Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas Play Last Concert of the "Twilight in the Park" Season August 28

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, August 28 I went to the last “Twilight in the Park” concert of the 2025 series to see and hear a band called the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas. At least that’s their name for themselves; for some reason the organizers of Twilight in the Park thought that was obscene and demanded that the band rename itself Back Pocket Whiskey Fellas, even though drummer Ric Lee’s bass drum contained not only the band’s true name but a logo featuring a drawing of a woman’s tightly clad blue-jeaned ass with a whiskey flask stuck in her back pocket. The band members themselves stumbled over the name at times, as if they had a hard time remembering the censored version they were supposed to use instead of their real one. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to go – the last time I’d seen them I’d been put off by the sexism of their logo, and also there was another event last night (a reception at the OBR gallery, or whatever they are, on El Cajon Boulevard between Texas and Arizona) I wanted to attend. But after I’d seen the Marcia Forman Band’s Twilight in the Park concert and enjoyed not only her playing but that of her husband, violinist Floyd Fronius, whom she announced played with the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas, I decided I wanted to hear them again. It was a good thing I did, because it was one of the most enjoyable and fun concerts of the Twilight in the Park season. As I arrived they were starting a sound check, two minutes of the Pogues song “Streams of Whiskey” which they later used, at full length, as their encore. There was the usual tiresome jabber from the organizers, including promoting the Starlight Bowl restoration, before the concert formally got underway with a song called “Never Make It Home” (originally recorded by a neo-bluegrass band called Split Lip Rayfield) and an original called “Guyanese Gold.” Their next song was called “P’s and Q’s” about slang terms used in brewing beer, and afterwards they played a cover of one of my all-time favorite songs, “In a Big Country” by Big Country. I’ll never forget the rush of energy I felt when I first heard this song in 1983, and though the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas didn’t have access to the e-bow (a device that can be used to make an electric guitar sound like a violin), they did a quite good version of it that came within hailing distance of the incandescent original.

Then they did another original called “Ooh La La” – though those sounds don’t occur in the lyric and what does is the catch phrase, “Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now,” so it’s yet another song lamenting the passage of time and wishing you’d known in your youth what you know now so you could have had a lot more fun then. The next song on their agenda was “Rocky Top,” a good faux-bluegrass number written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant in 1967, a decade after they’d established their reputation by writing most of the Everly Brothers’ hits, and recorded by the Osborne Brothers in 1967 and Lynn Anderson in 1970. It’s a lament of an adult city dweller looking back on his childhood in rural Tennessee. According to Wikipedia, it’s one of Tennessee’s 11 official state songs. Then came an original by the band’s mandolin player, Ethan Van Thillo (also executive director of the Media Arts Center in San Diego and someone my husband Charles and I have seen a lot of over the years, not only at Media Arts Center events but playing mandolin in a pickup band at one of the Adams Avenue street festivals), called “Speedway Racer.” It seems that one of the band’s seven members, Jack Laux, went to Britain to race motorcycles, and Van Thillo wrote a song to honor him. Then the band did a cover of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” (the lead singer, bassist Stive Hoshko, didn’t have the almost unearthly power of Morrison but he still did a pretty good job) and, after an original song called “Bury Me in Whiskey,” they did another 1960’s cover, “Mendocino” by Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet. I was never that big a fan of that group, but I liked “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino.” They followed that with another original which appeared to be called “The Turd” – at least that’s what I think the title they announced was, though it could have been “The Tongue.” They closed with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” and did the full “Streams of Whiskey” as their encore. Despite the confusion over their name, the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas are a quite good band, alternating originals and covers and playing a wide range of music. They bill themselves as an alt-country “Americana” band but their song list includes some quite good rock covers as well, and aside from “The Turd” they kept their stage act within the bounds of good taste and it was overall a fun evening.