I grew up with country music greats playing in the background. Johnny
Cash, Waylon, Charlie Pride, and many others. Today, I don’t like country
music -- I couldn’t give two shits for what passes as country music on the
radio. But in it’s day, country music was to poor white southerners what
blues music was to poor black southerners -- the music of folks who had
more troubles than joys, whose life was doomed to trailer parks and rusty
cars and drinking too much beer. Doing stupid things that they regret,
about loneliness and striving and everything else that makes people human.

-Eric Lee Green

RESTAURANT

The band Restaurant was born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "pince-nez" and a shared love of all things Wu-Tang. Word around the campfire is that Bobby "State" Penn was conceived behind the walls of a Huntsville, Texas maximum security prison. Shortly after, Bobby's mother, Denise, would escape in a sanitation truck and migrate East toward the Atchafalaya River Basin deep within the swampland of Louisiana.

Legend has it that Denise carved what the Creole people call a "pirot"
out of a dried alligator carcass and rowed it to shore on the banks of Bayou Chene, far from the watchful eyes of the Fox Action News cameras that would eventually be instrumental in bringing her back into captivity. There was young Bobby born and brought up on wolf-milk and Tabasco sauce. A search party sent out from Texas led by none other than Tommy Lee Jones's half-brother, Allan, and a feisty Fox News reporter, Melissa Angelica Anejo Sanchez-Diaz would, only a year later, apprehend Denise in the parking lot of a New Iberia A&P where she had gone to make a diaper run.

Bobby was left in the Bayou to fend for himself. He was discovered by Cajun crawfish trappers in a bald eagle's nest overlooking Sawyer's Cove. He was brought to the home of 90 year-old Alcide Veret where he was taught how to make moonshine and piss in a circle and run under it without getting wet. At the tender age of 15, Bobby would leave the bayou, Alcide, and the pack of wild dogs he called his friends and make his way back to Texas with a traveling carnival called The Family Fun Park.

At 16, Bobby got a job bussing tables ironically in a Cajun eatery in Rangoon, Texas where he impressed the owner with his wide range of knowledge pertaining to roux and Creole spices. Shortly thereafter, Bobby was promoted to head-waiter/sommelier but kept the position only 6 months after which he applied and was accepted to the University of Texas at Austin's Botany Department where he would meet his soon-to-be bandmate, Kevin.

Kevin was quiet and reserved, but with a distinct air of sophistication
about him. The two would run into each other during late nights spent in the campus Botany laboratory, a place they would fondly refer to as "The Kitchen." Kevin was preoccupied, some would say obsessed, with gourds. He spent almost two years attempting to grow a special kind of gourd with "laces" that could mimic and eventually replace conventional leather rugby balls in tournament play. Bobby spent his time in "The Kitchen" trying to create a smokeable hybrid of herbal Viagra and herbal ecstasy, a blend he would call Erectstasy and sell to merchants on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

Kevin successfully licensed the use of his athletically modified gourd to Merf, a division of the popular Nerf foam sports-ball company, and the two quickly gathered their respective fortunes and relocated to Southern California to start a fucking band.

Kevin, the child of a strict vegetarian/military upbringing, found the superficiality and rampant semi-nudity of LA to be a bit much for his taste, but reveled in the vast selection of vintage neckties that Hollywood had to offer. In his youth, Kevin had been a devotee of the old, obscure Southern folk singers who had roamed the land in boxcars and worn neckties, but as he got older he found himself gravitating to deep Delta blues and artists like Mississippi Fred McDowell and R.L. Burnside.

Kevin's mother, Delphine, a French screen star of some repute had regaled Kevin, at a young age, with the music of Francoise Hardy and had taught him the art of Crepery, a skill that Kevin has continued to refine to this day with delectable results. Kevin brings a noble determinism and workmanship to the band and continues to draw from his experiences on the crossbow range with his father, Lt. Col. Kevin, Sr., to garrison the music of Restaurant with a solid structural integrity and quartz-like precision. Again ironically, Kevin, Sr. continues to serve his country as a Fox Action News war correspondent. He calls Kevin occasionally from the Middle East to congratulate him on his many successes and discuss various Backgammon strategies. If Kevin's Academy days taught him anything, it's that if you spur a horse in the ribs it'll gallop, but if you spur a horse in the nuts it'll buck your ass right off.

That's not to imply that Bobby needs be handled with kid-gloves, but let's just say that if it weren't for a few firm, disciplinarian backhands from the sometime fatherly Kevin, we wouldn't even be able to get Bobby out of the hip-hop booty clubs to play his fabled dustpan and bra-box.

So, Jah willing, Bobby and Kevin will soon embark on a pilgrimage of reverence and celebration, and in March of 2004, take another skilled chef and a Fox Action News crew back to Bayou Chene where they will record their debut album and cook up some more of that bluesy-slide, electrotrash gumbo that is Restaurant. The documentary, tentatively titled "Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Breakfast" will be a testimony to the Power of Friendship, the Magic of Music, and the Non-Indigestion Inducing Spice of Life.