Listen Up: The New Year, The Band and The Meat Zone

By Saturday afternoon, after stuffing our faces like fools for two weeks straight, my boyfriend Joe and I were beginning to feel like squishy-bellied gluttonous oafs. And so, with the old year just barely behind us and all the clean, healthy, glistening promises of 2010 floating just at our fingertips, we made the obvious choice of where to grab lunch—Fox Brothers BBQ.

If you live in Atlanta and enjoy eating meat and haven’t been stuffing yourself silly for weeks on end already (or even if you have), I cannot possibly overemphasize how immediately you need to go eat at this place. I’m sure there’s better barbecue somewhere in the city, likely served out of some smoky old train car parked on a side-street somewhere, but I haven’t been there yet. What I do know is that I’ve never left Fox Brothers without feeling utterly defeated, greasy-mouthed, stuffed to popping and toting a THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU plastic bag full of leftovers that I absolutely cannot wait to be hungry enough to finish up.

Everything I’ve ever eaten there has been the best version of that thing that I’ve ever eaten. Smoked turkey, pulled pork, brisket. Collard greens, mac and cheese (served traditional-style, or cubed and fried, or under a pile of Brunswick stew in a special side called the “Fox-a-roni”), fried pickles. Sometimes I get a beer, sometimes I get water if I’m feeling like just leaving room for meat, but on Saturday I ordered the spicy bloody Mary and just about passed on real food in favor of guzzling down three more of those things. They’re made with Fox Brothers’ house wing sauce and are served with a garnish of pickled green bean—which, I know, sounds disgusting. But for the love of all that’s green and sodium-laden, please try one as soon as you’re physically able. Preferably at Fox Brothers, because there could be nasty ones somewhere out in the world, but they do not exist here.

Joe and I, when we go to Fox Brothers, both go deep into The Meat Zone, a place in which we become mostly unaware of what’s happening beyond the airspace between our faces and our plates. Sometimes we pop up from our respective Meat Zones to nod at one another or grunt or stare pop-eyed at each other and maybe swipe a bit from each others’ plates but usually it’s a total mental and social blackout and we just eat and eat and eat. This probably explains why I don’t have any memory of music ever playing in the restaurant before this Saturday—I was just too far gone in The Meat Zone to ever notice it. Or maybe there was music playing but it was just quiet and inoffensive enough that it never registered over the general sound of ecstatic gobbling all around me.

But yesterday I had a really revelatory moment—well, to be fair, I had a few really revelatory moments, but the one I want to tell you about wasn’t the one with the bloody Mary, or with the Fox-a-roni, or my pulled-pork sandwich. We’d paid our check and Joe was in the bathroom and I was just sitting there at the table, staring off into the middle-distance, feeling all the barbecue swimming around in my bloodstream and feeling the early stages of a food coma creeping up my limbs, when a strange steady sound broke through my meat-addled brain and the din of the packed room. It was the shudder of an organ, soon replaced by a high, fragile guitar plucking—it was “Theme from The Last Waltz,” the song that opens the documentary about and The Band’s 1976 last show, released by Martin Scorsese in 1978 and as a soundtrack that same year. It’s the first track on the album and I usually skip it when I put it on—I don’t know why, I guess because I like to drive to the soundtrack, and the instrumental just doesn’t work on the road in the same way. But there at Fox Brothers, I sat still through it all, listened to every note, and kind of went into a reverse of the Meat Zone, where every sound in the room was clear and defined and over all of it draped this beautiful song, moving in and out of its sad and playful parts, light to dark, as the wait-staff hurried about and forks and knives clattered against plates and hungry teeth pulled rib-meat off bones all around me.

By the time Joe got back to the table the theme was over and it was on to “Up on Cripple Creek” and I could have cried—we were about to leave but it was clear they were going to play the whole album straight through, and it was going to be perfect. As we stacked up our to-go boxes and gathered our coats, I looked over and saw a table of collegey kids in their dyed-black hair and Chuck Taylors all bobbing their heads and shifting their shoulders to the beat; a couple waiters swung by us on the way to the kitchen singing under their breath, and as Joe and I pushed through the crowd of waiting groups by the front door, I swear I saw a few pairs of lips moving silently along with the chorus, and I can’t say mine weren’t as well.

We’d been to another Fox to see The Avett Brothers the night before—it was one of the best shows I’d ever seen them play, and the house was fully packed, and everyone in the crowd sang along to every single song at the top of their lungs, and that made my heart swell almost to bursting, how this little band has gotten so big but how the love and grit and heart they pour into everything is just poured right back into them apparently no matter how big a crowd they draw or how many people know their names. But the scene at Fox. Bros, with the tables quietly jamming to themselves, guys mumbling along with Levon Helm while absently reading over the country-kitsch wooden signs that covered the walls, was somehow more stunning to me, more unexpected—these songs came out of nowhere, while our minds were all on something else entirely (ie: delicious, delicious meat), and roped us all together before we knew it, if we knew it at all.

In the parking lot, I declare The Band to be the most ideal barbecue music imaginable. I’m not generally one to make such bold statements, but I guess I’ve gotten a wild hair lately. Anyway, it’s perfect, I tell you—kind of dirty, smoky and funky and messy, and best enjoyed with great people. “I’m going to open a barbecue place one day and it’s just going to play The Last Waltz on repeat, over and over,” I tell Joe.

“Call it A Drunkard’s Dream,” he says, and then I decide it will be a 24-hour barbecue joint, like Waffle House but with smoked ribs instead of raisin bread and… well, that’s about as far as we got. Blame my meatbrain.

When we get home, we shelve the leftovers in the fridge, and then, our brains and bodies addled by meat, we accidentally fall asleep for two hours. When we wake up, we pull out the Styrofoam boxes, eat up the remains, and those two songs are still in my head.

If the rest of 2010 could please be even just a fraction as excellent as that afternoon, it’ll be a pretty great year.