All Funked Up:
Travelin’ Thornberries Enjoy “Wrap” Music from Here Come The Mummies
 June 14 to June 16, 2012 

Hello, Our Darlings!

Yes, we know only too well how bland, colorless and without meaning or purpose have been your lives these past months, lacking as they have the sparkle, the luster, the verve and the enrichment from the words and deeds of the Traveling Thornberries.  But be apprised that the pendulum for your period of privation is at a precarious point in which it must now plummet, placing you, post haste, on a particularly pulchritudinous perch for a perspective on our proud plot in this proceeding page.   More than a year has passed since our last tale of angst and awesomeness.  Yes, thirteen months of financial fits, scholastic sandpapering and the inevitably overwhelming insecurities inherent in the upheavals of the current operations of our existences.  Jennifer and I have faced a number of new crises in our lives, especially these past months.  Ergo, we felt we were long-overdue for a nice and relaxing getaway.

As you longtime fans of the Traveling Thornberries narratives know, Jennifer and I are normally fans of air travel.  True, one surrenders much of the control and sees little of the country in the travel process, but in exchange, many, many headaches of highway travel get bypassed.  But finances being what they’ve been, austerity is everyone’s new reality; we knew this year’s excursion would have to be a humble one.  No planes for us.  We decided maybe getting there could be part of the fun.  After all, Jennifer’s brother and his better half have told many grand stories of their adventures on the road together, and they seemed to be doing great.  In fact, here’s a shameless plug for their tales of goats, cheeses and caves:

           http://www.onesixtyk.com

Ultimately, then, Jennifer and I settled on our own road trip to a place called Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Why that particular destination?  Why, to attend a music concert put on by what is perhaps one of the most unique performing groups we’ve ever encountered: Here Come The Mummies.  A friend turned us on to them as far back as April 12, 2011 (you know who you are, Dan!), and they’ve fascinated us ever since.  Like KISS in the 1970s, HCTM wear elaborate makeup—in this case, mummy wrappings—during performances.  They do so specifically to ensure no one knows who they are.  

The mystique not only allows established musicians to perform together (even though they are otherwise committed to preexisting contracts at rival companies, as rumor has it), but also makes for endlessly fascinating theorizing among fans about their potential identities.  The group’s music is mostly feel-good funk, brass instrumentation and a great deal of suggestive—if innocent—innuendo.  They usually play small venues, allowing for a near-unprecedented connection and responsiveness to the fans.  And we hungered to be a part of the Mummy mystique!

I think it only fair to give our gratitude to HCTM for their hard work by linking as many themes of this chronicle as possible to their songs and lyrics.  If you’re unfamiliar with their brand of performance, then you’ll have plenty of clickable opportunities to URLs where you can play the songs and let Here Come The Mummies seriously “funk” you up.  Read on!

Thursday, June 14, 2012—Our “Terrifying Funk From Beyond the Grave”

It always seems like the terrifying stresses of our lives before a trip steadily pile up and reach their peak only days or even hours before time to actually leave.  So it was with this one.  In those days beforehand, we were, quite frankly…

“Running Hot”—The Thornberries Crack Skulls with Life

Yes, we would both “overheat” with our obligations for this week.  On Monday, Jennifer had to do a teaching demonstration as part of the application process for another one-year job with her current college campus employer.  She found it a surreal experience, performing as she was for colleagues who already knew and respected her.

I faced my own demons that following Wednesday, getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to give myself plenty of time to get to campus for the Comprehensive graduate examination for which I’d studied the previous six weeks.  Well, as HCTM observe, “Ra Ra, Ra, when all is said and done, we’re not the first to be here. There’s nothin’ new underneath the sun.”  That includes the essential nature of life as a wellspring of suffering.  In context, when I stopped early in my trip at a Speedway station for fuel, it only seemed natural when another customer pointed out to me that my car’s engine was smoking.  The damn thing had blown a heater hose.  **Groan!!**   We had planned to get on the road early that next Thursday morning, but now we had to wait on my car repairs.  Oh, well, we figured.  It’s only a six hour trip, so how much damage could it do for our leisurely car trip?

Doh!!  If only we had known….

We thought we’d never tire, that nothing was gonna stop us, not…

Hurricanes, Floods and Fire

We packed Jennifer’s car, Tinky, with all necessary supplies, and headed out of the state.  The first two hours of the trip were relatively smooth.  Oh, sure, we knew our first Interstate was eventually going to be blocked, but we were prepared by advanced news reports online to address that.  Apparently, a rock slide had fallen over it.  So we had planned a detour route around it, and figured smugly that the trip would be smooth sailing thereafter.

[Sigh].  If only we had known….

Apparently, once we entered the state of Tennessee, we must have stumbled into a Roach Motel superimposed over the highway system.  We checked in, but we sure as hell couldn’t check out.  The state became an agrarian Alcatraz.  It started when we hit a slowdown in traffic on 25E and were routed around some unseen snarl, driving Gypsy (our GPS unit) nuts.  Then, we got to I-40 near the North Carolina border. And stopped. Yep, every car gridlocked against the bumper of the car in front of it, like some sort of arthritic Amtrak train.  We’d inch forward a few hungry feet, then sit and listen to the egg salad in our cooler spoiling.  A couple of cars would shift, and then it was back to feeling the water in our bodies evaporate.  At last, we spotted an exit off this ridiculous FUBAR, and on impulse, we took it.  Perhaps, we surmised, we could simply take a back road or two, and maybe pick the interstate back up at a point beyond whatever the hell was clogging it up like so much bowel impaction. 

Thus began a fight against all the very forces of the universe set to thwart our progress.  It literally was like facing wind, water and flame.  Every road we took seemed to dead-end.  We once had to take a detour of our detour.  Each time, at least twenty miles of snaky-ass roadway, and forty-five minutes, got added to the trip.   We watched our planned evening on arrival get sucked into a more and more shriveled, anemic shape.  It was like a timewarp, this state, like we would never find a way out of it.  And this was a scary region of it too.  The settlements seemed like places Mad Max would hide out, with names like The Slab Café (really, “Slab?”  How does any food offering become more appetizing with that word in it?)
At long last, we finally cleared the Tennessee border and renewed our faith that other states in the Union actually continue to exist.  Even still, after endless reroutes and clogs, we had to ask ourselves…

Do You Believe in Things You Cannot See?

…Like, for example, in the existence of Spartanburg?  With the temporal dislocation and the spatial delays, our destination had begun to seem like Shell Beach in the movie Dark City (1998).  For those of you who haven’t seen the film, hero John Murdock keeps trying to take subways and buses out of his home city to a place called Shell Beach, only to be defeated at every turn by some sort of “convenient” mishap, technological SNAFU or misdirection.  He learns ultimately that the city is really a construct in space, a metaphorical snow globe in which no world exists beyond its borders.  There is no Shell Beach.

Finally, finally, FINALLY, long after we’d stopped taking our superstitions seriously, we found Shell Beach—er, Spartanburg.  Of course, a little south of Asheville, North Carolina on I-26, we hit yet another slow-down, and lost forty five more minutes creaking and rotting our way through it.  By the time we saw the Spartanburg city limit, we were only four hours later than we had planned.  Arrrg!!  By this point, we were starving, as our original intent had been to get a nice meal at one of the restaurants in the Marriot hotel where we intended to stay.  But now most of those places were probably going to be closed.  We hoped instead to find a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel and grab something to take up to the room.  We were sick and tired of traffic, people breaking the speed limit law when it was actually possible to drive on the interstate, and the endless recursive looping around the highway system.  To avoid the public would be divine.

But it was not to be.

No, apparently, the only part of the route through Spartanburg to the Marriot without any restaurants was the area within a mile radius of the Marriot itself.  **Sigh**  This time, we refused to be denied.  Jennifer turned us around and we left the hotel area, seeking a Jimmy John’s restaurant we’d passed on the way in.  The place was nigh deserted this late, and the employees had the Backstreet Boys blasting so loud over the intercom system that we could barely hear ourselves salivating for the sandwiches on display…and we didn’t care at all.  The girl making the sandwiches had about as much personality as the loaf of bread she used to put our fare together, but even still, we almost cried to see delicious, Italian subs ready for our jaw-slamming mastication.Returning to the hotel, we were nearly unstrung yet again when the attractive young Jailbait Marriot hotel attendant got us registered with no hitches, and she even told us that when we eventually went upstairs and wanted to apply for wifi service, there would be no charge.  She escorted us to the elevator, bid us goodnight, and we were on our own.  We were tired and worn to stubs.  Making one more trip to the parking garage to get the rest of our stuff, we threw ourselves into those sandwiches realizing that our long impatience to arrive would be rewarded. We looked at them lovingly and said, “Damn, you really are so luscious!”

Friday, June 15, 2012—Life in the “Boom Boom” Room

We slept ridiculously late the next day, determined to make up for some of the lost relaxation our trip through the Highway to Hell had forced on us (whoops, sorry to put a bit of AC/DC in there!)  Overall, though, this day would generally compensate us for so much suffering.  The Traveling Thornberries were finally going to take on Spartanburg; we were “larger than life and twice as appealing!”

Almost.

I finished washing my hair in the restroom, came out and to find Jennifer covered in coffee grounds and evidencing a tourniquet around the steaming stump of what had been her right hand.

Luke Skywalker's memorable loss of his hand to a lightsaber slash from Darth Vader best captures Jennifer's pain and suffering from the Hot Side of the Grounds.

Why?  It goes back to Diabolus ex machina; the Devil in the machine.  We had brought our own coffee, figuring we might save some money on Starbucks purchases.  So what if, as we found, the room’s coffee machine wasn’t quite up to the task?  No problem!  I had my own coffee maker I’d purchased for just such an emergency…I have a travel job, after all, and keeping redundant equipment is a sure safeguard against inconvenience.  All we needed was to get it from my car…

Oh.

Damn.

That’s right, my car was in the shop.  And guess what, we’d forgotten to get the coffee maker out of it before we left.  **Arrrg!!**  Even though Jennifer had tried so hard to force the dumpy little maker in the room to accommodate our own delicious coffee grounds, it wasn’t up to the task.  Within minutes of her starting it up, the stupid thing burbled and churgled, then blew a wad of superheated sludge all over her.  She was quite happy about that when I came out.  **Sigh**

Still, that was the only real shadow on this particular day.  To get it started, though, we wanted to return to what we had planned for the previous night, before the Paradoxical Parkways had conspired to rob us that irreplaceable time.  And that was a chance to…

Splurge!!

“…By the hour!”

Yes, we wanted a couple of nice meals, and had packed everything else on the cheap to make financial room for such indulgences.  At risk of boring our readers with detailed verbal descriptions of us chewing, we’ll limit the talk here to saying that for lunch, we went to a hotel establishment called Sparks. 

For dinner, we went another direction in the hotel to a classy place called Mesh.  There, we had a sexually satisfying steak, medium-rare for Jennifer, and cooked to completion for moi.  I looked at Jennifer’s large slab of cow meat and asked her, “Tell me baby, U gonna eat alla that?”
Alongside this caro boris (that’s Latin for “flesh of the cow”), we treated ourselves to a few martinis.  I learned I liked these elegant ladies “a little dirty.”  Basically, that means that in addition to a chilled vodka and light Vermouth combo, I liked the taste from a bit of olive brine added to the mix.  Jennifer didn’t. 

We otherwise just enjoyed the relaxing facilities of our “Boom Boom Room,” until it was time for a …

Welcome to our Everlasting Party

At long last, tummies full and sensibilities only slightly buzzy, we were ready for the show!  We had deliberately settled on this hotel because it was within walking distance of the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium, where the concert was to be shown.  We only had to hang around outside for a few minutes before the doors opened, and inside we went!

HCTM tend to play small, understated venues, but we were nonetheless surprised to find ourselves in what was essentially a basement.  I was proudly wearing a new set of Bushnell binoculars around my neck, in anticipation of our usual luck, which would probably involve our being folded up and crammed into seats so far away from the action that we’d think we were watching Here Come the Moths instead of those eight Mummies. 
 But in fact, we discovered the room boasted a small stage and plenty of seating.  Since we were so early, we grabbed a seat up front for one of the better vantage points! We were the early birds catching “The Worm!”

Another observation we made was the range of ages here.  Unlike most classic rock concerts, where we expect an overwhelming majority of Baby Boomers, or more contemporary bands, where we might think the bulk of the audience would be in their twenties, this one had pretty much every adult age represented (we suspect HCTM would be a bit risqué for children).  There was even the usual slew of groupies, albeit those of a more lumpy, dumpy and dimply variety than at most venues.  A few of them stood right in the way before the stage, naturally.  But we could overlook such things, since everyone was there to have a good time.  Where a few of them really started to bug us, however, was in their displays of PDA.  Apparently, some people take the anonymity of a concert as a license to engage in acts of virtual public fornication.  Two of our characters here, both women just for the mental image, were eventually gyrating atop each other and swallowing one another’s tongues all through the show.  Alright, ladies, HCTM makes all the girls hot, but you should really get a room, huh?

 After the opening band made their gracious exit, it was time for HCTM….

The aura of expectation was palpable, a thrumming energy that vibrated through the room like sexual tension.  Here at last was the moment for which we’d been willing to do battle with the entire Tennessee highway system, and all the inexorable grinding of the forward momentum made manifest in Father Time himself.

And then suddenly, in a hail of marching band drums, there they were, the true Terrifying Funk From Beyond the Grave.  Here Come The Mummies entered the scene from the back of the room, carrying bigass drums and hammering them as they walked through the crowd to the stage.  Immediately, everyone left their seats and moved up to the floor right before said stage.  I was hesitant to leave our choicy spot, but Jennifer pointed out that everyone else in the building was going to do so, and if we didn’t move, we’d be left unable to see anyway.  So reluctantly I joined her.  They started the act with a classic Mummy moan, which prefaced their hit, “Believe (In Things You Cannot See).”  Hell, why am I describing it!?  Here, take a look at a chunk of the video for yourself:


Yeah, yeah, the camera on my iPod Touch is a bit weeny, making the venue look overly constricted, the stage lights washed out and the sound tinny.  But you can at least get the idea that everyone was having a good time, right?  Jennifer and I had neither one been to a concert since Barenaked Ladies did a performance in our home city way back in 2004.  Now that we were far from home and amidst a crowd of people who shared our interest in this esoteric, energetic ensemble of Egyptian entertainers, we felt free to groove to the music and let our idiosyncratic Freak Flags fly.  Let’s watch HCTM teach how to do that, shall we?


Since HCTM keep their identities concealed, none of them really talk.  They sing, sure, and they sing damn well.  But they don’t risk giving audible biometric cues as to who they really are.  As we would eventually see, in face-to-face encounters, they grunt in true ancient mummy fashion.  To free them from the risks of speech, they have a “front man,” who does all the crowd-rousing and engagement.  His name is Java Mummy (pronounced Jay-Vah, not Jah-Vah, like the coffee).  A true party mummy, rabble-rouser and self-proclaimed “Sexual Stuntman,” Java makes sure everyone gets into the action happening on stage.  He does so with such acts as teaching the audience how to do the Fenk Shui dance, fluttering his talented tongue in a way that makes all the ladies weak in the knees with where their imaginations take them, or doing his pelvic gyrations with HCTM’s patented “Cowbelt.”  But again, there’s no way to capture Java with words.  You have to behold this “Libido Knievel” with your own eyes:
Alright, we can’t recapitulate the entire show, but suffice it to say we had a helluva time.  Other than the two ladies publicly licking on each other throughout the performance, we only had a couple of other minor irritants.

Jennifer had an incident in which some dumbass figured it was a good idea to spend $5 on beer just so he could throw it on her and other members of the crowd.  In this time of economic recession, we only wish we had that kind of money to waste.  Yeah, thanks for that experience, Numbnuts.

On my end, I had some big ox who thought he could keep leaving his spot at the front near the stage to buy beer, then hog his way back through everyone and take his original position.  Most folks at a concert understand that once you leave a cherished piece of real estate, the crowd is going to surge forward and close that gap.  So you have to choose: do you want a position or would you rather drink?  But this lummox went past me so many times, I was ready to tell him that he should have just stayed the hell at home with a twelve-pack and watched HTCM on YouTube.  Eventually, I stopped giving ground for him.  I just planted both feet wide apart  and refused to budge when he tried to shoulder past me.

But let us leave this section by reiterating that the concert was awesome!  HCTM went strong for almost two full hours.  No breaks.  They jumped around, whaled on their guitars, blasted out supersonic excellence on their brass instrumentation, and in general, saved nothing for later.  They gave their all.  We couldn’t shake the spell they put us under; they must be one of the Wonders of the World!

And it didn’t stop there.

After HCTM left the stage, the group members started to mingle with the audience in an up-close and personal way we’d never observed in performing musicians before.  I managed to bang knuckles with one member who we suspect was Eddie Mummy, the drummer.  As a bonus, we got Jennifer’s picture with him, and he was more than gracious about posing with her.  So from the Traveling Thornberries to Here Come the Mummies, thanks guys!  You put on a helluva show and we’re so unbelievably grateful to you for your energy and sacrifices; so grateful that…well, we wrote this story about you!

Saturday, June 16, 2012—Bags of Bones

We checked out the next morning, ears still ringing from the funk-ass concert of the night before.  This time, we held out no hopes for a smooth ride home, and dammit, we were right.  Granted, I took the first leg of the drive out of Spartanburg and it unfolded with minimal hassle.  Then Jennifer took over, and we got about fifteen minutes out on the I-40 before it was Parking Lot City all over again.Inch by inch, row by row, we creeped and crawled so damn slow…and finally back up to normal roadway speed after only an hour.  We actually managed to listen to two Great Courses lectures back-to-back off my iPod before we broke through the morass.  Although we loved the concert, this trip scarred us enough that we’re really hesitant to take another road trip any time soon.  By the time we got home, even with our love, we were nothing but a bag o’bones.

Hey, HCTM…any thoughts of performing in our home state again soon!?

Really guys…you were great.  We’d love to see your mummy-wrapped asses again!

Thanks for reading!

Finis