15 posts tagged “9:30 club”

Mark my words, 2009 can be summed up in two ways. The Year in Music: Pet Sounds. The Year in Food: Cupcakes.

Seems like every band these days is drawing inspiration from Pet Sounds (read lots of harmonies, studio trickery). At the same time, the ubiquity of local cupcake dealers has reached the point of madness here in DC. Everywhere you go, it's cupcake this, cupcake that. The 9:30 Club is selling them now. The humble cupcake has officially jumped the shark. As a spurned Potsy wisely said and I'll paraphrase, just because it's mini, doesn't mean it won't fatten your ass.

The two trends (Pet Sounds and Cupcakes) collided last Monday night at the sold-out Grizzly Bear show when band member Ed Droste came on stage and passed out cupcakes to the front row audience at the 9:30 Club.

Grizzly Bear's latest album Veckatimest (named for an island near Massachusetts as best I can tell) is the brand of swirling melodies, ethereal sonic landscape I've come to expect out of bands this year (see Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion). This is not a bad thing. It's music to reflect to. It's music to get lost in thought to. But we're going to look back on it, much like the cupcake, as very 09.

With one foot stuck unapologetically in the past, a review of what I've been listening to lately:

• What: Come Back to The Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee
• Who: Benjy Ferree, DC local and inexplicable wig wearer. Likely frets that he was born too late to audition for Sha Na Na.
• When: Winter. On a date "of sorts." The Black Cat. CD release party. Crowd was classic DC, crippled by its own apathy. [Ed note: intentional use of ironic quote marks.]
  
• Why: Because it's your new favorite T-Rex album. Because there should be more concept albums. Because Fear and Blown Out are just great songs
• What: Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album title that could be worse. But only if you called it Nissan Pavilion.
• Who: Animal Collective, a band whose last cover art was so bad I refused to get the album
• When: A month ago, after I could no longer ignore CarrieNation's recommendation.
• Why: Twee as fuck. Makes me want to sing in rounds. Shades of Pet Sounds. Here's a great ode to not masturbating, but thinking about it anyway.

• What: 1993's Kill My Landlord (points for not pussy-footing around on a title)
  
• Who: The Coup
• When: Throw the following in a blender in the month of March: Dabysan's recommendation years ago. A renewed interest in the song "Laugh, Love, Fuck" right around the inauguration. A nice gentleman in California sending me their first two albums.
• Why: Brilliant lyrics.

• What: Middle Cyclone
• Who: Neko Case
• When/Where: DC's 9:30 Club. Friends and member of DC CockRock Club in tow. The Secretary of Education showed up and spoke from the stage, marking a weird new era in DC. Neko played with her hair lots, as she does at every show. I was not into the stagecraft. Could have done with fewer images of owls and other precious animals. It was like walking into an Anthropologie. Still, a good show for being encumbered by your own loneliness as she sings yet another song about loneliness. This Tornado is just not that into you.
• Why: Actually, I don't think this album is as good as the others. But the cover art is scary/ badass and sexy all at once. It's worth the price of admission.
  

  Middle Cyclone

  Neko Case

Saw Chrissie Hynde play with her Pretenders last night at the 9:30. Not a lot to say about the show, except that she still rocks and she's about the only woman her age who pretty much looks today like she did in the 1970s. Maybe it's all the veggies she eats. I dunno.

The Pretenders didn't play "Middle of the Road." And they didn't play "My City Was Gone," a song about paving old farms and putting up parking lots in Ohio. It got me thinking about songs that either feature Ohio in the title or have lyrics about Ohio. The Jayhawks have a song about making calls from "deep in Ohio." A Modest Mouse song repeats the name of the state over and over again. Liz Phair shoehorns it into a rhyme about Cinco De Mayo. I'm just scratching the surface. Don't make me raise the specter of Les Nessman, livin' on the air in Cincinnati, WKRP. What gives? Why so many songs about Ohio? Here's another to add to the list:

I am obsessed this week with Sun Kil Moon's Carry Me Ohio, and Mark Kozelek's lyrics specifically.

I dialed back almost two decades and saw They Might Be Giants perform their 1990 record Flood on Friday night at the 9:30 Club. The show was to be "bifurcated," as the well-fed John explained, with Flood at the beginning, followed by miscellany for the latter half. I'll spare you a cogent narrative and leave you with a few observations from the show because I like making lists and can't be bothered. I am lazy. Never said I wasn't.

• There was a couple right in front of me that I was certain met during a 10th grade production of The Crucible. They were holding each other through most of the show and mouthing the lyrics to one another. They probably would make a baby to the music of They Might Be Giants.
  

• Hearing Flood live was an absolute joy. There's no other way to say this. I've written about this record's influence on my music tastes before. No need to rehash that. But let's just say there was immense satisfaction in hearing the opening "Why is the World in Love Again?" bookended by "Road Movie to Berlin." Oh yeah, touring on the success of past records is big right now.

• I think "Lucky Ball and Chain" and "Twisting" have aged well.

• I could have done without the entire second half of the show. I didn't need a song about the number 7. Or that one about the countries, as nice a geography refresher as it was.

• If they were going to do older material, it was pure balls to leave out Ana Ng and Don't Let's Start. After the show, this forced my hand to sing the lines about Ana Ng and how they're getting old but "still haven't walked in the glow"...I'm sure the patrons at Solly's did not appreciate.
  Ana Ng

• I can safely say that unless my future kids make me take them, this is the last time I'll see They Might Be Giants.

Let’s get the mildly trivial things that must be said out of the way first. Liz Phair looked amazing at the 9:30 Club last night playing the entirety of Exile in Guyville. I wanted to come home and take a cold shower. A friend who couldn’t attend emailed us this morning asking about the show, but I really wanted to talk about her outfit.

Phair came out wearing something that looked like a bathing suit that had the sides cut out with a pair of seersucker pants over it. You know how I feel about seersucker, but the pants were saved by the fact that they had long black stripes down the side. It was very J-Crew meets hair metal bands. Oh, and she had on these suspenders that hung down around her waist. They were extraneous, not working to hold up her pants or anything, but Hotrod said he thought they were a nice touch. From the upper deck, you could see that she was wearing amazing black shoes that had red heels that were visible when she sat down to play Chopsticks during the encore. I’ll quote Hotrod here: “She could have come out in that get-up and read the phone book for an hour, and I would have gone home pleased.” Check it out here:

To the music: I list Guyville among my top 10 influential albums for several reasons.

I didn’t get a copy until the summer of 2002 – almost a decade after it had been issued -  but it quickly became one of my favorite records. At the time, it felt like a sexual revolution. There are so many things women aren’t “supposed to” talk about to remain polite. We’re supposed to have sex, but not talk about how much we like it or how we want it. Liz Phair tore up the script on that one with her song-for-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet.  And it's not just a record filled with potty-mouthed talk about sex. The writing is interesting, and there's a reason it was named as the Village Voice's best album the year it was released. If you want the history on the making, here's the interview she did with NPR.

I have an affinity for women who aren’t afraid to have a filthy mouth. I like clever, honest women who wear their intellect on their sleeve. I’m lucky to be surrounded by some of them in my own life. Guyville is a reflection of these women. There isn’t a bad song on the record, but I still get chills listening to the opening guitar on 6’1". And the line "you sell yourself as a man to save” is one of the best burns in rock history. I like this writer's take.

 

Lord, how I miss the Summer of Bill. Even if he doesn't remember that there was a Summer of Bill back in the early aughties, I do.

Bill never actually told me about the Summer of Bill. I think I heard about it first from Dabysan, later confirmed by HotRod. If I may take editorial liberties here, the Summer of Bill (or SOB as we'll call it) evolved as a way for Bill, a mild-mannered fellow with a faint Southern accent, to wrestle his life away from the clutches of the same old drinking routine at a notoriously skeezy townie/jar head bar called King Pepper. This is not to say that Bill wanted to quit drinking during the SOB. But he had other ambitions that summer. Ambitions such as: buy a motorcycle. I'm not sure what else was on the list. Probably get laid and ride coasters, if I were betting.

There were occasions that summer where the phrase "Summer of Bill" got invoked without much explanation. I didn't need to know more, really. It served as an elegant short-hand for someone wanting to change his life, seize the moment or at least tick off a list of fun shit to do in a summer. Bill didn't have to say it. We all knew it. And we all wanted that for him.

Bill eventually left town, moved to San Francisco, slimmed down and became quite the looker. Not sure if it was a result of the SOB, or that he'd long been itching to get out of the town he grew up in. Still, the SOB lives on in my imagination as a good way to get off your ass and reclaim the things you love.

The summer is nearly over, and I've attended zero shows. Time to rectify that. I'm invoking SOB. No time like the present. In the next two months, I'm seeing:

1. Old 97's, July 29th at the 9:30 Club

2. Bon Iver, Aug. 1 at the Black Cat

3. The Hold Steady, Aug. 14 at the 9:30

4. Liz Phair, Aug. 28, 9:30 Club

5. Bob Pollard, Sept. 28, Black Cat

6. Dressy Bessy, Sept. 30, Black Cat

 

Sunday at the Whole Foods on P Street, I came across something so vile that I’m still reeling 24 hours on. Wedged between the stacks of Yoga Today and Saveur was a selection of music targeted squarely at the Whole Foods customer.

This wasn’t new age music enjoyed by 50-something men with ponytails who wear linen lounge wear. It wasn’t the kind of tepid collection of world music that speaks to ex-Peace Corps volunteers. And it wasn’t the sort of Music for Aging Cougars (Antigone Rising) that Starbucks sells.

I couldn’t make out the entire collection because the line snaked down the better part of one aisle, but even from a distance, I could tell that it included Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky and the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. There’s something that strikes me as inherently wrong about this. It’s enough to make a girl want to set fire to the nutritional yeast, knock over the display of fish oil supplements and throw a punch at the nearest self-important D.C. so-and-so checking their Blackberry in line.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like to buy my music from purveyors of music. Not the place that sells me fucking organic free-range chicken. What bothers me most is that I can be targeted in this way. Some marketing genius looked at the data and predicted with frightening accuracy that the people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods fit into a demographic that’s going to like Arcade Fire. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s probably true. But it proves that we are all a bunch of crashing bores.

Can we just stop this cross-marketing bullshit, right now? Why must everything be about creating an experience apart from its original intent? I don’t want an outing to buy groceries/coffee/books to be about anything other than the experience of buying groceries/coffee/books.

There is an experience I’m looking forward to this week that I hope will be totally pure, divorced of marketing gimmicks and about nothing more than watching one of the greatest bands of our time play their music. I hope Wilco rocks our collective Whole Foods-shopping, organic-eating, supplement-taking asses off Tuesday and Wednesday at the 9:30 Club. See you there.

Saw Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) at the 9:30 Club one week ago. I've been meaning to write up a little something about it, but moving all of your possessions 10 blocks away will slow a person down. I'm a big fan of a list for almost every facet of life, so:

1. She was better than I thought, given her reputation for freaking out and running off stage. She sat down near the amps stage right on a few occasions, but that's about as odd-ball behavior as it got. Oh, and there were some weird ramblings. But I think that's to be expected from someone who still seems to be fighting some serious demons. The two cups of coffee she had with her on stage were a nice effort to beat them back.

2.  Chan looks like a woman possessed. I realized this too late when we were all squeezed a little too close to the stage. There were moments where I felt she might reach out and grab Hot Rod. Normally, I'd support that. But I found myself silently praying that she not come any closer.

3. Yo Han commented that she was "doing the same 12-bar blues that's been done for 80 years." True enough. But if Jack White can do it, so can Chan.

4. She did a cover of Tracks of My Tears. That song is a fucking barn burner, and I love it. It should be covered more often.

5. In fact, most of the show was covers, including a dark interpretation of New York, New York and a cover of Satisfaction. A few people commented to me later on that they hated the Satisfaction cover. I'm sorry, but I liked it. And I think it takes balls to cover it. I've said before on these pages that I'm very pro-cover. They almost always turn up something new in a song for me. I've gained a new appreciation for the lyric "he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarrettes as me" as done by Cat Power.

6. This should surprise no one: Chan will be coming out with another covers album soon.

A brilliant list that Jodi posted about the 100 reasons you might still be single listed "calling the month of October "Rocktober" as a reason you'd die alone. Well, I'm sorry, but if that's wrong, I don't wanna be right. Because you know what? October is kinda the rockingist month in DC.

To wit, my fall music plans:
September 26, 9:30 Club: Rilo Kiley

September 27, Black Cat: Magnolia Electric Co.

Oct. 1, 9:30 Club: Matt Pond, Pa

Oct. 15, 9:30 Club: Cat Power

Oct. 27, 9:30 Club: New Pornographers

Contemplating:

Oct. 7, 9:30 Club, Pinback

Oct. 22, Nissan Pavilion: Shins (hesitating because I hate this venue)

Oct. 30, DAR, Ryan Adams (again, hate the venue. And he's a notorious douche in concert).

Nov. 11, Verizon, Bruce and the E Street Band (only an act of God would score Hot Rod tickets to this).

Nov. 15, Black Cat, Stiff Little Fingers (that's right pussies. I said Stiff Little Fingers).

Nov. 15, Black Cat, Georgie James

Nov. 17, Rock N Roll Hotel, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (or am I over them? I think I am. And I think I blame pitchfork)

Nov. 27, Black Cat, Dinosaur Jr.

You know what would be great?

If a certain ginger-haired lovely will wear a shirt that says "Neko Case, make red-headed babies with me!" to the 9:30 club when we go see her sold-out show this Thursday.

You know what would be better? If the message is crudely scrawled in marker on a rumpled, dirty T-shirt.

And funnier than that? If the words "Neko Case" are crossed out and replaced with "Jenny Lewis," and he wears it when she come to D.C. with Rilo Kiley in October. 

At press time, Hot Rod is waffling on my proposal that I'll make him such a shirt to wear for the show. But I plan on gathering photographic evidence if it does happen. And you know, they would have the cutest kids. Until then, here's a nice live version of her song "Teenage Feeling" from the Sound Opinions show. Click here.