You know it's been a good summer when it's noon and the conversation starts like this, "I just woke up 10 minutes ago -- We were in Pittsburgh last night with The Allman Brothers and Tom Petty."
Yeah, Bruno and the home-grown long-haired boys of American Minor have been partying like its 1969 this summer criss-crossing the States hitting everything from Bonnaroo (the world's largest festival) at the beginning of the summer to book-ending the Summer season by opening up for the aforementioned rock legends.
Oh yeah, and they've also got to rock up the Sturgis Bike Rally and play the opening night of the Jackson Hole Film Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Come Friday, the Jive Records recording artists -- who have learned well their summer lesson about climbing mountains after midnight -- bring their whiskey-heart-and-hill-stained rock originals to The Huntington Music Hall at the MonkeyBar, 611 4th Ave. for the last area show for a while.
The five-man-band, now based in Champaign, Ill., is going off the road for a little bit to work on the follow-up to its top-shelf, 11-song debut CD on Jive that is stamped with a whole set of Southern rock-rubbed gems such as "Walk On," "Buffalo Creek, "Break," and "All My Time."
Tickets are $10. The 8 p.m. concert also features The Love Coats and Side A Only.
In between the Pittsburgh concert and a Knoxville gig with Bang, Bang Bang, Bruno, the bassist, and lead singer and primary lyricist, Rob McCutcheon, stopped in for some super-sized mugs of joe at the Java Joint, home of the former Calamity Cafe, where the band often played its punked-up pedal steel songs in the early days in Huntington.
Sporting their cleanest black T-shirts (including McCutcheon's PBR tee from playing the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee), both were still a buzz from the summer, which has been whipping up so creamy, chunky and good like an Oreo Blizzard.
Hey, we had to get a Dairy Queen reference in here since the band, which first started playing shows in the area in 2002, got started when guitarist Josh Gragg and drummer Josh Knox landed coveted jobs at the Teays Valley DQ.
The owner let the boys use his barn as a practice space, and McCutcheon, Bruno and guitarist Bud Carroll, who skipped on his Marshall University finals to do his first road gig with the band, soon joined in.
McCutcheon said being at Bonnaroo was like what he imagined the original Woodstock to be.
"It was some of the more critically acclaimed underground groups coming together with the best jam bands and I don't think those two cultures had connected much before," McCutcheon said. "It was a weird marriage in some ways but a reaction to what is going on right now."
Originally, the band, which played Bonnaroo on June 16, was going to hole up at a Motel 6 about 30 miles away in Murfreesboro, but once they got a taste of the fest, they wound up staying out on the farm for the four-day fest where they got to vibe on everyone from Tom Petty and Beck to Elvis Costello and Cypress Hill.
"I think it was one of the best things we have experienced thus far in our career," Bruno said. "We've played some real hard rock festivals where there is 15,000 people and a cop for every 10 people but at Bonnaroo, 80,000 people attended -- not counting bands-- and there was not a cop inside the place. There was occasionally the guy who ate way too much acid and started freaking out, and needed to be strapped down to a stretcher but that was for his own sake, not mine."
Given the current state of affairs, Bruno said Bonnaroo was a pretty unbelievable slice of life.
"To see that many people there just getting along and all there to share the music together and to enjoy the great music that people are making now and to see it go off without any real drama or violence in the world we live in today, you almost think that it could never happen," Bruno said.
Both said they did the festival by feel, not worrying so much about who was there, but just laying down the music as a group that's been living together and traveling for the past four years opening up for everyone from Blues Traveler to Drive-By Truckers.
"I think in situations like that you kind of know what to play, you play the ones you really know how to play well and the ones that people like," Bruno said. "We were having such a great time that honestly we were excited to play, but also just as excited to be finished so you can go see Tom Petty. You can really only make the end result worse by getting nervous or overthinking. You've got to just think that you're good enough by now, and if not, why are you still at it?"
Live, the band has been getting a lot of audience love from the originals from the record, such as "Walk On," and "Buffalo Creek," as well as a new tune they've written called, "Help Yourself."
The magic eight ball says you might hear that one and some more like it on a CD next year since the band will gather up at the home base of Champaign, Ill., and whittle away on some songwriting, a strength of the first record in which they painted true life workingman blues, taking on the coal company greed in "Buffalo Creek," and President Bush's policies as governor and president in "One Last Supper."
"It will be the last one for quite a while so we're hoping everybody can make it out," Bruno said of the Huntington show. "We're going to take our time and we're not going to rush to put out something that we are not happy with. We were pretty particular about what made it on the first record and we don't plan on changing that for the second one."
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