We learn today how easy it is to combine mountain music with poolside dalliances. We learn that jug drinking and hoedowns, barn dances and stiff drinks can mingle with bikini tops, bottoms, wayfarers and the California sun with little to no irony or wink. It's splishing and splashing away on hot days, with drinks getting replenished and with nowhere to go but back into the water, back to squeezing all of the sweet joy out of life.
The Two Man Gentlemen Band, based jointly out of Los Angeles and Charleston, South Carolina, is a two-man swing band that makes you feel that you're enjoying life only about one-fourth of the amount that you should be enjoying it at. You might actually be doing something massively wrong. The songs that Andy Bean and Fuller Condon write are full of gorgeous women that everyone would like to talk to and - in a strange twist of fate that must be the direct result of the karmic vibrations of these two gents - they're actually willing to talk, willing to hop in the pool, willing to entertain all kinds of ideas, willing to stick around all damned night, as long as the drinks keep flowing and the music keeps playing.
It all feels like a magical place, where hillbillies, dapper dans, geeks and models all coexist just because they realize that life's too short to be miserable in it, even for a second. It's a world that has a hop in its step that's only partially a result of the whisky and the gin and tonics. They sing, "Please don't water it down, I want to get happy," on their latest record, "Two At A Time," suggesting that watering it down only works for bartenders at Applebee's, and the mantra of keeping the good times rolling is so easy to swallow. We just say, give me another. Keep em comin' my good man, keep them coming.