The Stillhouse Junkies, a Durango-based roots band, was supposed to be wrapping up a tour of Great Britain and touring the U.S. right now, but a certain virus had other ideas. Unable to have a show with a live, in-person audience, the band held an online show early on in the pandemic via Facebook Live. Now they have a better, more intimate — but not too intimate — idea.
The Rolling Junkies Revue Tour will hit the road and play 10 locations over the course of two days, May 9 and 10, and if you sign up in time, you can see them without any fear of jamming yourself into a crowded music venue. After all, this time, the music venue is your front yard.
“There are five time slots each day, next Saturday and next Sunday, and whoever signs up, we’ll just drive the van to their house and set up in their front yard,” said bassist Cody Tinnin. “We’re not going into anybody’s house or anything, and we’re going to stay socially distanced from everybody, but we’ll play probably only 30 minutes at each stop and then we’ll hop into the van and go on to the next place.”
Signing up for the shows is free, but the band will accept donations or tips virtually through Venmo and PayPal. Sign-ups will be conducted through a Google spreadsheet that will be posted on the Stillhouse Junkies’ Facebook and Instagram pages (@stillhousejunkies for both) May 3 through 7. The sets will likely consist of songs from their recent presciently-named album “Calamity,” with some older favorites thrown in, Tinnin said. You can hear the band’s music on its website, stillhousejunkies.com.
The band got the idea from other artists who are adopting similar means of connecting with audiences, such as pop-rock/Americana artist Amy Helm, who has been playing curbside at residences around Woodstock, New York, Tinnin said.
“We were definitely pretty strict about the quarantine thing at first. But at this point, too, it’s pretty essential for our livelihood that we at least try to do a little bit here and there,” he said. “It’s literally just for whoever is in the household; we don’t want people to invite the whole neighborhood over.”
While the band has Durango in mind for this particular house-to-house tour, they’re also willing to head over to nearby communities such as Bayfield and Mancos. If this tour’s sign up sheet fills up quickly, the band may do it all again in the near future, Tinnin said. Judging by how and what is currently reopening, it certainly doesn’t look like they’ll be able to have a traditional tour for quite a while yet.
Nick Gonzales
