Uptown 1, Hot Live Guys 0
Julian Bargen drops croquet match due to distracting Mormons
Mike Warkentin

“Through?” Hot Live Guys frontman Julian Bargen asks after a blind uphill croquet shot in Assiniboine Park.

Bargen didn’t find the wicket, but he’s still leading the six-person match, which also includes Savants bassist Andrew Oepkes, who truly sucks at croquet.

I’m trailing Bargen by a bunch of wickets, so I’m asking him questions about his seven-year-old band in hopes that he’ll lose focus. Hot Live Guys — a garage-rawkin’ outfit rounded out by drummer Mike Johnson, bassist Kurtis Wittmier and guitarist Joe Warkentin — will be releasing the new album Robbin’ a Bank on May 26, so I should be ‘staking out’ ahead of Bargen well before I finish my beer.

“It was daunting at first,” Bargen says of the recording process. That makes sense considering HLGs recorded their last alb, 2002’s Serve Pipin’ Hot, in Bargen’s cottage.

“I like to use the analogy ‘(recording) is kind of like the ugly lights,’ when you turn on and it brings out everbody’s really hideous faces...” he says. “Every ugly mistake you hear back 150 times.”

Speaking of ugly mistakes, I’m suddenly in the lead and Bargen’s stuck in a small ditch, mostly because he’s fixating on some Mormons searching the park for converts.

“On a totally different story, I once called them (the Mormons) and said, ‘My sister’s having some problems and I think she could really use a Bible and a talk,’ and they came by, and she’s never forgiven me.”

He’s also telling me that Robbin’ a Bank, to be released on the local Transistor 66 label, was recorded in two days at Private Ear Studios. Apparently the eight-song, 20-minute blast was done live off the floor between games of Mortal Kombat 2.

Whatever, Bargen. I win. Serves you right for making me do a Google search for ‘hot live guys.’

“Yeah, I choked,” Bargen says as I ride my mallet around the course. “I wasn’t happy about it. I was leading until almost the very end, and then you had a couple of incredible shots...

“I’m hoping for a little divine intervention in the team game. That’s why we should go talk to them (the Mormons). We should challenge them — ‘Alright, you guys be God, we’ll be Satan.”

“We’ll need more beer for that, though,” Oepkes chimes in.

So we talk to the missionaries. Bargen quizzes them on history and even scores himself a Book of Mormon and a pamphlet.

“That booklet is like an album full of song titles,” Bargen says.

With all the theology we didn’t get around to inviting the Mormons to the HLG CD-release show at the Albert, which is too bad because the Hot Live ones shine onstage.

OK, they bleed onstage, usually courtesy of their guitarist. The dude is nuts.

“He takes tons of falls,” Bargen says of Warkentin, “and he usually shakes them off and gets up, but every once in a while you’ll see him come down in such a way that you’ll see the shock in his eyes and he’ll stop playing guitar.”

You want proof? There’s a gnarly picture of a very bloody Joe on the Hot Live Guys website.

You won’t need the address to find the site — just Google ‘hot live guys.’