I meant to write about the show at BKW’s last week but I never got around to it. It didn’t quite turn out how we expected, but it did yield some interesting results. First of all, Leif was sick in bed. Second, Josh had a prior engagement and had to leave at 5. So we got there around 2. There weren’t many people there, so we really just had fun Jamming out with Greg from Groove Juice. Josh and I played a few Gizburg Duck songs by ourselves, but we spent most of the time playing old George Jones songs with one of the bar’s old-timer regulars. It was fun, but it hardly qualified as a Gizburg Duck show.

However, the owners of the bar did like what little bit of GzDk music they were hearing, and said they might want to hire us as a regular band there for the summer. But they wanted to hear how we sound under normal circumstances first, so they had us come back the next Saturday, which was today.

So we showed up today, again in the late afternoon, and played a small set for just the owners and two or three other people at the bar. It wasn’t a terribly great performance, but I guess it was good enough because they want us to come back on June 22 to play for the Saturday night crowd. Which sounds really awesome, except for one thing. Something we kinda figured we’d have to deal with: we need to learn a lot of bar-friendly covers.

After we played at Rum Runners in 2011, we decided we didn’t really want to play at bars anymore. We were trying to turn into a 100% (or at least 99%) Christian band, and the bar scene just wasn’t meshing with that very well. Not that we have a problem as Christians with being in a bar. It’s just the vibe of all the Metallica and Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Guns ‘n’ Roses that everyone expects at a bar. There’s nothing wrong with any of those bands either, except the more of that type of music that people expect us to play, the less room there is for Christ. Instead of 99% Christian, it’s more like 40% if we’re lucky.

However, that attitude is part of the reason we didn’t play any shows at all in 2012. Without bar-friendly bands, songs, and venues, there really isn’t much for a local band to go on around here. Perhaps that’s not really such a bad thing, though. A central theme in a lot of the lyrics that I write for Gizburg Duck is that Christians should be less afraid of getting their hands dirty. To get the gospel to the people who need it most, you can’t wait for them to come to you in a church, because they never will. You have to take it to them, and you have to put it in a form they’ll pay attention to. And unfortunately, in a bar, they’re not paying attention unless every other song is classic rock. So we’ll learn some classic rock.

Which really isn’t so bad. I mean, we won’t play songs we don’t like. And what we do play, we’ll fuck up Gizburg Duck style like we do with I’m Eigteen and Island Song. And we’ll definitely have fun with it. We just need to remember to not “let our lights dim” as the churchy-types would say.

And, on a completely unrelated note, we have something to tell someone now when people ask what Gizburg Duck means. It’s something Josh was telling us today that he said he’s always kinda pictured in his head. He said the words “Gizburg Duck” have always made him think of a Freudian slip. I had to look it up myself, so for those who don’t know, a Freudian slip is when you accidentally say/do what you secretly want to do instead of what you actually intended to say/do. A gizburg could mean a Freudian slip that you’re completely unaware of. You do something that’s in your best interest without ever realizing what that best interest was. So a gizburg duck would be like if you ducked a baseball bat being swung at your head by bending down to pick up a dollar on the ground.

I wonder what Sigmund would have to say about that.