Proper True Yarn

Part five with Luke Geiger is the Mount Isa Rodeo yarn, and it might be the funniest five minutes of the series. The setup: Luke and the boys land one of their biggest gigs ever, playing the Isa Rodeo alongside O'Shea, the Screaming Jets and Aussie rock royalty The Angels. After the Friday crowd thinned out on the Jets, the promoters flipped the Saturday order, so The Angels went on first and Luke's crew got the closing slot, sharing a green room with the Brewsters and Dave Gleeson, who spent the arvo singing cowboy songs with them out the back.
Earlier that day the barbecue boys on site had handed Luke, a self-confessed chilli man, a bottle of their hot wing challenge sauce, the Ghost of Chainsaw. He had a respectful amount on some roast meat, fiddled with the bottle, and thought nothing more of it. Ten minutes before showtime, packs on, ears in, guitar on his back, he ducks into the single portaloo for a nervous piss. What follows is the discovery that ghost chilli does not wash off your hands by itself, a door flung open with one leg in and one leg out, jeans at the ankles, a handful of portaloo soap, and a man scrubbing himself for Jesus and everyone to see while The Angels rip into Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again twenty metres away.
He made it on stage, still smouldering, and opened the set by thanking The Angels for opening for them, only to look across and find Gleeson and Rick Brewster standing side of stage listening. Gleeson stayed for the whole set and ended up jumping up to sing a Johnny Cash song with them, which Luke rates as one of the coolest things the band's ever done. The ep wraps with the world record stakes: one adjudication slip-up across 120 hours and the whole thing counts for nothing, which is roughly 30 four-hour gigs back to back, unpaid. Watch this space.
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Part four with Luke Geiger is the touring yarns, starting with a crash course in hospitality riders and the piss-takes buried in them: six mandarins, three peeled and three unpeeled, green M&Ms picked out of the bowl, and one bloke whose rider ends with a framed picture of Trace Adkins. Luke's had his own rider rinsed by another artist who shall remain nameless but absolutely knows who he is, and there's the all-time Mackay classic from his pub days with Big Sexy: play a packed Friday night at Malloy's, tell the barman to tab the drinks up, then go to collect the cash at the end and get told you owe us 300 bucks.
Then the main event, the night that became a song. Luke, Big Sexy and Luke's wife Carly rock up to the Honky Tonk of Texas in Silsbee, outside Beaumont, for a Tuesday night gig at what looks like an empty feed shed. By showtime you couldn't get a park. The second the locals clocked the accents, the shots started coming, Texan-sized 60 mil jobs, and they didn't stop. Luke got so poisoned he couldn't play his guitar, greeted his own wife in the hallway with pure amazement that she'd made it all the way to Texas, got carried from the car to the motel with his boots dragging, and took two days to come right.
The kicker came at the next venue, the famous Sengelmann Hall in Schulenburg, when he opened his gear and found a stack of love letters written on napkins, bar receipts and bits of cloth. Turns out blackout Luke had spent the night telling every woman at the bar he went to uni with Keith Urban and personally promising to deliver their letters. So Keith, if you're listening, there's mail waiting for you in Silsbee. The episode rounds out with the song the whole disaster earned, so stick around for the outro.
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Part three with Luke Geiger, and it's the big exclusive: Australia's wildest cowboy party is going after a Guinness World Record. Luke's whole thing is taking requests, not breaks. He plays six and seven hour sets without stopping, and Knuckles has watched him do eight and a half hours straight at the Gympie Muster's Lights on the Hill bar with three trips to the dunny, after already playing all day at It's a Bloke Thing in Toowoomba and getting choppered between the two with James Johnston. The only reason the man stops is a flat battery.
So he looked up the longest continuous music marathon, found the mark sitting at around 105 hours, and decided he wants to be the bloke who beats it. The target: 120 hours. Five days. The plan, hatched years ago with Graeme Connors' sons at their Mackay venue and now revived for next year's Gympie Muster, is dead serious. He walks you through the actual Guinness rulebook: no repeating a song within four hours, 20 seconds max between songs, adjudicators watching around the clock, and five minutes of banked rest earned per hour played, all of it saved up to survive the 3am to 5am dead zone when the diehards have collapsed and the early risers aren't up yet.
Mates can jump up and accompany him, guitars, fiddles, spoons, tambourines, whatever you've got, as long as he never stops. The finish would be staged for the main stage with a countdown. The last problem to solve is his fingers, which already bleed after a big night, so there's talk of lighter gauge strings, a rack of backup guitars, and the silicon fingertips he can't stand for reasons best left to the episode. Watch this space, because if anyone's mad enough to sing for five days, it's this bloke.
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Part two with Luke Geiger opens with maybe the most innocent mistake ever made by a country footballer. Fresh out of Chinchilla and playing footy in Sydney, 18 year old Luke discovers the whole squad shaves, and the trainers won't rub you down before a game if you're hairy. After a leg waxing attempt back in Toowoomba ended at one leg, two girls and a lot of swearing, he spots a sign under his unit block: painless Brazilian waxing. He chews on it for a couple of days, wondering what's so special about this wax from Brazil, then walks in with all the confidence in the world and asks for the Brazilian on his chest. The beautician calls the hairdresser over just to hear him say it again. Once it's explained, Luke's out. They wax his chest with the regular stuff instead, it draws blood between the pecs, and as he puts it, painless my arse, but my arse did remain hairy.
The back half is the bush kid landing at Central Station with a bag of clothes and a swag, straight into the famous Souths player house next to the Juniors leagues club. Crazy Dave the minder in the front room you never saw, groceries lined up the hallway, grass past your knees, and a brand new mower big Ricky couldn't start because he'd been told to hold the primer button until fuel ran out of it. When Luke finally mows the yard, the apprentice in him horrified at the state of it, he starts hitting forks. Then spoons. Then he looks up and sees plates, cups and tomato sauce all over the roof. The boys' explanation: we had a roof party, better view up there. Fair play. The ultimate bachelor pad, and as Luke says, there's plenty of yarns from that house that can never come out.
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New guest series with one of the best blokes Knuckles knows, Queensland cowboy country singer Luke Geiger, and the pair front up fresh from trying to drink rum for Australia at the 16th It's a Bloke Thing prostate cancer luncheon, hosted by their good mate Jack Wagner at Wellcamp Airport. The lunch raised $39,000, and the cause is a beauty: a testing truck partnered with Heart of Australia that's already checked 541 blokes in rural Queensland, with 12 per cent sent for follow ups. That's near 60 blokes who'd never have been checked. If you see it out west, walk in.
Luke's job at the lunch was the grand entry, driving the auction Kenworth from one end of the airport to the other, then jumping out with guitar and mic. What the room didn't know is that he'd been out bush long enough to need a favour first, which is how he learnt the greatest airport secret in Australia: they confiscate hundreds of aerosols a day, so if you ever need a spray of deodorant at Wellcamp, they've got you covered. One donated can of Rexona later, he was fit to sit beside Knuckles and Ray Martin. Yes, that Ray Martin, and yes, he's coming on the pod.
The main event is Luke's teeth. Four implants and 18 crowns at the top clinic in Vietnam for about $10,000 all up, versus the $10,000 his Mackay dentist wanted for one implant. The catch: Luke refused to be put under for three and a half hours of drilling into his jawbone because he was convinced they'd knock him out and take his organs, ignored the dentist's warning that shade number one was too white, and learnt both lessons the hard way. There's also the small matter of Knuckles buying the South Sydney VIP box at auction purely as a thank you to Luke, a bloke he ribs relentlessly for supporting them.
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