SB

Work is a punch in the face I get to endure five days a week that I’m hoping to correct eventually, but for now, I’m just glad it lets me live it up with Laura before, after, and on the weekends. (Pictures by Laura Barney)

March 13, 2010 found us heading down to Myrtle Beach, SC for a Ben Folds concert. Funds were a little short compared to the previous weekend which we had been planning for 3 months, but it wasn’t enough to make us forget our fundamental rule, “Live life.” Initially, Myrtle Beach was scheduled for thunderstorms, but I called in a favor with Mother Nature and she agreed to brighten up the skies for us since it turns out she’s also big fan of Ben Folds.

Myrtle Beach is a very bearable 1 hour drive from our home in Wilmington, so we left that morning around 9-ish, entrusting our continually awesome friend Brandy to check in on the dogs for us so we wouldn’t have to come home to a feces covered apartment. Did I mention how awesome Brandy is?

Our 9AM departure allowed us to arrive around 10AM, just in time for breakfast at Dino’s House of Pancakes, the third highest rated breakfast joint in town according to Urban Spoon. Laura got a sweet special of two pancakes, two scrambled eggs with cheese, hash browns and four pieces of bacon (two of which she was kind enough to give to me, knowing my obsession with the stuff) for a measly $5.25. I indulged in a half order of french toast (my favorite when it comes to sweet breakfast food), only two pieces bacon, and two eggs over easy with Texas Pete that ran me $5.50 because apparently french toast is for rich people. Maybe they’re under the impression people will think it’s literally imported from France because last time I checked it costs about as much to make as pancakes, yet costs more and comes with half the sides.

Altogether it was a relatively cheap breakfast and it was quite tasty even though the bacon was a little on the chewy side. Next time we come to Myrtle Beach, we’ll see what other places are around here (there are roughly 1,300 breakfast joints on this beachside strip), but we left perfectly content with what we had paid for with a total bill of $14 after drinks (OJ for me, coffee for Laura).

We finished eating by 11 and still had half a day to kill before the show started so we decided to backtrack to a flea market we had passed on the way into town. I’m not sure what it is about flea markets, but I’m a huge fan. Maybe it’s the fact that I absolutely cannot FATHOM how any of these places get enough business to pay whatever the market’s rental fee is, yet somehow they obviously do. The idea that people will run a store selling any mixture of random things they feel like and are willing spend the prime hours of every weekend attending to it blows my mind. It’s also fun to judge flea market quality based on how bizarre the combinations can be, and I feel safe to say the Weather Vanes and Talking Parrots store of North Myrtle Beach might have the blue ribbon of randomness on lockdown.

I bought a Stephen King short story compilation book for three bucks and Laura grabbed some near-uselessly tiny tupperware containers just because she thought they were cute and were four for a dollar. By noon we decided to head back to the strip to hit up one of the many putt-putt courses we had passed, the clear winner of which was obviously Dinosaur Adventure Golf because dinosaurs are awesome and I am a perpetual eight year old. This was literally as exciting for me as going to a zoo with real animals.

Dinosaur Adventure golf is broken up into two courses and it only costs $9.00 a person to do both so obviously that’s what we were going to do. Things started out simply enough with actual putt-putting, but things quickly escalated into dangerous territory with the realization we were surrounded by giant monsters – all of which I needed to show my dominance over.

My first victim, the triceratops, was easily slain. Considering he’s basically a triple-rhinoceros, it was a little surprising how little effort it took to bring him into submission, but maybe I’m just underestimating how insanely intimidating I am to stupid vegetarian dinosaurs. They must have heard how much I love meat.

I’m not one for baby-steps, so I decided to test my intimidation tactics more fully by immediately jumping to the King of Dinosaurs. The key to defeating a Tyrannosaur is taking advantage of its weaknesses, so I challenged him to a game of rock, paper, scissors and just threw “rock” every single time. The two-fingered bastard never knew what hit him.

The next dino we came across was the Stegosaurus. Now, while Stego’s should be easy to take out because of their ridiculously small brains, you also have to factor in that they have NO idea where their spike tail is and could very easily impale you completely by accident. The only way to handle this is to plan a surprise attack and just bash their brains in. Thank god I had my putter.

Pterodactyls thinks they’re hot shit because they can fly. The key here is to make yourself seem as big as possible and clip a wing when they swoop in. Once you break one wing they’re like the biggest babies ever and you’re free to kill them as slowly or as quickly as you like. I’m no monster, so I decided to kill it at medium speed, recreating with my golf club a pain level I felt would be the equivalent of  being eaten alive since that seemed like the most honorable way for him to go given the era.

This guy was just kind of chilling on a mountain minding his own business, but I’m always thinking ahead so I was mostly concerned about what would happen if he tripped and fell on us. Death is what would happen. After climbing a mountain to get with striking distance it was kill or be killed. He shouldn’t have been standing there.

Dimetrodon is basically God’s Cretaceous energizer bunny, so the key is to go straight for his battery. Once you break the solar-panel on his back he’s as useless as Helen Keller in a game of Mother May I.

On the Raptor course, things got a little more dangerous. I’ve seen Jurassic Park enough times (roughly 157 times, in fact) to know you don’t mess with these guys. They’re like the gangsters of the Jurassic era, and I just don’t have the Jungle cred I need to fit in.

The allosaurus is basically a smaller version of the T-Rex and since I didn’t feel like emasculating this one with playground games, I decided to try out a little move I learned from Super Mario 64. Step 1: Sneak. Step 2: TAILSLAM.

After a day full of dino-defeating, I finally made a friend. It didn’t who was better or worse; stronger or weaker. What mattered was that I had finally fulfilled my childhood dream of befriending Littlefoot.You can spend all day bludgeoning pterodactyls and stegosaurs, but when you find a true friend you can feel it in your soul.

And that’s something we can all stand to learn. Having learned this important life lesson and ending our double-session of putt-putt at Dinosaur Adventure Golf with moral worthy of The Land Before Time XVII, it was time for lunch.

Fat Jack’s came at the recommendation of my family who had visited Myrtle Beach a couple weeks ago while on vacation. Buffalo wings are one of my top five favorite foods of all time, and this place is on par with the best of the best – Anchor Bar, home of the original.

Since we were on a bit of a budget and still had another meal left to eat, we split the 18-wing, 2-side platter for $22. Fat Jack’s has a variety of sauces, many of which sound unique and delicious, but for our first visit we decided to stick to the three main heat levels of classic buffalo style: medium, hot, and kamikaze; siding it off with cheesesticks and fries.

Medium was among the mildest wings I’ve ever eaten. It has enough flavor to satisfy the weakest of heat-palettes, but Laura and I like things a little spicier. Fortunately, “Hot” is absolutely delicious. The wings here are cooked perfectly regardless of what heat you get, but the hot sauce on the hot wings was the perfect balance of spicy vs. flavor. The next time we go back (and we will be), it’ll be awfully tempting to get more of these, but we might have to hold off on that until we’ve had a chance to try everything else.

The third wing style was called “kamikaze” which didn’t seem too terrible at first bite, but hits you much harder once you let it settle. By the second and third wings of this, I was wiping off some of the sauce with a napkin before eating and Laura was drowning it in ranch. It’s still great, but there’s no way I would need more than three of these. The sides were nothing to write home about, but they easily served their sole purpose as spice-deterrents for the kamikaze wings. All in all, I loved this place and look forward to hitting it up again the next time we drive down.

Our last stop of the day was the one we had been looking forward to for the past few weeks. The House of Blues in Myrtle Beach is a moderately sized venue, with open floor “seating” as well as some actual seating up in the balcony. We had done the “Break the Barricade” pre-show buffet of hot dogs and hamburgers so we could get in a little bit early for the first-come, first-serve seating.

If you think the artist is worth ten bucks a person to get in early, this is highly recommended as we were able to get front-row positions ten feet away from the main act, but the food itself is not something you’re going to want to eat as your main dinner. Fortunately, we had finished our wings just a couple hours earlier so we weren’t too hungry anyway, but the burgers were cheese-less on rock-hard buns, and the hot dogs weren’t a whole lot better. The mac and cheese was good and they at least give you cans of Coke products, but getting in early was the only part about this deal that really made it worth the money.

The opening act was Zach Williams (hear him here), whom neither of us had ever heard. If you’ve seen the indie musical Once, he’s basically an American version of Glen Hansard, with a hint of Bob Dylan depending on the song. The entire concert was acoustic – not a drum set to even be seen. Zach had a keyboardist play some chords behind him, but generally the performance sounded raw, which greatly helped the beautiful simplicity of his style.

It was an odd lead-in to Ben Folds since Williams’ music is a bit of a downer lyrically, but he’s got a great emotional voice and I really wish I could’ve picked up his album after the show. His set was incredibly short as he only got in about five or six songs before his time was up, and some people seemed to think it was cool to just talk during every song he played regardless of how personal it was (he had songs about both his daughter [linked above] and his wife). For what it was, it was an excellent performance and I was glad he played.

Finally, it was time for Mr. Folds to take the stage. And when I say that, I mean ONLY Mr. Folds. The name of the concert was “Ben Folds and a Piano”, and that’s what they meant. No drums, no guitars, no bass – just Ben and whatever he felt like doing. Ben Folds/Ben Folds Five has been among my favorite artists since early high school and ushered me into my love of piano rock that would later continue with bands like Jack’s Mannequin, Something Corporate, Elton John, Billy Joel (I know those sound backwards), Keane, Coldplay, Jon McLaughlin… the list goes on and on, but it all started with Ben Folds for me.

If you haven’t heard anything by him, he has a really goofy sense of humor (One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces), but can write a beautiful ballad just as easily (Landed). Thanks to the goofy half, seeing Ben Folds in concert is like getting a stand-up comedian (or sit-down-at-the-piano comedian in this case) and musician all in one. Between the talking and crowd-wide sing-a-longs, the show never let up.

At one point during the show, some kid named Jason on the front row handed Ben a piece of paper asking him to ask Rebecca if she would go to the prom for him. Not only did Ben read the sheet, thus completing the kid’s simple request, he continued for the next five minutes to write two different songs on the fly asking Rebecca to go to the prom with Jason, eventually working his way into a crowd-sing-a-long where everyone in the building assisted Jason in getting a prom date. It was both hysterical and amazing.

Jason (Rebecca is somewhere in the balcony)

Also, during two different songs throughout the show Ben decided to teach the audience how to harmonize so they could join in better. The first harmony was a four parter that was hilariously complex to watch a thousand people try to sing together. The second was a two parter that was far easier for everyone to manage – easy enough that Folds ended up doing a remix by conducting different sections of the audience with his hands.

Given that it was literally JUST Ben Folds and a piano for an hour and a half, the show carried just as much energy as any I’ve ever been to. He covered the full spectrum of his career, from Ben Folds Five classics to his solo stuff to his unreleased album (which sounds amazing). I would go see him again in a heartbeat.