King Size & The Chalice of Rock
King Size
A Tip From Stark to Save Money BEFORE You Call
What If The Police Destroy Your Car?
The Backyard is Now Open at 11am
Tomorrow: Magnolia Honey
King Size
There was a time when knowing the song was part of the fun.
Before Shazam. Before Spotify told you what was playing. Before you could type four mangled lyrics into Google and have the answer before the second chorus.
Somebody played a riff and you either knew it or you didn’t.
King Size apparently intends to preserve this ancient human skill.
They have a chalice.
Not just any chalice.
The Chalice of Rock.
I feel compelled to capitalize that because that’s roughly how the name is delivered. There’s a little voice modulation involved, somewhere in the neighborhood of an old MTV announcer or late-night FM radio DJ.
The game is simple. Cam gives you a bass riff. Name the song and you get to choose a sticker from the Chalice of Rock.
It is magnificently low-tech.
It also might explain King Size better than anything I’ve written about them.
These guys love songs.
Not a genre. Songs.
That’s how you end up with a King Size set wandering comfortably through decades and musical neighborhoods that probably shouldn’t share a property line.
Tears for Fears can live next to Foo Fighters. Billy Joel can bump into Alice in Chains. The Beatles, Tom Petty, Green Day, Lit and John Denver can all get shoved into the same evening without anybody bothering to ask what format the radio station is supposed to be.
And if you’ve seen King Size before, none of that is particularly surprising.
Ruskin, Cam and Brannon have been doing this long enough that the surprise isn’t what they can play. It’s what they’ll decide to play next.
That’s where the Chalice makes so much sense.
Cam plays a bass line. No lyrics. No guitar giving the game away. Just enough of a song to send a few hundred brains digging through whatever strange filing system we use to store decades of music.
Somebody gets it.
They get a sticker.
Everybody else gets the slightly maddening experience of realizing they absolutely knew that song three seconds after somebody else said it.
Then the game ends and King Size gets back to doing essentially the same thing on a much larger scale.
They take songs everybody knows and don’t necessarily leave them exactly where they found them.
Sometimes it’s a harmonic Ruskin sneaks into a Green Day song where you didn’t expect one. Sometimes Cam wanders into a bass line the original songwriter never put there. They aren’t reinventing familiar songs beyond recognition. They’re doing something considerably more fun.
They know them well enough to play with them.
And every now and then, one of them apparently decides to remind everybody just how well.
At some point Thursday night, Cam went off.
Not in the metaphorical sense. He stayed right there beside Brannon. But what had been a bass line turned into something considerably more ambitious. His hand started moving around the neck in a way that made me wonder if I was watching him sweep on a bass.
Whatever exactly he was doing, it was a fairly impressive amount of showing off from a guy who doesn’t seem particularly interested in showing off.
Then it ended.
Cam made a few little scat noises into the microphone.
“That’s jazz.”
And that was apparently all the explanation we were getting.
It was funny, but it also exposed something that's easy to miss about King Size.
There are three seriously experienced musicians on that stage, and very little of the show is organized around proving it.
They could.
Instead, most of that ability gets tucked inside the songs. A different bass run here. A harmonic there. A fill that wasn’t on the record. Little decisions that might pass completely unnoticed if you aren’t listening for them.
If you are, though, there are Easter eggs everywhere.
And maybe that’s why the genre-hopping works.
King Size doesn’t treat the songs like museum pieces that have to be reproduced exactly as they were recorded. But they don’t use them merely as scaffolding for three musicians to demonstrate how clever they are, either.
They seem to have landed somewhere better in the middle.
Play the song people came to hear.
Then have some fun with it.
Some of Thursday night was still under construction.
King Size had a 90s class reunion coming up, which meant working a few new songs into the machinery. One of them was Hootie & the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand.”
There are probably worse places to test a song than in front of a few hundred people on a Thursday night in the Alley, especially when the song comes with instructions. They needed some help from the crowd on the vocal parts, so Ruskin recruited everybody into the rehearsal.
And people sang.
A lot of people, actually, which got me thinking about something I couldn't quite put my finger on earlier in the night.
There is something old school about King Size, but I don't mean classic rock old school. It's more like disc jockey in the 80s or MTV. The goofy voice they use to announce the Chalice of Rock certainly helps, but there's something familiar about the whole way the show moves from one completely unrelated song to another.
For a lot of the people standing in the Alley, that was how we learned music.
You didn't have to be a Billy Joel person to know Billy Joel. You didn't have to go looking for Tears for Fears. MTV might give you Tom Petty, then something you hated, then something you'd never heard before, and the radio was doing the same thing in the car. By the time Alice in Chains, Hootie, Green Day and Foo Fighters came along, they just got piled onto everything that was already in there.
We had preferences, obviously. We made mixtapes and bought albums. But we also shared a lot of music simply because somebody else controlled the dial.
That's mostly gone now. We have access to essentially everything ever recorded, but we also have the ability to spend all day listening to exactly what we already like. My algorithm doesn't have to resemble yours at all.
Maybe that's the little bit of comfort I was picking up from King Size.
Their set feels less like somebody's playlist and more like somebody turned the radio on.
You don't know what's coming next, but there's a pretty good chance you know it.
The Alley
A Tip From Stark to Save You Money BEFORE You Call!
Your toilet can leak without making a sound.
A worn or poorly seated flapper can let water continuously slip from the tank into the bowl without the toilet ever doing the familiar running-toilet thing.
Even a small leak can waste hundreds of gallons of water a month. Fortunately, there’s a ridiculously cheap diagnostic tool:
Food coloring.
Put a few drops in the toilet tank without flushing. Wait about ten minutes. If color appears in the bowl, water is getting past the seal.
That’s money quietly going down the drain.
Literally, for once.
A flapper may be a simple fix. If the problem isn’t obvious, or the water bill suddenly looks like you’ve installed a municipal splash pad, Stark Plumbing is the person to call.
(803) 866 - LEAK
The Bud Light Stage
Who Pays When the Police Destroy Your Car?
If the police accidentally destroy your car while chasing someone else, who pays for it?
You’d think that one would have a pretty obvious answer.
Apparently not.
A Houston college student recently found her car riddled with bullets after police opened fire during a standoff. She wasn’t involved. Her car wasn’t involved. According to reporting by the Houston Chronicle, she wasn’t even there when it happened.
The city’s position?
It doesn’t owe her for the car.
The dispute gets into a strange corner of the law called governmental immunity, which can protect cities and other government entities from liability in circumstances where an ordinary person or business could be responsible. Lawyers quoted in the report argue that a Texas Supreme Court precedent may nevertheless require compensation when the government intentionally destroys private property for a public purpose.
So imagine walking back to your car after dinner and discovering that the police have put a few dozen new ventilation holes in it.
You did nothing wrong.
They know you did nothing wrong.
And the question of who buys you another car can still become a legal argument.
The details and the law would be different here in South Carolina, but the larger lesson travels pretty well:
“They obviously owe me” and “the law says they owe me” aren't always the same thing.
That's generally where having a lawyer becomes useful.
BMG Law.
Apparently We Have Lunch Five Days a Week Now
Thursday: Magnolia Honey
A new experience for me and for Amp, Magnolia Honey makes their debut this week, but you may remember Johnathan and Chad from Stella Blue earlier this year. Here's a sneak peek, but let's see what it's all about together! See you out there.
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