Union Rock Yards

Jive Tofurky: A Document of PRF BBQ Meatless Grilling

Tree a-grillin' by Jodi Shapiro

Hey man, my name is Tree and I helped head up the grilling team for the 2009 PRF BBQ and its successor, the 2010 PRF BBQ.  The food at these BBQs was something to be proud of and very representative of the PRF’s lack of willingness to engage in the store-bought/prepackaged/cheap.  There were dozens of sausages from Chicago’s stellar Paulina Meat Market, even more sausages from the state of Wisconsin, homemade sausages, burgers hand-formed and seasoned with love and topped with a variety of cheeses, chicken parts, fish, and even pork shoulder.  “You Eat Well or You Go to Hell” was our motto*.

For both of these events, I made the decision to handle the vegetarian grilling duties.  I am not a vegetarian, far from it, though I tried it for about six months in 2003 until my wife became pregnant with our second child and was ravenous for meat.  Since it turned out the baby was mine, I figured I should start eating meat again as well.  I am a vegetarian sympathizer, and as an avid griller, it pains me to attend/host a cookout and see the meatless folks show up with frozen veggie patties, or even worse, tofu dogs.  There are actual vegetables to be consumed and many of them are delicious when grilled, so allow me to talk about the items that I made for these BBQs.

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A little background on The Hype!

I made a post sometime in early 2009, around the time of the initial talks of this basement BBQ in the works, suggesting that we should include live karaoke. I didn’t expect anyone to care enough to respond, but within a few hours had been contacted by MF Nightmen (guitar), Ruy Lopez (drums), hench (keys, though more on that), and kerble as the MC. I offered to fill the open bass role, though MF thought we’d be better served by 2 guitars and asked the other bassist in his band (-o-), Erik, to join. Wow, we had a karaoke band!

Colonel Panic at The Hype perform Live at PRFBBQ2010

Months later, we’d kind of forgotten about it and realized we needed to get our shit together. The show was about a month away and people we’re actually anticipating my half-assed karaoke concept. Oh boy. Around that time, hench told me he was too busy to do it, then got seriously ill, then moved to LA, so we we’re SOL in the keys dept. Uh oh, no one on EA plays fuckin’ keys (as far as I knew at the time). I even contacted a professional keyboardist through craigslist to fill in as over half of the requests had pianos or synths. Luckily, the dude didn’t write me back (he seemed a little too into Ben Folds anyway) and Noise&Light contacted me 3 weeks before showtime. Saved! We had our first practice about 2 weeks before the BBQ and after some shaky run throughs, we managed to get 19 songs down in 4 or 5 practices @ MF’s Ravenswood Manor bungalow (which is like playing in a 1960s basement, in the best way imaginable).

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