Right off, I should point out that I didn’t actually end up seeing Deerhoof, though I am really bummed about it. I probably shouldn’t have gone out at all that night, since I was sort of sick, but I thought I would be OK. Alas, after the many opening acts, I just couldn’t stand up any longer, which was doubly too bad because I think I would have really enjoyed Deerhoof, and I really really didn’t like any of the opening acts.

The Bostonist and Herald (The Herald reviews indie rock shows?) reviews were way, way too generous. Terri has a fuller rundown, with her usual great pictures, and a more positive attitude than I about the whole enterprise. So I won’t duplicate what she writes, but just fill in some pot shots. L’Ocelle Mare was cut from the cloth of the Charlie Parker of the Recorder who plays in the Central and Harvard T stations: impossible for me to tell if he was some kind of musical genius or just some strange guy strumming tunelessly with a pained expression, until he’d stop and smile to let you know the song was over. The Martha Colburn films might have impressed me if I didn’t remember a time when MTV played videos and had that sort of experimental filmmaking edge; accompanying several films was music by Jad Fair, who I’ve never had much use for. I know Le Ton Mite was very self-consciously dorky and childlike and that was part of the schtick, but man, was he just… wrong. When he abandoned his guitar and sang his “remix” (a capella) of a song he called “Damn, you people are fine; some of you gonna make love tonight”, I just lost it. I couldn’t stop laughing and crying; maybe it was the illness, but I just couldn’t believe what was happening was happening. And then, just when you thought it couldn’t get worse… a dance troupe came out and cleared a patch in front of the stage at the Middle East. I have to admit that I liked them a bit, but as the Bostonist review remarks, it was sort of like a Laurie Anderson rip off.

Now, as anyone who’s been willing to sit through my recent tirades against rock shows may surmise, I think that the whole thing needs a bit of an injection of … something. So I’m sympathetic to the general enterprise of bringing a sort of wacky and multi-faceted and arty carnival atmosphere into rock venues. But this wasn’t it.

The Bostonist and Herald reviews seem to imply that the crowd was into it, but that’s not the impression I got. I could definitely hear a lot of mutinous people around me, and people were just sort of talking during most of the opening acts. Part of that could have been that they were quiet– I can’t think of another show where the sound from the Middle East upstairs was leaking into the Middle East downstairs (and not vice versa).

Terri has just called me a negative vibe merchant, but I’m going to post this anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 6:25 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.