This morning I’m recovering from the 2008 Spin Year in Music Party in bright red Super Sunnies and friends, it is not pretty. Last time I went to this thing, The Spinto Band played as I ran away from a Vanity Fair contributor with a chillum who was a good two inches shorter than me in flats.
Yes, John Norris was there and almost as blonde as his very young Brooklynite companion. And it was my first foray into the Highline Ballroom, which I really liked.
We missed most of Brother Ali, but Ted Leo and the Pharmacists was one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Not only because they’re just an incredibly charismatic group; but also because they’re so inconsistently stylistically so as a whole. For instance, the frontman/namesake would be jumping around like he was on the Vans tour with these split-chicken-kicks (and they were, in a word, rawsome) while the heavily bearded drummer with day-glo teeth would be pounding away on the skins, looking blankly in the air as though he was solving an SAT math problem. I could almost hear his thoughts, “The train leaves at thirty miles per hour from DeButte, now let’s see here…carry the four…and…” while he was just drumming his arms out. And what’s more, their disconnect completely worked. I really have warmed up to their new album. It’s just as frenetic as their performance—oscillating between this 90s neo-pop-punkish high school rock and twangy little beachblast numbers.
But even the free-flowing alcohol and smashed green glass on the floor as rubberband hipsters slipped and fell because they wouldn’t take off their cardboard sunglasses could not prepare me for the Eagles of Deathmetal. These guys are throwbacks to the part of the seventies I always forget: swampmarsh ‘staches, mutton chops, Aviators, patriotic tats and knocked-kneed hambone dancing with really big round electric guitars. These guys brought the house down so much, it was the first genuine mosh pit I’ve seen since since eighth grade (when I moved away from another town in Connecticut, my friends threw a party and some punk bands played and my dad*—there because the venue would not let us be there without someone over eighteen—stood watching as my friends, my boyfriend and his idiot posse all accidentally stabbed each other with Hot Topic spiked wristbands.) It was like some backwater revival by the end, with everyone split between yelling “Freebird!” and squinting at the stage with a slow and horrible realization of, “Uncle Rick….is….is that you? Get the hell off the stage and stop being so cool!” Because if these guys weren’t the spitting image of my twice-removed cousins from Normal, Illinois, I owe some dude a drink.
Needless to say that after all this I’m crawling back into a hooded sweater. There cannot be play like this and productive job-searching together, can there?
*(And let it be known that my father stood there in a MICKEY MOUSE sweater made by Ralph Lauren for golfing so that everyone would know that he was the dad. Like they wouldn’t? Oh, I’ve been mortified many times since then, but that was my first taste.)
Yes, John Norris was there and almost as blonde as his very young Brooklynite companion. And it was my first foray into the Highline Ballroom, which I really liked.
We missed most of Brother Ali, but Ted Leo and the Pharmacists was one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Not only because they’re just an incredibly charismatic group; but also because they’re so inconsistently stylistically so as a whole. For instance, the frontman/namesake would be jumping around like he was on the Vans tour with these split-chicken-kicks (and they were, in a word, rawsome) while the heavily bearded drummer with day-glo teeth would be pounding away on the skins, looking blankly in the air as though he was solving an SAT math problem. I could almost hear his thoughts, “The train leaves at thirty miles per hour from DeButte, now let’s see here…carry the four…and…” while he was just drumming his arms out. And what’s more, their disconnect completely worked. I really have warmed up to their new album. It’s just as frenetic as their performance—oscillating between this 90s neo-pop-punkish high school rock and twangy little beachblast numbers.
But even the free-flowing alcohol and smashed green glass on the floor as rubberband hipsters slipped and fell because they wouldn’t take off their cardboard sunglasses could not prepare me for the Eagles of Deathmetal. These guys are throwbacks to the part of the seventies I always forget: swampmarsh ‘staches, mutton chops, Aviators, patriotic tats and knocked-kneed hambone dancing with really big round electric guitars. These guys brought the house down so much, it was the first genuine mosh pit I’ve seen since since eighth grade (when I moved away from another town in Connecticut, my friends threw a party and some punk bands played and my dad*—there because the venue would not let us be there without someone over eighteen—stood watching as my friends, my boyfriend and his idiot posse all accidentally stabbed each other with Hot Topic spiked wristbands.) It was like some backwater revival by the end, with everyone split between yelling “Freebird!” and squinting at the stage with a slow and horrible realization of, “Uncle Rick….is….is that you? Get the hell off the stage and stop being so cool!” Because if these guys weren’t the spitting image of my twice-removed cousins from Normal, Illinois, I owe some dude a drink.
Needless to say that after all this I’m crawling back into a hooded sweater. There cannot be play like this and productive job-searching together, can there?
*(And let it be known that my father stood there in a MICKEY MOUSE sweater made by Ralph Lauren for golfing so that everyone would know that he was the dad. Like they wouldn’t? Oh, I’ve been mortified many times since then, but that was my first taste.)
1 comment:
this party sounds fun! but that crowd....
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