Thoughts On Full Throttle Saloon

• Not a trick.
• Not setting you up for a joke only I find funny, which is a good 45% of the site.
• Not gonna veer off after a couple hundred words and discuss something that might be relevant to anyone’s lives.
• I will try to work the Dead into it.
• That I can do.
• Otherwise, this will be 1200 or so words about a reality show set in a biker bar that aired on TruTV from 2009 to 2013.
• That being said, you are free to go, and I will not hold it against you.
• You should stay.
• Stay with me.
• Stay with me and put my feet in your mouth.
• Put everyone’s feet in your mouth, you freak.
• HEY.
• Yeah, that got creepy and aggressive real quick.
• It did. 
• Sorry.
• You’re already just barely hanging onto everyone’s attention with your choice of topic, so don’t foul the water with your perversions.
• I said I was sorry.
• Just get this over with.
• Ahem.
• Shit.
• I want to start the sentence with the title of the show, but teevee show titles are italicized and it would be confusing so close to Italics Voice Guy.
• There needs to be some space in between him and me.
• Maybe I could invade Belgium.
• Okay, that’s enough screwing around; let’s get to the fucking about: Full Throttle Saloon is an IV shot of Whiteness, a distilled concentrate of every “Meet the Trump Voter” article in the Times.
• Biker Whiteness is a rare and high-pitched Whiteness.
• It is an oblivious Whiteness.
• If you were to point out the lack of diversity to a patron at the Full Throttle, they would say they hadn’t noticed.
• Or they would say something horrible.
• Maybe it’s best not to go pointing shit out, huh?
• Reality shows combine exotic locations with entertaining characters, and here is FTS‘ cast:
• Yes, of course the bracelet reads JESUS.
• Obviously.
• That is Angie, and she loves Jesus very much.
• So much, in fact, that she does not ever curse and instead says things like “Oh, poop” and “Holy catfish.”
• You may recognize the phrase from the shirt, which is available at the Full Throttle merch tables and online in sizes XS-XXXL; a similarly-emblazoned baseball cap is also for sale.
• Along with Full Throttle S’loonshine and…um…well now.
• I was going to mock the bar’s owner Michael Ballard (the wook on the right) for being a sleazy merchmonger, but I can find no problem with this man’s wares.
• His tee-shirts are cheaper than Dead & Company’s, and nowhere that I looked could I find a $3,000 poncho.
• I’m still mad about that fucking poncho.
• And the pop-up store.
• Although, the Full Throttle is kind of a pop-up store in that it’s only open for ten days a year.
• You can stop in and get a beer in April, but there won’t be anyone operating the globe of death or the zipline, and the Marshall Tucker Band will not be playing on the main stage.
• For 355 days of the year, the South Dakota town of Sturgis contains just over 6,000 souls.
• The nearest big city to Sturgis is there isn’t one.
• It is not the middle of nowhere, but it is the county seat of nowhere.
• In 1936, a guy named Pappy Hoel (pronounced Hoyle) and his buddies rode their Indians out to Sturgis, where they camped and drank and fucked around with their bikes.
• In 2018, half-a-million people showed up.
• (There was a gradual build-up. It wasn’t that a minor event occurred in ’36 and then an unrelated flood of humanity swept into town 80 years later. A rally took place every year, slowly getting larger. It would be funny if it happened my way, though. The residents of Sturgis–Sturgeons?–wake up eight months ago to find 500,000 bikers on their lawns. No one even calls ahead, just BOOM tsunami of denim and chrome washes over the Black Hills. And, obviously, there isn’t enough food and all the bikers make too much doody for the plumbing to handle and the whole situation turns into a Bosch painting by mid-afternoon.)
• These people need drinks and skank.
• Michael Ballard will provide the drinks.
• And the skank.
• The syntactical relationship the bikers have with alcohol is unhealthy: booze is downed, slammed, thrown back, pounded; the beverage has no taste, only utility.
• If you’re chasing a shot of tequila served in a plastic medicine cup with a Bud Light, the flavor profile of your drink is not your first concern.
• You wanna party.
• FULL THROTTLE!
• (A good 20% of the program’s five seasons are taken up by B-roll of lubricated gargoyles in bandanas screaming FULL THROTTLE at the camera. A further 20% is taken up by the “next on” and “previously on” bumpers that originally played around the commercials. There’s maybe a half-hour of fresh content during each episode’s 42-minute runtime.)
• Anyway, I got away from my explanation of context: with more bikers coming every year, facilities had to be created to house and entertain them so now there’s entire cities, ghosts for eleven months, on the outskirts of town.
• Sturgis has nothing but outskirts.
• The bars on the Main Drag were too small to host national acts, but space wasn’t a concern out at the campgrounds, and Johnny Paycheck trekked out to the Black Hills in 1981 to sing his hits and start some shits.
• Since then, all your big rockyroll bands of an ilk have made the trip.
• You know what ilk I’m talking about.
• A milky ilk.
• Here, this is from the Wikipedia article about the biggest of all the campgrounds, the Buffalo Chip:

• The Buffalo Chips Campground opened in ’81. Its first concert for the Sturgis Rally was Jerry Lee Lewis in ’82. In ’87 it had Canned Heat. ’89-Mitch Ryder, ’90-Bachman-Turner Overdrive (from Winnipeg), Marshall Tucker Band, ’90-Joe Walsh, 91-Kentucky Headhunters, 92-Stray Cats, 94-Blues Traveler, 97-The Guess Who (from Winnipeg), 98-Lynyrd Skynyrd, 99-Def Leppard (from UK),’00-Montgomery Gentry, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Cheap Trick, Styx (from Chicago) with REO Speedwagon, Jonny Lang (from ND), and Cher, 01-Sheryl Crow, Grand Funk Railroad, 02-Smash Mouth, 03-Our Lady Peace, 3 Doors Down, Seether (from S. Africa), 04-Heart (from Seattle), Nickelback (from Alberta), ’05-Shinedown, Tim McGraw, Steve Miller Band, 06-Keith Urban, Kid Rock, Tom Petty, 07-Buckcherry, Papa Roach, Velvet Revolver, Daughtry, 08-Staind, Puddle of Mudd, Theory of a Deadman, Saving Abel, 09-Hinder, Aerosmith, 10-Bob Dylan (from MN), Stone Sour (from Des Moines), Disturbed (from Chicago), Jason Aldean, 11-Pop Evil with Alice Cooper, 12-Zac Brown Band, Loverboy (from Calgary), 13-Sublime with Rome, 14-Florida Georgia Line, The Pretty Reckless, Train, Motley Crue, 15-Five Finger Death Punch, 16-Miranda Lambert, Willie Nelson, Weird Al Yankovic, ’17-Alter Bridge, Trapt, Blink-182, Ozzy Osbourne. In 2018, Buffalo Chips hosted Yelawolf, Chevelle, and Eric Church for the Rally

• Leaving aside that the author of the page felt we needed to be reminded where Bob Dylan was from, but would need no such help with Daughtry’s place or origin.
• Dammit, you tell me where Daughtry is from!
• …
• Anyway, you get the ilk I’m talking about.
• Although the Full Throttle does do a Hip-Hop Night, and Michael Ballard talks it the fuck up like he was marching across a bridge in Selma.
• “None o’ them other places offer hip-hop, but we have Darryl from Run DMC comin’ out this year.”
• I’ll talk about Darryl  in a bit.
• Trust me on this one: you want to hear what kind of bullshit he got up to in Sturgis.
• The Full Throttle Saloon is a 30-acre property two miles outside Sturgis proper with cabins, bars, masculine metal sculptures, skank, carnival rides, rockyroll bands, tattoo parlors, merch tents, midget wrestling, the exact type of food you’d imagine would be there, and a burnout pit.
• Burnout Pit is not a song by The Hold Steady, but it should be.
• A burnout pit is a fenced-off patch of fresh blacktop that one can spin the back tire of a motorcycle against at furious revolutions; this produces greasy plumes of white smoke and, after a fashion, an exciting BAM! when the vulcanized rubber gives.
• Michael Ballard provides this burnout pit to all of his guests free of charge.
• The new tire he sells you afterwards will run you $275, but doing the burnout is free.
• Michael Ballard is a bidnizzman.

IN RE: skank vis-a-vis Full Throttle

No aspersion should be cast upon the hard-working (most of ’em) young women that make up the bartending/shot girling/dancing cohort of the FTS; those are tough gigs. (Not shot girling. Being a shot girl is not a tough gig. You just gotta be hot and have shots. If it’s late enough at night, you don’t even need to be hot, just have shots. Bartending and dancing, on the other hand, are fuckers.) Girls come back year after year, taking vacation days from their jobs as dental hygienists and pharma reps and bartenders in other states to make ten grand in a week. Strong work ethic on these ladies. They do, however, look and act like skank.

The FTS is traditional, gender-wise: hot chicks work the sales jobs, women cover the office, men labor. Management is similarly divided: the stage manager is a dude, and the bartenders manager is a lady. Men do the outside work, and women do the inside jobs, and both support the troops. They’s Americans and that’s how it is no matter what Hillary Clinton says.

(In what was certainly a decision by producers, there is not one shred of politics in the 2009-2015 program: no shots of bumper stickers,  no snippets of conversations containing the word “Kenya,” no hilarious tee-shirts. Fuckload of Confederate flag clothing and/or tattoos, but I’ll bet there’s been far more these past two years.)

In conclusion, the nomenclature of “skank” applies to the job, and not to the women.

Except for Debbi. Debbi is a skank.

Back to the Bullet Points!

• Holy shit, this is too long.
• I’m sorry.
• I’m sorry for all of this.
• You don’t deserve it; hell, some of you send me money and this is how I repay you?
• With 1600 words on a C-level reality show that aired a decade ago on a D-level cable channel?
• AND NO END IN SIGHT.
• I have, like, nine more topics to cover and I also wanted to work in some Queer Theory and then a short history of biker gangs–excuse me: motorcycle clubs–in America.
• Again: your desire to bail is understandable.
• I’d go with you if I could, but I’m stuck here.
• Anyway, lemme remind you of the players here and walk you through their ur-plots.
• 
• (I say “ur-plots” because each of our characters repeats the same arc each season. They cycle through life as they cycle down the road. It’s like Beckett with skull rings.)
• The guy who looks like albino Mick Mars is Michael Ballard; he owns the bar and is referred to by his full name, which sounds like MAH-k’l BAY-l’rd in the Southern accents possessed by almost all who work at the Full Throttle.
• Each season, he frets about money, fires a couple people, and fends off the familial clutches of Angie, and fights with Jesse.
• Angie is the one you think is Angie.
• Each season, she is involved with drama with her troupe of hoochie-dancers, and attempts to advance her relationship with Michael, and fights with Jesse.
• (The girls go out onstage before, say, Molly Hatchet and dance hoochie-style. You know what I mean. They’re not strippers as nudity is never achieved, but there is stripping: various sexy costumes are ripped off to reveal various sexy undergarments, wild undergarments, thrilling undergarments. High heels are alternated with knee-length black boots. The crowd sees no butthole. You know: hoochie-dancing.)
• And that third good ol’ boy?
• Well, that there is Jesse James Dupree.
• Yes, that Jesse James Dupree.
• Of the third-tier late-era Hair Metal group Jackyl.
• …
• Think about it.
• …
• Yup, he was the guy with the chainsaw.

• Now, you had forgotten that Jackyl ever existed.
• It was a pleasing ignorance.
• Their other songs are better than this one, but just marginally.
• The greater world moved on from its brief dalliance with Jackyl.
• But not bikers.
• Bikers fucking looooove Jackyl.
• Jackyl Night is Thursday night during the rally and it’s enormous; the entirety of the episodes airing in the first half of each series are spent building it up.
• There is a world, Enthusiasts, where Jackyl coming to town is a boon to all.
• I do not live there.
• But in Sturgis, for ten days a year, Jesse James and his boys still ride tall.

Ah, shit, I forgot to tell you about DMC. It’s too good to leave out. So, like I told you, Michael Ballard’s Full Throttle Saloon is the only venue in Sturgis that presents performers of rappity-hop. He does so on the last night of the rally when many of the bikers have taken off for home and his patrons are mostly locals who prefer the Ying-Yang Twins to Ted Nugent.

(Uncle Ted totally shows up in Season Four. Jesse goes backstage to say hi and Ted immediately starts talking about freedom, and then there is no more footage of Ted speaking because after Ted talks about freedom, Ted says racist shit. That’s his one-two punch.)

Darryl McDaniels, aka DMC, is booked to play the Full Throttle for a Hip-Hop Night along with Ice-T, and Ice wants none of this cracker bullshit. He clearly wants to get out of town as soon as possible, but DMC is game to hang out with the rednecks. He hits it off with Jesse and they cruise around downtown; DMC is wide-mouthed at the alien spectacle that lay before him. So this was white people did when there were no black people around.

DMC was having himself a time. So good a time, in fact, that the man lost his damn mind and appeared in this with his new best friend Jesse:

I am, at long last, speechless.