brooms to literally sweep the stage. Songs such as “Smell,” “Take Our Time,” “Chicken Skin,” and “All Three Sides” sounded fresh and relevant, with a hard hitting “Domestic Violence” as the show’s stunning closer. All five appeared at ease with the material and truly happy to be together, the relationship to each other and the music as comfortable as an old Birkenstock, while the audience, the Brethren, looked on with adulation through rose-colored Luxotticas.

Although the crowd was less than anticipated, it would have packed a smaller venue. It’s a shame that more of the area’s music faithful didn’t risk a night out on a relatively unknown entity to experience this rare gem of a performance by an Omaha legend at a great venue. But the Brethren knew. Their total engagement in the spectacle before them prompted one stage hand to comment that he’d seen many bands come and go at Stir, but never one which commanded the audience like the Beef Curtans did that night.

Makes us wish we could turn to The Reader these days and find those Beef Curtan boys appearing over the weekend at Slowdown or the Waiting Room and we having secured a babysitter (what luck!). Alas, those days have ended. The logistics of bringing certain band members from points afar are simply too daunting to allow regular access to the cult classic which they are.

Any great cult classic can bring us back to a certain time and place. For the Brethren, it’s a time before the kids, before the mortgage, before the workaday drudge for health benefits. Experience the Beef Curtans and we’re back at the Howard Street on a well-deserved cut-loose Friday night, or meeting our true love at Sharkey’s (who knew?). And for that brief dazzling moment in time, that recent fair night under the stars, we were all back, Beef and Brethren alike, remembering what it was like to believe anything was possible.

We’ll just have to wait until next time for that feeling again, provided there is another Beef Curtan show. Here’s to hoping that anything is possible.