SATURDAY, MARCH 25 2017: South Sound events + craft beer …
Broadway Center + Peaks and Pints = Starburst
The Grand Cinema + Parkway Tavern = complex
BOP
Proving that rock ‘n’ roll can still thoroughly thrive without the guitar, Davina and The Vagabonds lay it down with a vintage instrumentation — piano, horns, bass, and drums —and hi-tone retro ambition. It boogies and woogies as if spilling out of Preservation Hall, or more like the parlor music heard in New Orleans brothels of yore. At the front of the band, parked behind the piano, is Davina Sowers, a songstress that comes across like a mix of Rosie the Riveter and a pin-up queen painted on a B-29. But Sowers’ likeness doesn’t adorn nose cones, nor is she building them for the war effort; she’s knocking ’em dead, Like she’ll do at 7:30 p.m. in the Theatre on the Square in downtown Tacoma, with her band’s jazzy jump and swing.
PREFUNK: Soon it’ll be easier to bring Ecliptic Brewing on your stargazing treks into the mountains. Pack in (and pack out) cans of Starburst IPA and a seasonal rotating can Quasar Pale. Ecliptic badass rep Libby will hang at Peaks and Pints beginning at 4 p.m. tasting out the cans and handing out swag. We’ll also tap the juicy Starburst IPA and (bah, bah, bah-bum, ba, bum-bum, da, bum) Star Destroyer Imperial Dark Lager, a schwarzbier brewed with fellow Portland brewery Gigantic Brewing Co. Just to make space the place, we also offer a five-beer flight of Ecliptic.
WEIRD
David Lynch is a great magician, with a painterly vision, an oddly comic storytelling style and a keen awareness of the absurd, not to mention the downright silly. Some of the laughs come easily — reactions to the stilted, minimal dialogue, the broadly played gangsters (like Robert Loggia’s craggy Mr. Eddy), the dopey cops and the gloom-bringing homunculus played by Robert Blake as a menacing combo of Yoda and Dieter. And then there are the less comfortable moments: the morphing headwound victims and bloody deaths by coffee table don’t seem funny at first, but like a screwball comedy slowed from 78 rpm to 16 rpm, they’ll get you laughing — eventually. We speak, of course, of Lynch’s Lost Highway, which screen at 11 p.m. at The Grand Cinema as part of the Tacoma film house’s Weird Elephant series featuring trivia and craft beer.
PREFUNK: The barleywine: Sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, often intense and always alcoholic. Despite its name, a barleywine is very much a beer, though its invention did stem from the rivalry between beer and wine. In 18th century England, it was actually safer to drink beer and wine than water, which sounds pretty cool now, but must have been a real be-otch at the time. Wine was considered the “more respectable” beverage, so brewers set out to make a beer with comparable alcohol content — barleywine. The term was coined by Bass in 1903 to describe its Bass No. 1 Ale and may have more patriotic origins, since the English upper classes wanted a beverage to replace French wine during England’s many wars with France. Both English and American versions of the barleywine exist, and this difference is this: while English barleywines tend to be mellower and balanced between malt and hops flavors, American interpretations are usually hopped out of control and are far more bitter. Typical Americans. Anyway, you’ll find both versions, and many of them, at the Parkway Tavern’s annual Barley Wine Festival from noon to midnight.
