Ah, the utterly romantic life of touring musicians! Take Lower Ninth Ward multi-instrumentalist Mike West and his better, lovelier half, multi-instrumentalist mom Katie Euliss, who perform as Truckstop Honeymoon, a name based on their own nuptials.

As the bride confides: “I got here in New Orleans and it was a full moon on Christmas Eve in 1998. It was very cold. I flew in from Seattle and got a ride in the back of a pickup truck from the airport.

“I wanted to get back to the South. I grew up in the South. I was born in North Carolina and grew up in Florida mostly. Then I went as far away from there as I could get.

“It was nice in the Northwest but I started having dreams about the ironwork down here in New Orleans, started reading a lot of Zora Neale Hurston, and decided it was time to get back down to the South. New Orleans was the best compromise of a city in the South that I could find. I just loved it.

“I started playing on the street. It was so much fun. The energy’s always changing, people are walking by. It’s not the same as a gig, where people come just for that purpose. It’s really kind of magic when people stop to listen in the street and there’s this whole circle of stuff going on. It was really a great way to make a living for a little while.

“I was playing a Happy Hour gig down at the Spotted Cat and Mike came and sat in on mandolin for a couple of tunes. We just started playing music together. We just really hit it off. We’ve been touring together for about a year now. We decided to get married last Valentine’s Day. We got married at City Hall and we had a gig that night in Lafayette. So we drove out to Lafayette and did our gig and we were both kind of sick. I had a cold and it was a real smoky bar. It was a long drive home and we were really tired and sick so we stopped at the Tiger Truckstop and slept there for a few hours in our little car.”

It was not exactly the Carol Channing Suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel but the less-than-blissful night of passionate coughing did inspire both a name for the couple’s musical coupling and the title of a track on their latest CD, which will be celebrated with a party at d.b.a. on January 25. For this interview, Katie arrived at OffBeat World Headquarters with husband, three-year-old daughter Sadie and six-weeks-old daughter Vega in her entourage. It was the first time this writer had ever interviewed a subject who was simultaneously breast-feeding an infant. It was also the first time this writer had encountered squirrel fat soap, a bar of which was delivered with Truckstop Honeymoon’s CD.

“I clubbed all the squirrels,” Katie explained. “There’s at least eight squirrels in every bar. I take the stick right off my gutbucket bass and go after them in the yard. They only twitch for a few seconds. Squirrels don’t really have that much fat on ’em so you have to club a lot of ’em to get a good batch of soap out of it. It’s kind of a messy process but luckily the yard dog likes to eat the leftovers. It’s gross. The squirrel population’s getting thinned-out around our place.

“You have to get the musk glands out of the squirrels. Lye—sodium hydroxide—mixed with water causes the saponification to happen. That’s what makes the squirrel fat and chemicals turn into soap. It’s a chemistry process. If you die in a river, your body will saponify sometimes—you can turn into soap. Bizarre, isn’t it?

“Squirrel fat soap is about the only thing that can cut through the peculiar stink of a banjo player. The squirrel clubbing is a family tradition—I learned that from my grandpa. He was the regional champion of Western Carolina squirrel hunting. He did it all by clubbing the squirrels—he didn’t waste any lead at all. He killed 43 squirrels in two hours. Amazing!”

RICO SUAVE

Everybody’s a multi-tasker in these modern times. Not content to be simply one of Louisiana’s greatest photographers, Rick Olivier has momentarily ditched the Nikons for turntables and emerged as DJ Rico, available to provide the sounds for your next bachelorette bash or crawfish boil (dial 504-486-2040).

“I will rock the house party,” DJ Rico declares. “I go anywhere: Back O’ Town, Front O’ Town, Uptown, Downtown. Rates are adjustable based on what kinda party it is.”

Actually, Rico’s been deejaying since 1977 when he was a student at Nicholls State (a.k.a. Harvard-on-the-Bayou) and he’s released an excellent sampler CD that amply demonstrates his skills on such selections as “Battery Acid Jazz,” “Satan’s Tow Truck” and “Bingo Bango Bongo.”

DJ Rico describes the latter track thusly: “It features selections from one of my favorite series of records, which is the Command audiophile records from the ’50s, which is when stereo started to get really big. These records are beautifully produced and mixed. They’re on the old heavy vinyl and they have super separation. They sound so wonderful. It’s a very weird form of exotica, which I’m really into. It’s coming back worldwide but a note to my fellow deejays in town: Do not start buying exotica records. Because I need to get them all for myself.”

THE FUTURE NOW

Bon voyage to WTUL deejay Karen Misconish, a.k.a. Ms. Conduct, an eternal advocate of the rowdier forms of music. Due to a family emergency, Ms. Conduct has temporarily departed for Pittsburgh. Congratulations and salutations to Mr. and Mrs. Alex “St. Rock” Rawls on the occasion of their joyous matrimony. And finally, I peek into my prophetic crystal ball and—poof!—El Matador Lounge disappears! Like magic. Say it ain’t so, Rio!