Claire & Bain’s Maple Yum-Yum reunion show and accidental pub crawl
July 7th, 2008 by Helen Herbst in Music news, Photo GalleryI rolled up to Lenny’s Bar at 7:30 p.m. yesterday, excited for what promised to be a great show. The bar was closed.
“Shit,” I murmured and turned to my boyfriend/chauffeur. “Are you sure it was Lenny’s?”
“I thought so,” he replied. So had I.
As luck or fate (or their combined power, fuck) would have it, neither of us had our cell phones. We decided, since we had no idea what to do or where to go, to head to Java Monkey for some beer and poetry.
At Java Monkey, standing behind some friends while the bard on stage shouted rhythmically about No Child Left Behind, it dawned on me. Eddie’s Attic. I knew it was one of those two-syllable-apostrophe-S-name thingies.
BF and I walked the minute-and-a-half to Eddie’s Attic, climbed inside and grabbed some barstools. It was 8:30, one hour after the show had started, and Claire & Bain’s Maple Yum-Yum — the entire reason for the journey — had not started their set yet.
Claire & Bain’s Maple Yum-Yum disbanded six years ago (”back when gas was 96 cents a gallon,” Bain says) and returned to Eddie’s Attic last night for an onstage reunion. They hinted that it would not be the last.
(Read more below the break…)
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Claire and Bain are Claire Campbell of Hope for Agoldensummer, and Bain Mattox of Bain Mattox and Shot from Guns. Joining them on stage was Becky Rogers of experimental group Creepy playing cello and xylophone. Their chemistry built slowly, and Bain — apparent group spokesman and self-proclaimed “chubby member” — acknowledged it, claiming, “We don’t really have the banter we used to,” before launching into the first of nine songs.
But for all the awkward silences and obviously scripted jokes between numbers, the music was as good as it ever was. And when their voices rose in folksy harmony, I wouldn’t have known that they hadn’t been together since 2002 (or technically, since AthFest last month, but still). The only time the lyrics got muddled was when they were covering Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy.”
The Wayne Fishell Experiment opened, and unfortunately I missed them. I’m sure they were awesome. It was still a great show, but I can’t really imagine it going down at Lenny’s.
Claire & Bain’s Maple Yum-Yum will be available on iTunes soon. Check Claire and Bain’s respective MySpace pages for more information.
(Photos by Perry Julien)
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