My Top 100, No. 43: "Cavaliers Har Hum" by Bombadil

Several songs on this list have personal significance because of my time in a college alt-rock band, but this is the only song I discovered because I was in a bad.

The focus of the indie rock scene in the South Carolina Midlands--such as it is--is a bar called New Brookland Tavern in West Columbia. 

NBT is small enough that my band headlined there several times (I don't think we ever drew more than about 150 people, most of whom we knew in some capacity), but also notable enough that Of Montreal played there when I was in college. I saw Bright Eyes in North Charleston once and Conor Oberst said it was their first show in South Carolina in 10 years because he got mugged at a show that sounded a lot like NBT.

The procedure for playing a show at New Brookland was that you had to try out with a 20- to 30-minute set at "new band night," after which--if you didn't bomb--they'd invite you back to open for other bands, and eventually you'd be able to organize your own lineups if you could get enough acts together. Our first gig after new band night was opening for the album release party for a band called Juicebox, a three-piece group that included one singer who played guitar, but also accordion, xaphoon and melodica. Their two big hits were "I'm From Space" (sample line: "The latest trend / in space vacations / is to take over the planet and / enslave the natives") and the AC/DC-inspired "Sin Big" (sample line: "If you're going to sin / SIN BIG"). They were great.

I mention all of this to put into context this scene from the Juicebox album release party. We'd finished our set and packed up, and were watching four guys we'd never seen before, one of whom was wearing in a marching band uniform and at least one other was dressed like a gaucho, set up a dizzying array of musical instruments, the overwhelming majority of which you would not ordinarily see in your average college indie band. 

Halfway through their set, I turned to my guitarist and said, "This is the weirdest fucking thing I've ever seen."

And so we were introduced to Bombadil, a uniquely strange but also uniquely fun and charming folk-rock band (I guess you'd call them folk-rock?) who proved that not all Dukies are assholes by driving seven hours round-trip from Durham to play our own album release party a few months later, despite having only met us once, and despite having no financial incentive to do so other than a share of a $5 cover, times maybe 80 people, split among four bands.

"Cavaliers Har Hum" is my favorite Bombadil song, partially because it's a little more accessible than some of their other work, but because it's got this "Do You Hear the People Sing?" quality to it, only chippier. It's Patrick Henry, but not at all angry.

Which makes for a fascinating dynamic, in which lines like "We shall fight like a lion with a sword in its side" and "Cavaliers, sing out in glory!" are counteracted by the silliness of the pan flute and saxophone, which are themselves counteracted by the harrumphing in the background, to which I can only say that we need more harrumphing in our music.

The end result is that you're holding a torch and joining the mob to go kill the king, but you're skipping along the way and you're really happy about it. I can't think of another song that elicits an emotional response quite like this one, and I'm grateful to have encountered it.