Editor’s Note: As written by a band member, this story may be biased, but we don’t care.
If you want to see how 60-year-old men can still rupture people after forty fricken years, don’t miss Government Cheese at 3rd & Lindsley Saturday, September 27. Our guitars still growl, our drums still thunder, and Mammaw still drives the bus.
If you want to know chapter & verse of the whole sordid, sodden journey of Government Cheese, buy my book Cheese Chronicles. (Please!) You can get it on Amazon and at many reputable used-book stores. In the meantime, however, I’ll give you the broad strokes.
We were students at Western Kentucky University up in Bowling Green and played our first gig, a frat party, in January of 1985. We first played Nashville the following November. We were one of the last bands to play Cantrell’s, where we had seen so many artists who were gods to us.
From 1985 to 1992, we played full-time — inspired by the hard-charging work ethic of R.E.M. and Jason & The (Nashville) Scorchers. If there was a garbage can with a light bulb in it anywhere within 600 miles of home, we played there. There are probably still filthy restrooms out there with “Government Cheese” scrawled with a Sharpie on the tile wall.
Exhausted, we hung it up in the spring of ’92. The beer, the Popov, the women, the weed, the mousse, the vomit, the gasoline, the trucker speed, the Wendy’s Frosties, the fleabag motels with hookers and crack two doors down … it’ll wear down the strongest 8-point buck.
In the fall of ’94, we were asked to play a benefit here in town at the Ace of Clubs. I forget what the cause was, but somebody in charge specifically wanted us. After some hemming and hawing, we said yes.
To warm up, we thought, what the heck, let’s get a gig in Bowling Green. No one will show up, and it’ll be depressing, but it’ll be a working rehearsal if nothing else. It was at some dive north of the tracks across from the college, and as late as soundcheck, we were steeling ourselves to play for a dozen people, if that many.
It sold out. It more than sold out! You couldn’t get another person in there with a battering ram. Fire code was merely a suggestion. You know what a Caribbean island looks like after a hurricane, with all the trees knocked over and houses flattened? That’s what that place looked like after the show. I’ve never seen so many empty longneck bottles in my life. We almost cried. We had no idea so many people cared.
Since then, there have been so many reunions that they aren’t really reunions anymore. Somebody’s sick without insurance? Call the Cheese! An offer to play New Year’s Eve for stupid money? We’ll be there! I wrote a book; we toured the book. We cut a single. We cut an album. We played. We cut another album. Played again. We worked in the daytime and raised our kids, and once or twice or three times a year, we surfaced like a majestic yellow orca spewing holy vapor on the faithful.
And now, forty years since that first gig, we’re still alive. There’s a big exhibit on Bowling Green music at the Kentucky Museum on Western’s campus — displays of Sam Bush memorabilia, Bill Monroe’s fiddle, Kentucky Headhunters guitars — and amongst it all, a memorial to Government Cheese. Who’d ever thunk? There we are, behind glass, the band who gave you “Fish Stick Day” and “Camping on Acid.”
So, get your tickets now before they’re gone. Be a part of the fun. Nobody ever leaves a Government Cheese show in a bad mood. And if you feel like you can’t risk breaking a hip in the crowd up front, fear not. You’re still cool. We’re still here. Longevity is very, very sexy. And when Mammaw drives the bus, we go everywhere.
