I am a fan of literal tunes. Songs that are actual stories about real people, real places. I am also a fan of dive bars, small towns, music that swings and forces me to move a bit. In the new video for their tune “(Mancos Kind of) Saturday Night”, Stillhouse Junkies nail all of that down, hard. The video was shot at the Columbine Bar in beautiful Mancos, Colorado…the town that shares the tune’s namesake.
The band tells us that the tune is, “An ode to small-town life in Colorado and elsewhere.” A story about a place that exists in a different time plane, “the Columbine Bar in Mancos, Colorado, “where the West still lives”.”
Viewing almost as a short film of sorts, we follow the band through the alley ways of a town that seems stuck in a different decade. Through an old dance hall and back out onto the street picking up members along the way…where the stillness of the street is palpable. The band enters to the aforementioned bar and the music picks back up. The tune ready kicks and swings.
The bass pushing things along, percussion jangly acoustic strings keeping the pace driving and a steadily drifting fiddle over the top. Shit kicking, hip shaking, force you to dance kind of barroom stomping jams. The kind that makes you want to cheers your pals with a hard clink of a cheap draft beer and shoot a whiskey before returning to the dance floor lit by the glow of a Buck Hunter machine and overhead pool table light to get down just a little more before last call. This is the good stuff folks.