Show Journal 2010-06-19
What an odd night. First off, there were actually people in the Tonic Lounge for a show we were playing at. Yeah sure, most of them left by the time we played but there were a lot of people there for a while. I’ve long maintained a theory that shows at the Tonic are great as long as we aren’t playing. I can’t fullly reverse my theory, but I can at least begin to question it. The first band was pretty good, I think. I say that because all I could hear was vocals and the bass drum. The guitars players genuinely looked like they were shredding but I couldn’t hear a note of it. Bummer. Burnout was up second and it was very good to see them again. We played a number of shows together between 2000 and 2002, so it was sort of a trip down memory lane for us. Despite not playing regularly anymore they sounded great. One detail I had forgotten about Burnout shows was the high following of annoying skanky girls they attract. I’m not talking rocker-chick skanky, or crusty punk skanky, but more like one-drink-away-from-being-in-a-Girls-Gone-Wild skanky. These girls are easy to spot. They are slightly overdressed, a little too much makeup, you could say they are packed a little too tightly into their clothes (and perhaps spilling out in a few places), they make persistent cries of “woo-hoo”, throw up the devil horns because they think you are supposed to do that, and the tell tale sign of the coming apocalypse is when one by one they all decide it’s a good idea to stand up front and try to slamdance until they 1) fall down or 2) get bumped too hard and a fight ensues when their evenings gentleman caller. Fans are fans though, and Burnout did play to a packed room. A very nice surprise for me was their covering of ‘Round and Round’ by The Wanna-Be’s. I have had a copy of that song on my iPod forever and have been coming back to it over and over for years. It was nice to see it played and played well. The third band was nuts. I don’t want that to sound bad, I’m just not sure how else to say it. It was two guys that would basically loop their tracks on stage (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards) and then play over their music while mixing the loops in and out on the fly. It was pretty nuts because you could literally watch a song be constructed and deconstructed, while not losing its groove. Very entertaining. We were up last and there were all of 5 people on the floor when we sound checked. Eventually people trickled in, but it was maybe a third of what Burnout had watching. The good news is that one third was four times as many people as we usually play to at the Tonic so it was still a win for us. Our set was a little scattered and went from tight to sloppy within the same song. We played New Song #2 for the first time in years, which was fun for me. There were some rowdy folks up front and at the end of our last song a fight broke out. The cause? A drunk girl “dancing” got bumped into. Surprise. All in all it was a pretty entertaining night.
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