I don’t know if it’s the proliferation of cheap recording technology or the fact that Guitar Center is always having crazy, once-in-a-lifetime blow out sales, but for some reason everybody and their mother thinks they should be in a band these days. This is all well and good when the wanna-be Coldplays and the would-be Limp Bizkits keep their ill-fated dreams locked up in a practice studio somewhere. That way the public’s ears are safe and none of us ever have to be subjected to their self delusion and extra shitty music.
The thing is, most of these bands insist on playing live. (The rest of them send me CDs). By way of either luck or tenacity they end up opening for bands that are much better than them. Allow me to address these cut rate opening bands for a moment: Do not do this. I understand you have dreams of rock stardom, but it is simply not in the cards for you. When your lame-ass, no talent band gets up on stage and sucks at full volume, it only makes you look bad. And it makes the band you’re opening for look that much better.
Case in point: I went to see We Are Wolves last night at Cafe Du Nord. There were two opening bands. One of them dressed like a group of drug-addled Burning Man cast-offs and played psychedelic electro dance rock. They were ok. At the very least they got the early crowd dancing and they seemed to be either really enjoying themselves or really high on peyote.
It was the band that came on next that was the problem. They were god awful. The drummer was off time, the guitar player just made noise, and the singer couldn’t sing - although from the look on his face you would have thought he was a finalist on American Idol. By the time they lurched into their second song the whole audience had escaped to the bar in the front room, leaving behind three people near the stage that were clearly relatives.
Why keep playing at that point? If you can’t even make music mediocre enough for people to ignore, if your music literally repels them, why not just give up? Do you think a surgeon would keep cutting people open if everyone he touched died on the operating table? Do you think a race car driver would keep getting behind the wheel if his cars blew up as soon as he crossed the starting line? No, they would not. So why do you insist on playing music when it is so clearly not meant to be?
Really the only acceptable answer is this: The incredibly terrible band whose name I didn’t even bother to look up was there just to make We Are Wolves sound awesome by contrast. If that’s the case, then congratulations on a job well done. When WAW hit the stage and began cranking out their trademark brand of electro-punk, it was like drinking a cool milkshake after 45 minutes of hot shit sandwiches. The crowd came streaming back into the room, twice as large as it was before. Everybody danced and drank. WAW didn’t waste any time with mumbled banter in between songs. They just turned their amps up and rocked like it was meant to be.
I once heard a crazy statistic about the difficulty of parking in San Francisco. It was something along the lines of there being five cars for every public parking space. In other words, parking is a huge bitch. Unless you have your own garage or can afford to pay $50 a day for parking, you’d better get your ass a Geo Metro or a Vespa or something else you can squeeze into that semi-legitimate half space between the bus stop and the loading zone.
A few years ago an old lady t-boned me at a stop sign and totaled my truck. I was forced to look for a new car and everybody kept reminding me about the parking situation, telling me I should get something practical. But flaunting conventional wisdom was kind of my m.o. back in those days, so I did the opposite: I bought a 1981 Cadillac Coupe De Ville with chrome rims, tinted windows, and a sub-woofer the size of a love seat. It was as long as three Geo Metros combined and got about 11 miles per gallon. But it was awesome. When I asked the guy who was selling it if it helped him get girls, he said, “Are you kidding? I just turn up the stereo and drive by the high school.”
One of my favorite things to do was to throw on a punk rock CD, put the system on blast, and drive over to Oakland for some BBQ. The car was so pimped out that people expected it to be driven by a guy wearing a fedora and a shark skin suit. When they saw a skinny white boy with a mohawk get out of the ride, they always stared. It was like they couldn’t connect the image in their head with what they were seeing. I was even profiled by the cops; I was pulled over three different times, but when I rolled down the window and they saw that I wasn’t a pimp, a thug or even a famous rapper, they’d just shake their heads and say “never mind.”
The car turned out to be a lemon and I eventually traded it for $600 cash and a digital 8-track recorder. But if I still had the Caddy, the band that I would have stuck in my stereo this week would be Tweak Bird. In fact, they might be the band that perfectly sums up the aesthetic I was going for: loud and aggressive, but with enough funk to make it nasty, and just weird enough to keep you guessing. Their new 7″ doesn’t come out until early next year, so you have enough time to go and get a record player installed in your car. That way you can listen to Tweak Bird while you drive around endlessly, looking to blow some minds - or just trying to find a parking spot.
These guys have all been friends since they were pre-schoolers back in Jersey - in case you care about that sort of thing. It’s not really all that relevant except that it might explain how Thing-One got such a cohesive sound before they even graduated college. Their newest track “Move It” is tight little dance rock nugget, and it leads us to believe they played a few house parties back in their school days. Their slower songs tend more toward the proggy side of the rock spectrum, although the rhythm section always gets a chance to shine. You can tell they’re still developing, but once the band makes the inevitable move to the city and seasons their sound with a little of that downtown grit, they will make the final leap to awesomeness.
Supposedly comparing one band to another is the biggest cop-out in music journalism. Even worse is saying that Band X is a cross between Band Y and Band Z. But everybody does it. Why? Because it’s the quickest, most accurate way to describe a band in universal terms that anyone even remotely familiar with that genre of music can understand. Having said that, we would like to declare the band Sigmund Droid to be a cross between Suicidal Tendencies and DFA 1979. In your face conventions of music journalism!
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
