By Lisa Jordan     •     Metro Spirit, Augusta, Ga.     •     Oct. 17, 2002

     On Thursday nights at Last Call, two polished grand pianos face each other. As the lights dim, two pianists launch into Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” It seems low-key, but by the end of the night, the floor under the pianos will be littered with dollar bills and wadded-up napkins scrawled with song requests, the performers will be spent, and more than one patron will go home red-faced.

     “Write it down and send it on up here — we’ll see what we can do,” instructs Keith Allen. “If we don’t know it, we’ll fake it.”

     And the requests come: everything from the Beatles, Queen and Skynyrd to more Elton John. Then somebody requests “Baby Got Back,” one of the few songs Grand Inferno dueling pianists Keith Allen and Greg Anderson say they don’t do.

     “They send up requests, trying to be smart, for ‘Chopsticks’ and stuff like that,” Allen later says, during a phone interview. “We get a lot of things you can’t print in a newspaper. Sometimes they’ll request Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, trying to stump the band.”

     That’s pretty hard to do. Between the members of the Grand Inferno dueling piano show, there’s a wide range of experience and expertise. “Greg Anderson — he lives in Augusta, actually — for a long time, he was playing in Europe six months a year. So he’s got that end of it handled,” says Allen. “And I started in regular piano bars and did cruise ships for a long time.”

     But of the performing Allen has done, the dueling pianos concept is his favorite. “I enjoy doing the dueling pianos show more than anything. We’re having a blast when we’re doing it,” he says. “The coolest thing about the dueling pianos concept, from our point of view, is the audience participation. Everyone is involved — it’s like group karaoke. Everybody gets involved. That’s what I think makes a lot of it work so well.”

     Singing isn’t the only form of audience participation at a dueling pianos show. If it’s your birthday or you just got engaged, watch out. One of the birthday boys at last Thursday’s show was treated to a song about his less-than-stellar endowments. Another performed a few renditions of “I’m a Little Teapot” onstage.

     “We do a bunch of different ones for different occasions,” Allen says, laughing. “The thing that becomes an issue at one point is all the sudden, it’s everybody’s birthday. That’s just part of the show and it’s part of the fun. And we always tell them payback is always available.”

     The crowds at Last Call, where Allen and Anderson have been playing for close to a month now, have been growing. “I think it’s been getting a little bit better each week,” Allen says. “We’ve been coming in every Thursday and seeing repeat people. It should just continue to grow.”

     This Thursday, Oct. 17, is a confirmed date for Grand Inferno at Last Call, and Allen says they’ll continue to be there for some yet-to-be-determined Thursday nights in November. If you’re wondering just what a dueling pianos show is like, it’s your chance to catch one close to home. But it’s something, Allen insinuates, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

     “I’ve been doing this for nine years now,” he says. “And I still can’t describe it to people.”

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Grand Inferno dueling pianists

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