Thanks to everyone who came out for Run At The Dog’s show at Lee’s the other night. It was a good crowd and a good vibe, despite (or perhaps because of) the snowfall and the midnight set time. For those of you who missed it … well, you’re lame. But there will be more shows in the future.

Med School:

My Baby, She Really Plays My Song On The Radio:

Specks:

River Bottom Nightmare Band:

Posted: November 14th, 2008 under Concerts, Minneapolis, Music, Video.
Comments: 2

(Last Monday I had the rare opportunity to see Stars of the Lid perform live. Because I apparently can’t let a beautiful musical moment stand on its own without documenting it exhaustively, I came home and wrote this review.)

During the first true spring rain of the season, an eclectic array of people—hipsters, the art crowd, older classical-music aficionados, season-ticket holders, and everyone in between—crammed themselves into the tiny seats at the Southern Theater, not quite sure what to expect from the Wordless Music Series‘ Minneapolis stopover. While the artists currently showcased in the series do happen to traffic in instrumental music, the “wordless” component of the name probably refers more to the eschewal of genre tags as outlined in the series’ mission statement: “The various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today … are in an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”

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Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Concerts, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 1

The Hold Steady live @ the Orpheum Stage Door, Madison

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Posted: May 21st, 2007 under Concerts, Images, Music, Video.
Comments: 1

I’ve enjoyed Duncan Sheik’s music for a long time, but a series of near misses have kept me from seeing him live. I finally rectified that tonight, and it was worth the wait.

I walked/jogged without an umbrella through the pouring rain to the bus stop, so by the time I got to the Varsity (aka the Twin Cities’ best concert venue) I was soaking wet. Inside, however, it was cozy, the room configured for an intimate show. It was like being in an enormous living room. As if on cue, Nick Drake’s “Poor Boy” started up on the house system.

I ordered some coffee, grabbed a chair, and added it to the ad hoc seating area right in front of the stage, effectively creating for myself a second-row center seat. The Varsity was looking about as different as it possibly could from the last time I saw a show here. Looking around at the audience members lounging on wicker chairs and ottomans, I came to some conclusions about the sorts of people that comprise Duncan Sheik’s core audience, and I’d like to share my findings with you here in the form of this Venn diagram:

“Poor Boy” was followed by some Josè Gonzalez, then Josh Rouse. Whoever was DJing sure knew Duncan Sheik’s cohort.

The show itself was about as far as possible to the other side of the spectrum from my last show in every possible way (except that they were both excellent, of course). Sheik was accompanied by a drummer and a string quartet, as well as opener Holly Brook on keyboards and backing vocals. His set was largely comprised of material from his latest release, White Limousine, and from Spring Awakening, the Broadway musical he co-wrote with Steven Sater. (I generally hate musicals but I may have to make an exception for this one. This one and Mama Mia.) Sheik’s between-song banter adhered to the Alan Sparhawk Theorem, which states that the more mellow and/or depressing an artist’s music is, the more hilarious his/her stage banter will be.

I don’t think the crowd was going to let him leave the building unharmed if he didn’t play “She Runs Away”, so it’s a good thing he encored with it. That song pretty much single-handedly informed the emotional tenor of my junior year in college (aka my Melancholy Year. It was the only Melancholy Year of my college experience, with the possible exception of my freshman, sophomore, and senior years).

Afterwards I lingered just long enough for Duncan Sheik to come out onto the floor and chat with people. I politely waited my turn, then shook his hand and thanked him, making sure to beat a hasty retreat before I said something retarded, which I generally do whenever I meet someone I admire, especially someone who’s been hugely influential, musically and artistically, for a third of my life.

As I left the building I noticed the house system was now playing Joni Mitchell. Of course.

Posted: May 1st, 2007 under Concerts, Images, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 6

Trans Am at the Triple Rock

The sweatband: +50 pts
The polyester track pants: +50 pts
The shirtlessness: +100 pts
The chains: +200 pts
The Juno and the Korg: +200 pts (each)
The Rickenbacker: +500 pts
The RotoToms: +1000 pts
The chains: +100 pts
The drum solo(s!): +500 pts (each)
Sebastian Thomson intentionally misstating the names of openers Zombi and Psychic Paramount as “The Zombies” and “Psychedelic Pyramid”: +100 pts
Not playing “Motr”: -1000 pts
Playing “Futureworld” and FUCKING KILLING IT: +1000000000000 pts

Posted: April 28th, 2007 under Concerts, Images, Minneapolis, Music, Video.
Comments: none

Tara and I are in a Hold Steady video.

Back in October when they played a couple dates at First Ave, I was pretty close to the front at stage left on both nights and made sure to hoot and holler every time the cameraman panned the audience.

Now, a few songs from the second night are up at Schedule Two, which if you haven’t checked it out yet is a great site featuring excellent local rock show footage.

Proof that I like the crowds at the really big shows:

Posted: February 7th, 2007 under Concerts, Images, Minneapolis.
Comments: 2

The second Hold Steady show was as ball-crushingly transcendent as the first, but in different ways. It was all-ages, with whose stipulations (alcohol served on the second floor only; throngs of sweaty, hyperactive sixteen-year-olds cramming the first to the gills) I would have been far more annoyed if I weren’t so busy being rapturously entertained by the evening’s band.

In fact, the under-age element was, in a perverse way, integral to my enjoyment of the show. Because getting a beer entailed giving up one’s place in front of the stage and climbing the stairs and presenting my ID and pushing my way through the interstices in the throngs of sweaty, drunk thirty-year olds cramming the bar to the gills, I didn’t get drunk, but instead got a rock-show high of the sort I probably haven’t since high school, when I saw Fishbone or Soul Asylum and was one of those sweaty, hyperactive sixteen-year-olds, so that my exclamation in my previous post about not having this much fun since high school is anything but fatuous.

So by the point, halfway through the first encore, when Tad carefully held his guitar above his head and climbed off the stage into the frantic masses in the front rows to rock out in their midst—rather than scoffing with ironic distance at their clamoring response, I launched myself into that teeming mass till I was at Tad’s side and found myself tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “Hey Tad! Kyle McCloskey says hi!” And Tad, without missing a note, looked over his shoulder and said, “Awesome! I went to high school with him!”

And the band played on, Craig Finn donning his autographed Twins jersey and at least one handle of Jameson shuttling between Franz Nicolay and Galen Polivka, along with the steady depletion of the case of Budweiser on the drum riser; and Galen tossing dollar bills into the audience during “Southtown Girls”; and the ubiquitous DV cameramen panning the crowd for the documentary supposedly in the works.

There isn’t going to be one favorite concert of my year. There are going to be two, on consecutive nights, by the same band.

Posted: October 27th, 2006 under Concerts, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 1

I came home from a day of teaching and took off my teaching clothes. I put on a hoodie and my Weebs t-shirt and caught a downtown bus.

For people who have only heard the Hold Steady’s recordings and are still lukewarm, I tell them to go see a show. “It’s a conversion experience,” I tend to say.

I was in First Ave a matter of minutes before a found Zeb & Nicole.

Before the set, I was trying to get closer to the stage, and found it nearly impossible. The crowd was more densely packed than anything I’d seen in years.

“This haven’t been in a crowd like this since Lollapalooza ‘93,” I said. The older-looking guy next to me said: “I was there. I agree.”

The Grain Belt guy was moving through the audience somehow, holding a case of beer above his head. I bought one, then two.

The house lights came up for every verse with a reference to Minneapolis, which was pretty much all of them.

I took about thirty gabrillion shitty cameraphone pictures.

For ninety minutes, Craig Finn looked like the happiest man in the world.

I myself wore a beautific smile throughout the show.

“You should clap along with this song,” Craig Finn said during the encore. “I guarantee you’ll have more fun than if you weren’t clapping.”

My forearms are sore from clapping along, and I’m a drummer.

I hooted myself hoarse.

They did two encores.

I texted my brother: “Jesus Christ they killed.”

After the last encore I double-high-fived the guy behind me and his girlfriend. I said, “I haven’t had this much fun since high school.”

“And I’m not even drunk,” I told them.

“Are you going to come back tomorrow?” I asked the woman.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she said. “But now I might.”

Posted: October 25th, 2006 under Concerts, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 4

Last night Tara and I were planning a quiet evening of watching Deadwood and The Office, but then she called me and was all like, “The Secret Machines are playing at First Ave tonight,” and I was all like, “I’m low on cash and we already saw them. Besides, we were planning on spending a quiet evening watching Deadwood and The Office.” And almost as soon as I hung up I realized how incredibly lame I was being, and I called her back and said, “Never mind. We’re going to see the Secret Machines at First Ave tonight.”

And man, am I glad I changed my mind. The last time I saw them it was fucking awesome, and this time it was about a thousand percent better. So, you do the math.

Why was it so fucking awesome? Well, first of all, it was “in the round.” Some of you who aren’t fans of Def Leppard* or the circus may not be familiar with this highly technical term, but it basically means that the stage is in the center of the room and the audience surrounds it on all sides. I had no idea how First Ave was going to pull this off, but they did, and magnificently. It looked something like this:

Did I mention it was fucking awesome?

Here’s another reason it was fucking awesome: they played my favorite SM song, “What Used To Be French”. When I saw them last time, they didn’t play it, and I figured well, no duh, because it’s an old song from their first EP; of course they’re not going to play it. But then last night they totally opened with it, and totally killed it, and it was totally fucking awesome.

And they played all my other favorites, including “Faded Lines” and “Lightning Blue Eyes” and “Alone Jealous & Stoned” and “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” and of course “The Road Leads Where It’s Led”.

And they encored with “First Wave Intact” and that, too, was fucking awesome.

One thing that puzzles me, however, and about which I’d very much like to be enlightened by anyone who knows more about the economic machinations of the music industry and touring business than I do, is this: How can a semi-obscure band (albeit one with a very devoted following and a major-label contract, but still) afford to bring a special stage setup with them that involves the aforementioned in-the-roundness, plus special scaffolding and mounts for special, very expensive-looking lights to be operated by an employee whose whole job during the show is to operate the lights on cue with the music using a very large and expensive-looking computerized lightboard setup, which has been moved from up on the balcony to the First Ave mainroom stage (where all the other bands in the world normally play the other 364 days of the year, but oh no, not the Secret Machines) alongside two other people, also supposedly in the exclusive employ of the Secret Machines Foundation, who are running sound on equally large and expensive-looking soundboards which have also been hauled down from the balcony and onto the stage—not to mention the fact that both times I’ve seen the Secret Machines, there’s been no opening band, just “an evening with the Secret Machines” (as it was advertised in the City Pages) which is pretty much the only time I can think of that happening since I saw Pink Floyd play Jack Trice Stadium in Ames in 1994, and which certainly must also somehow make the whole touring enterprise more expensive? And it’s not like the tickets, at $15, were expensive. Do they just have a bunch of money to throw into putting on really fucking awesome rock shows where they are the one and only, expensive-looking-light-drenched headliners? Perhaps the Brothers Curtis, being from Texas, are heirs to an oil fortune. Or maybe they have a “special relationship” with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

*There’s an oft-repeated bit of rock and roll lore about Def Leppard having trap doors in the specially-constructed in-the-round stage so that while one of the band members was doing, say, a one-armed drum solo, the other members could descend below the stage and receive sexual favors from groupies. I really, really hope this story is true. The Secret Machines’ stage did not boast this feature, though I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if it did.

Posted: October 13th, 2006 under Concerts, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 1

On Friday night I saw Aimee Mann perform at the Minnesota Zoo.

I haven’t listened to Aimee Mann in a while, and my favorite albums remain the Magnolia soundtrack and Bachelor #2, so when she played songs from those I was more or less transported back to the melancholy (read: unemployed) summer of 2000 when I first heard them.

The stage banter was priceless and included a swipe at Phil Collins for beating her out for Best Song Oscar with his “monkey movie.” So apparently she’s still nursing that grudge. For her (first) encore she played “That’s Just What You Are” which is probably my favorite song of hers. No “Voices Carry” though. She’s probably sick of that one.

Posted: June 26th, 2006 under Concerts.
Comments: 4