The Muffin Man
I tend not to dwell on the past too often. But few memories bring me as much joy as the time my old band Blame it on Eve performed a genre-bending cover of "The Muffin Man" at the Hammonton High School "Battle of the Bands" to a packed auditorium.
It starts out simply enough: Steve accompanies the lines "Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man? Do you know the muffin man...." with a minimal slow strum on the guitar. Then for the next lines, "...who lives on Drury Lane," he cranks up the distortion and plays a crescendoing chugga-chugga riff. Then the song explodes, drum, bass, and guitar, into what can best be described as a pop-punk interpretation of the song. At this point I gathered that most of the audience was fairly incredulous. But it gets better.
After the pop-punk fiasco, Rob, the drummer, transitions into a breakbeat. This is followed by the following priceless exchange between myself and the audience:
- When I say muffin, you say man - muffin!
- (silence)
- Muffin!
- (silence)
This is repeated once or twice, then followed by something like "Muffin man! Say it as loud as you can! Yeah, muffin man. Alright."
It was pretty much a flop, but high school students aren't really known for either their subtlety or their sense of humor. I'm still bitter that we lost to that Nu metal band. Maybe if I too had taken off my shirt during the performance, I wouldn't be griping. But I had to think about all the poor girls that probably would have fainted if I tried to pull off such a stunt.
having been apart of the event, i offer my seal of authenticity as to what actually happened. thats pretty accurate. i had forgotten about the shirtless yelling man but now i remember it quite clearly. as an addition, i remember discussing the possibility of covering "purple haze" by jimi hendrix just to fuck with another band, as the band before us had been sound checking with it. the goal of course, to make their already miserable classic rock adaptations seem that much more trite than they already were, being played in 2003 with a short fat white kid playing the lead. also, as a followup to this great event, i ran into the judges of that battle of the bands up here in syracuse, ny when the progress played here. when i brought up the aforementioned 'muffin man', their response was immediately "when i say muffin, you say man... muffin! man! muffin! man!" the goal of the group was always to touch as many hearts as possible in the world, and to that i say: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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