Big Hair, Bad Eyesight, And Tube Tops

That’s Woonsocket, Rhode Island’s own Duke Robillard, trying to get  as many time zones between him and Woonsocket as he can.

When we were young we used to make Woonsocket jokes. It was in Rhode Island, and we were in Massachusetts, but it wasn’t very far away.
Everybody there was of French extraction and had wonderfully mangled translated expressions for mundane happenstances.

Throw momma from the train, a kiss.

Next time you go through my yard, you go round.

Is that to here, or for go?

My brother lived in a triple-decker in Woonsocket for a while when he first got married. Woonsocket is pronounced woon sock KETT! while using a Blaque Jacques Shellacque or Burglar Of Bampf…ff…ff comic accent, of course. We used to put lawn chairs out in his back yard and watch dead dogs float past in the Blackstone River.

No one much speaks French in Woonsocket anymore, or English, either, as time marches on. I’ll never go there again, and haven’t been there in 25-plus years, so it really doesn’t matter what’s going on there, does it? I can’t imagine they spend a lot of time worrying about me, either.

So perhaps they’ll forgive me if I forever immure them in amber, and imagine Woonsocket as the place where Duke Robillard plays in Chan’s every night, and all the girls have big hair and bad eyesight and tube tops, forevermore.

[Updated: From their website, Chan’s seems to have attempted to cut out the middleman, and produced a chimera of Duke Robillard in a tube top, with uneven results:]

Local musicians are never going to figure out that you need to learn to sing to be a singer, are they?