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Spacehog Wrote More Than One Good Song, True Story

With some concern did I read this article about the rock band Wolfmother, in which the frontman Andrew Stockdale complains:

"Too many guys come to our shows, because it's loud and aggressive. Girls come to our shows and they get crushed. By the end of the show, you've got some overweight, balding middle-aged dude cornering us in the back being like, 'I love your band!' Maybe we need to write some more power ballads. Or get some electro/'80s/new-wave thing happening and get some asymmetrical haircuts. And then we'll get heaps of chicks coming to our shows."

Has Stockdale actually ever been to a Wolfmother show? The first time I saw these guys at Tonic, I was trying to go up to Stockdale because I thought he was Steve Bays from Hot Hot Heat. I figured, hey, if it was Bays, I was being nice, saying hi, checking in on the man behind "Bandages" and "Le Le Low." If it wasn't, and it was just this random guy who looked like Steve Bays, then I could recant pretty easily, effortlessly really, with something like, "You're not Steve Bays? Really? Well your face looks like him." Obviously this way is better than just saying the guy looks like Steve Bays because I'd be providing him with the evidence.



Thing was: I couldn't get to Stockdale/Bays because he was surrounded by heaps of chicks! So I don't know what Stockdale's talking about. Every time I've seen Wolfmother, I've never seen any balding middle-aged dude corner Stockdale/Bays and say how much they like his band. Balding middle-aged dudes know better. Instead, I've always imagined extremely hot chicks forming some manner of chick battalion, marching up to Stockdale/Bays three-star hotel room after the show, demanding child support checks for kids they haven't even had yet.

Is it possible Stockdale has no idea Steve Bays thinks he's in Wolfmother? I present to you the latest Rock and Roll Swindle. Steve Bays, the man behind "Cairo" and the b-side to "Middle of Nowhere," buys tickets to every Wolfmother show he can get his hands on. He goes to the show and hides in the bathroom for the entirety of the performance--maybe he has a book he's reading, maybe he has one of those SpyTec microphones to listen in on conversations in the girls' bathroom. This is Steve Bays we're talking about here. Both options seem entirely plausible.



So the show's almost over--one more encore to go, but Bays is already working the crowd. Everybody's so psyched Bays is in town--especially the heaps of chicks. "I'm something like the Wolfmother shaman," Bays tells one heap. They think that's pretty awesome Bays is in Hot Hot Heat and Wolfmother. "I know, it's crazy. It's like I'm working two part-time jobs." More heaps hear this and also want to sleep with Old Shaman Bays.

"Ladies, ladies, please!" Bays protests. He takes his sunglasses off and puts them on again five times in a row. "You should probably share yourselves with my bandmates too. They're stars too you know." The show is all over, so these heaps have to think fast. They don't want the rest of the band to be angry, but they're not thinking fast enough either. Bays is getting antsy. "Tell you what," he says. "Lemme call Stockdale and see what he thinks. Let's be democratic about this. Everybody deserves a vote." Bays puts his right hand in the shape of a telephone and pretends to call Stockdale. From the look on Bays' face, it seems like Stockdale's pretty amenable. "OK chicks, here's the deal. I talked to Stockdale. He said I should take all the chicks home tonight." Bays wipes a tear from one chick's cheek. "He said it's better that way for everybody."

It Means Drink Apple Juice



And just when I thought I had found the creepiest birthday-related YouTube video...

How Riff Market Gets Its Creep On



(Blogliners, there is a YouTube video on my blog today)

Second 24, it starts getting really uncomfortable. The whole thing's only 25 seconds. I told you once.

Boredoms
Starlight Ballroom/Club Polaris
June 30

Always despised the 'bags out there who'd hear something marginal then say "oh man, so this is why I've dedicated my life to writing record reviews and concert previews for my local newspaper," as if the reason people listen to music is at all obscure. It really isn't! Let's be clear: We listen to music because it sounds awesome coming out of cars. That's about it. It's not like you can drive around waving around a sweet painting you drew and get the same rush, and it's definitely not like you're going to buy a firetruck and drive around with Vito Acconci jerking off under the ladder. You'd make a turn, he'd skip a beat, and all the sudden you're a bigger 'bag than the guy who hides under floorboards and makes sex noises for a living.

The flip of that is Garden State-inspired aversion to music's ability to change lives, to turn a man into a Portman, and that's sad too. If you do interact with music on a personal buy-in level, be it an overwhelm-via-sound or "gosh darn Elliott Smith knows exactly how my fifteen-year-old self feels," you're effete, to most a clown, a pussy to a few. It's like you might as well drink sparkling water out of a snifter or something. You just can't talk about music like that--it's always TMI, always subject to "personal narrative masquerading as criticism" snaps and, a shame, if it ain't criticism it's considered worthless. Don't get me wrong, I can't stand the "pull over on the side of the road" brand of writing some people think they've made a career out of--most times the people bore me and the music's marginal. But I catch myself snubbing my nose at that sort of passion-for-passion fan-not-critic interaction most people who like music still enjoy, and so who's the 'bag now.

I went to Boredoms with my friend's 15-year-old brother, who's from Stroudsburg so he doesn't do the live music thing often. Philly, that means physicality, lots of young kids covered in body paint, fat dudes covered in hair and unafraid to take their shirts off at the mere sight of a guitar. People still crowdsurf, and girls dance to Lightning Bolt and tear off their dresses just to wipe the sweat off their faces. Sean Agnew, who runs R5 Productions, puts together the best line-ups in any city I've ever lived in, always very disparate so you often get three distinct crowds in the same room. Here Hrvatski/Lightning Bolt/Boredoms made sense as three different-demo acts all interested in rhythmic overload--maybe. His concerts are always packed at least upfront, slight movements of the audience snowballing into a constant struggle to stay up and into it and alive. Everybody's a bigger fan than you are. Good luck taking out a notebook.

(More manifestation of Philly's anti-intellectual streak?)

The first half hour was brutal--three drummers playing mostly the same relentless break, passing off fills to each other when one got tired, creating something of the drum equivalent of Branca's bellowing guitar feedback until we all heaved and collapsed. It was physical but it was extremely musical and mentally taxing too--really had to fight to keep up and on and with them--so I don't understand people calling Boredoms hippie bullshit. Because eYe has long hair? Because a woman is playing drums? There was so clearly a language among the three drummers, a plan and an attentiveness and an unwankiness to eYe's conducting, a contour to the show you can feign as natural but can't naturally feign.

Proof of that: Everybody was shit tired minute thirty, all the guys without shirts started smelling pretty bad, a real Mortal Kombat "FINISH HIM!" type stupor. eYe brings the drums out, and Yoshimi breaks into this wordless blues, barely accompanied, catcalled at first but quickly too stunning to patronize. I'm convinced the temperature changed.

It wasn't a turn-on-the-dime, shock and awe type moment though, which is why I'm still stuck on this concert nearly a week later, easily the best I've seen the last six months. Yoshimi's blues came pretty neatly out of the banging and screaming and synthesizing, as if one was hiding the other, two faces of the same coin, etc. The closest I can come to making sense of it is Christmas lights, specifically the ones that have an adjustable chasing pattern. If you set the lights on the fastest possible chase, it loops back to "all the lights are always on." So obviously when you're 13 and in charge of the Christmas lights at your house, you try fucking with the chase pattern such that it's just a hair off from the lights going straight no chase--so that the lights are as BERSERK as possible and 100 yards away it looks like your house is on fire.

You can draw tentative if just rudimentary lines from recent Boredoms to the Sylvester family Christmas lights spectacular, at least I think so. Strikes me as very EASTERN to explore a dichotomy like that, the space between infinite speed and zero movement, "everything's secretly moving" atomic motions, etc., and I don't know bands that are flirting with those concepts so directly, so beautifully. Yoshimi's blues, works there too. Like a Magic Eye, *cough*, all the banging and screaming and squiggling suddenly comes into focus, and there it is, a 3D wizard's cap.