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THIS PAGE GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM!
| Index Old Croak Home Photos Photos 2 Links Gig History Members Mailbag Songs |
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UPCOMING GIGS:
click on underlined venue or event name to find out more  A
Benefit for
Amy Sabrina  Saturday, November 1st 1:00-5:00 pm. click
on picture to go to Amy's website–>
also starring:
“The Bayou Boys”
(a mish-mash of members from the Twin Cities Playboys and Cajun Hot Soles especially for this event) The New Riverside Ramblers By gum, we're playing for an actual dance! The other bands are terrific
Cajun groups.
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the First AnnualChicago
Saturday, November 8thBattle of the Jug Bands! 7:00 pm until the wee small hours Morseland Chicago,IL
1218 W. Morse Avenue - near Loyola University in the Rogers Park neighborhood 7:00 - Devil
In a Woodpile
9:00 - The Battle - Lineup: Bare Hand Jug Band (Chicago)  Blue Ribbon Jug Band (Chicago) Escape the Floodwater Jug Band (Iowa City) Fat Chance Jug Band (Minneapolis) Hump Night Thumpers (Chicago) The Geezers (Minneapolis) Strictly
Jug Nuts (Chicago)
tosee
the coveted "sausage press" trophy click here
midnight - Open Jam
for the first time (drum roll please) there will be an Annual Battle of the Jugbands held outside of the state of Minnesota, held in the very town where the Memphis Jug Band made records in 1927 and 1934, as did Gus Cannon in '27 and '29! Unlike the Minneapolis battle, the winner will be decided by an audience vote. They'll distribute ballots as folks come in, and collect them at the end. An independent Election Commissioner will count the votes and announce the winner, then invite the winner up for an encore song.  •news flash • news flash • news flash •at the Amazing Grace Bakery & Café, Canal Park   Well, we managed to win at Duluth this year, with - as you can see - a full compliment of eight members, so many we needed two pictures here. This marked our first public appearance with the hubcap Dobro guitar and
the doghouse bass. The twin bass sounds from it and the washtub drove us
to capture of the coveted Yid-Wegian Krumkake Iron, recently dubbed (by
last years winners) the SILBERmAN Award, which we proudly displayed at
the Minnehaha Bandshell gig on July 2nd, right and below.
 At Minnehaha Bandshell 7/2/08
Victoria, MN
Battle of the JugbandsSunday,
July 13th
Floyd's Bar Well,
only Al and Ludwig were able to make it out there this year. The
same thing happened with last years winners, Slipped-A-Mickey, so we
pasted the pieces together, forming something like Fat Mickey, or Slipped-A-Chance for the duration.
 Minnesota Bluegrass
& Old-Time Music Festival Friday August 8, 2008 El Rancho Mañana 27302 Ranch Rd Richmond, MN 56368 Get directions We played at the Festival for the very first time this
year. We did two "Marketplace"
 all-acoustic sets: Friday 10 am and 5
pm, and a couple of tunes between main stage acts at 1.30pm, too. Bob
and Pam participated in a bass demonstration between mainstage acts at
7.50pm. On Sunday, Al did a "Playing the Jug" workshop.The Festival ran Thursday thru Sunday. Former Fat Chance Jug Band member Adam
emceed one night and told some really bad jokes.
 9th Annual Edge of the Wilderness Sunday, September 7th 2008 LISTEN!
We finally have
some recordings posted.
They're set up to open in new windows and should play if you have the right plug-in in your browser-Quicktime, for instance... Above is a 17 second
video clip here of us playing Viola Lee Blues at the 2006 Garden Tour
A slightly better copy of this - which unfortunately doesn't play on some older browsers - is availible here ~ there are 7 sideways seconds more of it here ~ (there's also one from 2007 on the Members page). thanks to Jen Moates for these clips ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Visit Our Photo Albums ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ As
if the photo pages on this website aren't enough already, you can click
on a title below to look at
even more images, unedited (meaning some, good, some bad pictures and not all of us, thankfully ). THERE'S MORE A - COMIN' SOON The 10th Annual Duluth Battle of the Jugbands 2006 4th Annual Victoria Jugband Battle 2006 8th Annual Edge of the Wilderness Jug Band Boogie West Bank Community Garden Tour 2006 The 12th Annual Duluth Battle of the Jugbands 2008 Minnehaha Falls June 2008 MBOTMA Festival August 2008   Duluth 2006 Battle West Bank Community Gardens 
Effie 2007
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  Goodbye to Our Good Boy Wooly Bully left this earth quietly in his sleep on October 6th, 2008. He lived a good long life-reaching the ripe old age of 17. The bi-black sheltie made several trips up to the Duluth and Effie Battles over the past few years, He specialized in getting tangled in our mic chords as well as chasing cars. The surviving Jug Band dogs attended his funeral and burial, held at People's Farm near Wheeler, Wisconsin. Goodbye old friend.  2008 BATTLE NEWS We managed to not win (again) at the Battle of
the Jugbands back in February, the waffle iron returning to 2006
Winners Gramma's Saggy Jug. We did however manage to have a great time,
with Sarita rejoining us on tub bass and Tony
Paul on hand drums. We made up a brand new fake name for this year: the Spontaneous
Interjections.
"They's good
horses, ain't they"
BIG-TIME MOVIE STARS?
 gig
last fall is now being screened before every movie as part of a local
music series of shorts for the Riverview
Theatre in south Minneapols. It looks and sounds so nice that you'd
hardly know it was us. A lot of it is our music behind local merchants
ad visuals. It's in rotation with a couple of other bands' videos. The
folks that put this together have posted a short clip - which I can't
get to work on older browsers. Last years Duluth Battle we came in third, behind a group
made up of former members of the Bo Conrad Spit Band
called Hot Spit and our pals from Slipped- A-Mickey, who'd managed to take home
the coveted G.I. Mess-kit trophy at the 5th
Annual Victoria Jug Battle a month later. There is a report about this years Duluth competition, which we won, posted up top... Our
Song of the Month is one we put together entitled "Ice
Cream Habit", based on an informal, biased and unscientific
study of female behaviour, and introduced after a discussion of the
about the lyrics of a certain old Memphis Jug Band tune that could be
mis-constrewed as promoting a certain habit-forming product once
marketed in drugstores across America.
It's been the song of
the month for far too many months....
Anyone out there have any favorites we do you'd like to see on the song pages? Drop us a line 
The
show at St. Paul's Desnoyer Park Summer Picnic on July 10, 2007 was
another comfortable one for us - and them - when they finally took a
chance with us after years of booking bands that were way too loud for a
neighborhood event. We even got to play in a cool bandshell (right)
that projected the sound acoustically quite well.
 We took home the
Duluth Battle's Coveted Yid-wegian
Krumkake Iron (above) in 2003 and 2008:
Victoria's Coveted
GI Mess Kit in 2004 (Below): and Effie's Coveted Fish Skinner in 2001
and 2003 (Even further Below).
 (all jug battle
trophies are appended with "the Coveted")
 That
Fat Chance Jugband Is (left to right
below)
(more or less)... Pam: doghouse bass, recovering
bluegrass refugee.
Bob: muted tubles, saws, kazoos,
whistles, tub bass, jug, vocal, guitar, salsa & chips
Randy: vocals, guitar, kazoo, cigarettes, wine expertese Kris: washboard, vocals, kazoo, cheese, oysters Cindy: autoharps, vocals, kazoo, spontaneous interjections, carrots, grandchildren, and working on hubcap lap slide guitar... Ludwig: mandolin, banjo, tub bass, rare vocals, exotic beer Al: harmonicas, vocals, jug, washboard, kazoo, Old Croak Kentucky Straight Embalming Fluid, foot-in-mouth  click for more info about the Old Croak |
The mystery surrounding "If the Shoe Fits", the song we learned from Gordon Thorne, has finally been solved. As we noted, he couldn't recall who wrote it, and our attempts to discover the author had been in vain. The solution came to us anonymously, thanks to someone who was searching for the lyrics and landed on this web site. The song was by blues harp phenom James Harman and has the full title "If the the Shoe Fits (Wear It)". Links to this and other previous song postings are on our "Songs" page. In the fall of '07,
Ludwig,Kris,Randy,Bob and Al (along with Neptune and Wooly) made it up to Effie for our annual end o' summer tradition of playing at the Edge of the Wilderness Jug Band Boogie (the 8th Annual) at the Neighborhood Tavern in Effie.
 Once again we returned WITHOUT the coveted fish skinner trophy, but we had a swell time anyhow. 
We had a great time playing music around the campfire as well as at Deer
Lake Charlie's (aka the Dome) the nights before. HAUNTED!
 At
our practice on October 30, 2007–the day before Hallowe'en– we were
visited by a mysterious and mute washtub - playing, beer swilling ghost. The ghost disappeared
back into the spirit world (via the front door) as suddenly and silently
as it arrived after its spooky haunted washtub fell apart a second
time... It was
all quite unnerving.
Bowers succombs to
temptation!
More
Bass-ic Events
 Once again we were visited by a bass player at a practice, this time not from the spirit world, but from the even errier bluegrass world, when Pam Bowers sat in with us at a January practice with her real stand up bass. The photo shows Ludwig introducing her to the world of washtub bass, so confusing her that she was trying to play her bass backwords. After sitting in with us at several sessions, Pam has recently consented to "join" (whatever that means) the jug band, which means that we no longer have to play bottomless most of the time. A loose
combination of amateur musicians with years of jugband experience, Fat
Chance covers not only classic jug band tunes from Cannon's Jug Stompers
and the Memphis Jug Band, but jug band versions of classic country,
blues, early rock, and modern singer songwriters. Unlike many so-called
jug bands, we actually use a jug, as well as washboards, kazoos,
guitars, banjo, mandolin, tub bass, muted tuble, harmonica, shakers, and
occasionally, fiddle and even the glockenspiel - like metalaphone. Fat
Chance has taken home the trophy at Jug Band Battles throughout
Minnesota.
Available for bars, coffeehouses, and other low joints, as well as private parties, country picnics, festivals and the like. If we feel like it. Thanks for taking a look at our site. Be sure to get in touch with your thoughts and suggestions. We'll be updating now and again, so please check back often. This That Fat
Chance Jug Band
Website
This website is hosted by awardspace.com, a free webhosting service, except for the music files, (since they don't allow them, so are are at fileave.com/) and is built using Mozilla Composer, (which is also free) on a Macintosh G4 running OS9.2.2, which, come to think of it was a gift, so I guess that was free, too. And we're using Photobucket to host the picture albums. (just in case you wanted to know this sort of thing.) * * * * * * * * * * *
* * *
or by regular mail at: That Fat Chance Jugband
712 27th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55454
USA
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| The West Bank Boogie Book We suggest you check out the book by our very own ex-fiddle player Cindy Collins (shown with us at a get-together a few years back below) entitled West Bank Boogie at http://www.westbankboogie.com/index.php. Vintage photos, profiles and
candid interviews with over 20 westbank area musicians who have been
playing in our neck of the woods since the '60s-- such as Koerner,Ray
and Glover, Shangoya, Bill Hinkley & Judy Larson,Willie Murphy,Lazy
Bill Lucas, and Eddie
Berger, as well as folks that shaped the scene- like bon vivant Red
Nelson, or Ed Felien, publisher of the 100 Flowers newspaper during
the Great Hippie Scare.
Read about the venues that made it all happen, such as the Triangle Bar and the Viking...the foreword was written by a fellow named Garrison Keillor. It includes a 17-song CD of vintage and mostly out-of-print tracks featuring a good number of the musicians in the book. Author Cindy (Fiddle) Collins with us
back in '03 at a session at the
good ol' Seward Upstairs Clubhouse, English Sue (left) joins on maracas. |
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VIKING
BAR GONE!
 There's is a City Pages Blog and a Minnewiki Entry,
where folks have added reminiscences and stories- as well as a swell
story by Cyn Collins in the TC
DailyPlanet |
 On the night of the Viking's last stand, Randy and the
honourable gentleman were glumly wondering "now where do we goto watch color TV? It's still sorely missed. Things are just not the same... |
 for more pictures
from
the Viking Bar's last stand, click on either George or Jay |
You Gonna Quit Me.
