From there, there was but one question on roughly 90 percent of the assembled minds:

How long would The Gourds - fair headliners from Austin, Texas - wait before playing their 2000 cult-favorite, twang-cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice"?

"That's how it is everywhere," said Kevin "Shiny Ribs" Russell, Gourds lead singer, as he stood and watched the action at the fair's dunking booth that afternoon.

"Usually there's a hardcore group of fans, and then there's people who only know 'Gin and Juice,'" he said "And then there's the people outside of that who don't know who the hell we are."

When do you play your hit tune? Are you obligated to play it? Do you even like the song anymore? Has its very popularity consumed you, changed you, even altered your appreciation of the musical experience?

Such is the dilemma for any band, such as The Gourds, who have seen one song blow up into a meteoric success. The five-piece, alternative-country group has been around for 13 years and 10 albums. But it's their bluegrass version of another man's song - Snoop Dogg's 1993 ode to Seagram's - that has brought them the most acclaim.

"It doubled our audience in about a year or two, and since then it's just had a life of its own," Russell said. "It's a strange phenomenon, really. All because of the Internet."

Internet file-sharing - Napster in particular - is where The Gourds' version boomed. But there was another strange phenomenon at work. The song was often miscredited to O.A.R, or Ween, or Phish, or the Soggy Bottom Boys.

Imagine fans showing up for your concert, only to yell out a request for a song that's been incorrectly attributed to you.

"We were in Atlanta recently, real late at about 3 in the morning, and a group of kids came in to get on the elevator while we were loading our gear in," Russell said. "They asked us who we were, and I said, 'You know, the song, 'Gin and Juice.'"

"They said, 'Oh yeah, that's Phish,' and the doors closed," he said.

"That's the problem with the peer-to-peer stuff," he said. "You can call it any way you want. I can put the entire Lynyrd Skynyrd library under 'The Gourds' and share it, and that's what everybody would get."

A vocal portion of the afternoon crowd was well aware of The Gourds' legend when the band came out for a cajun-twinged, family-friendly, half-hour set at 3:30 p.m. Saturday. There was banjo, guitar, a few mandolin tunings which seemed to herald the opening strains of the band's most widely known tune.

But ultimately, no "Gin and Juice."

Russell and the band knew what they were doing. Many in the crowd were willing to shell out the $25 for an evening ticket just to hear the song once.

"We don't like to play it when it's out of context," he said. "Sometimes we get asked to play it at a wedding, and I'm like, 'I don't think we should play that at your wedding.' But people want it, because they want that big party. It's the ultimate party song. It's like 'Louie, Louie.'"

Veteran fairgoers know well the ruins of bands who've struck it big with one "ultimate party song." In 1998, Tommy Tutone was the headliner, 16 long years after the 1982 smash, "867-5309/Jenny."

"Jenny, I got your number /

I need to make you mine /

Jenny, don't change your

number /

8-6-7-5-3-0-9 (8-6-7-5-3-0-9) /

8-6-7-5-3-0-9 (8-6-7-5-3-0-9)."

"We like the song, and fortunately, it's fun to play once a night," Tutone lead singer Tommy Heath told the Empire before the show in July 1998. But "If people want to hear 'Jenny, Jenny,' I'd rather just stay home and write (computer) software."

Nonetheless, Tutone and band played "Jenny, Jenny" twice during their Aug. 8 mainstage concert. They also played another song that, as a fair organizer told the Empire, "had the same music but different words."

In Haines, the performance earned him the dubious nickname "Tommy Onetune." It got worse, according to an Empire review.

"Moments after he satisfied the 70-minute minimum showtime required by his contract, organizers said, he loaded all the catered food and beverages in the musician and crew's Green Room into grocery bags and left the dance," the article said.

The Gourds wouldn't fall prey to the same advanced narcissism.

"You have to play the song," Russell said. "We don't play it every night, but we'll play it tonight. It's the kind of atmosphere you should play it in.

Ultimately, the band lured the crowd for an hour and 20 minutes, before ending their main set with a 12-minute version of "Gin and Juice."

"You always have images of Alaska when you're a kid from Texas," Russell said. "You think it's snow and ice and Eskimos. Then you get older and you read about it and you see pictures. It's not far off from what I imagined. It's just bigger than what I thought it would be. It feels vast.

"This feels like a classic kind of very down-home local fair," he said. "It's what a fair should be. There's so much classic stuff, like the dunking booth. All-American stuff. It's just nice to see."

See related article, Haines Brewing Co. - a beer too far.

• Korry Keeker can be reached at 523-2268 or korry.keeker@juneauempire.com