One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
–Oscar Wilde
Live like it’s the style…
–Company of Thieves, “Oscar Wilde”
¤ ¤ ¤
After that I better stick this opening, huh? How about this:
Even before I shook the hand of the beautiful woman who’s voice I’d fallen in love with from afar, I was having a pretty goddamn awesome weekend.
(I like it. It stays.)
Even before that happened, I was really up in general. You don’t have to be Steve Winwood in order to be Back In The High Life Again, and a fun year was rolling on with the weekend being the tipping point. I had assumed as I DJed more and day jobbed less that Fridays & Saturdays were going to be every other days for me but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I went in for my usual VIP status at Currant, and hung out with my friends and talked bacon grinder & the usual fun bar chatter over absinthe then went over to my gig for the 2-year anniversary. I barely remember it. It must’ve been awesome. Not because of the absinthe, but the 2nd anniversary was a blowout bash. It might’ve been the busiest it’s been since I started there. And there was cake. CAKE! Everything’s better with cake, and that’s not me talking, folks, that’s science. Straight out.
Saturday I went to see (500) Days Of Summer with some awesome company (non-Thieves variety) and was very pleasantly surprised to find out it came to be my favorite movie of the year so far. JGL & Zooey destroyed it, awesome soundtrack, there’s karaoke, and it’s…oddly real for a movie, and especially for a romantic comedy. It also featured the first time ever I was yelling positively at a movie to END RIGHT NOW! (Which, of course, it did.) I really don’t feel like spoilerfying it but will suffice to say that this has my highest seal of approval and short of my own personal money-back guarantee, recommend this movie to each and all 12 of you still reading this blog. Ran straight from that and the post-mortem rundown & pizza noms–with some plans to do it again–to do the show, and made myself proud by right on time. (I was worried I was cutting it close, but the company was worth it.) Then the show went off, especially in the last 45 minutes when the attendance from the other late places nearby spilled over into our place providing a real make-hay-while-the-sun-shines festive atmosphere.
Pretty goddamn awesome weekend.
And then I got up yesterday and I was like “COMPANY OF THIEVES~!”
Not out loud.
I was saving that for later, methinks.
Originally I was thinking yesterday was going to be a work day but unfortunately the Sunday place is closing, depriving San Diego not only of two of the finest DJs in town but the best calamari steak I’d ever had in my life. Such is the economy. Times are tough all around. Third sentence verging on cliche to make you nod your head and go “So true. So true.”
On the other hand, power abhors a vacuum and glee abhors the maudlin. To wit, with my night suddenly free, I was able to go see the band I’ve been playing the most all summer long, thanks to their catchy-as-H1N1 “Oscar Wilde”, Company Of Thieves. Por ejemplo.
My friend Chris Cantore put me up on these guys and that propulsive guitar’s been running in the back of my head since about April. But the video was really a turning point where I started ramping up my fanboyism. You kidding me? A band playing a song like that with a hot chick out in the lead with a perfect aping of Rushmore (one of my favorite movies ever) naming a song and using quotes from my favorite literati of all time?
You don’t have to believe in the Lord Almighty to recognize things beyond coincidence.
Which is why, upon waking up, the first thing I did in my empty room was think “COMPANY OF THIEVES~!” I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to see this show, as I heard it was sold out.
Fire the interweb up, sip my morning orange juice, and the first domino of the day starts toppling. I hit the COT Twitter (how do you think I find things out? By the news?! Oh, you. You’re 200LATE. That’s what I call you, because you’re so far behind as to be in LAST year. And yes, I combined numbers and letters. I just bring the awesome that way. Infotainment, I call it.) and find out that the show is NOT sold out.
Very good news.
Tickets are $8.
Even better news.
My friend Derric’s plus one has mysteriously disappeared–D, I swear whoever it wasn’t I didn’t chloroform them Saturday after my show and then pushed them into my shed, locked the door, and waited for you to be disappointed. It just happened. His plus 1 was out. He got a plus one because he entered a Twitter contest to get tickets last week; a contest I grumbled at back when I thought I would be spinning and missing the show. He won. And a plus one. And would I like to go see this band as to not waste the ticket and go with somebody else he knows is into the band?
Beyond coincidence.
Lemme tell you something: when you know your day is going to be awesome before you even need to put pants on, you’re going to be having a good fucking day. I caught up on podcasts, made lemonade, just slaughtering minutes through minutae. I don’t want to say I was so excited I could barely keep a thought in my head, but I was pretty damn excited. While I have been seeing way more bands this year, they’re all friends and/or friends of friends, and local bands. This is not to say anything disparaging about a one of them, as good local music should be supported and nourished, but needless to say for a band doing a national tour to get back to town–for me to see them for the first time–for free–my mind was pretty much bubble gum, easily malleable, rainbows shitting out unicorns (I think that’s how it goes).
And a band on the verge! Finding a band on the verge actually worth the hype is like finding a 5′4″, 120-pound brunette Swedish bisexual librarian/stripper.
…just to throw together some random things I may or may not be into…lookit, the point is, when you take your music as seriously as I do (to a point of near-obsession–and some of you are looking at the monitor going “Near?“…well, let’s agree to disagree before I cut you with my best of Def Jam CD case) finding a band who’s star is rising and getting to see them is a reward in and of itself.
But
there’s also the possibility they are a studio band. That the live show is going to fall flat. Not because their plane crashed, or a bunch of Plain White T’s fans jumped the guitarist, or anything, but some bands are studio bands the same way some running backs only work in a platoon system or some basketball players are only All-Stars in practice. It’s a chemistry thing, and it’s the dictionary definition of organic: either it happen or it don’t.
That was the one thing I was even a titch worried about. Even then, I was going to be in the front (and oh my word yes was I going to be in the front) for Oscar Wilde, the clubhouse leader for Song Of The Year ‘09, live.
How worried could I’ve been, really?
Needless to say, there was only one way to make this day better: Daryl Hall.
For those of you who don’t know and GODDAMN SHAME ON THE LOT OF YOU Daryl does a monthly show from his house, where he & his band jam out with up-and-comers. It’s like watching a beautiful sunset or Ann Coulter getting raped to death by a pack of wolves. It’s that awesome. And wouldn’t you know, having been away from watching the show in a minute, I missed the episode where he welcomed in a little band from Chicago named Company Of Thieves?
Watching my new favorite artists get down with one of the 4 white artists allowed in my youth, I felt the familiar stabs of jealousy but even they couldn’t get through the surge of “Good GOD, this is fabulous!” I’m sure there’ve been horrible moments in their stint on the road when people didn’t show, they didn’t perform to their level, things were just off, pay was shitty, all of that, and I know it sucked and in some cases sucked bad. But–but–but–you were at Daryl Hall’s MANSION! (Yes, a mansion. I’m jumping the story a bit, but seriously, how many times have you heard “You Make My Dreams Come True” in movies or TV this decade alone? Are you familiar with the concept of royalties? You goddamn right Daryl Hall’s got a mansion.) You SANG WITH DARYL HALL! You motherfuckers shared barbecue ribs! For all the bad times, I would always look back on that moment–especially considering H&O is something I play weekly, personally and professionally to this day–as like, “You know, it wasn’t always awesome. But one time, I was at Daryl Hall’s place, and we blew through an awesome cover of Everytime You Go Away & Piece Of My Heart and when we got done, we sat in his kitchen and had us some ribs. That’s right, kids. Dad used to be the shit.”
By the time I was having the warmup meal at my favorite Mexican place down the block from the venue, I was looking forward to the show at about a solid 12.5. Maybe even 13. Hell, we caught the end of them on the radio after they’d played 2 hours of their favorite jams and wouldn’t you know as we started driving towards the downtown horizon with the sun setting Oscar Wilde kicked in to end the show.
I was getting a little less amazed–just a little less–but it was still crazy.
I went to stop off for mints first. Just looking forward to it. Just waiting to see if I would run anybody I knew there and especially Chris inside, since he was the lucky devil who was going to interview the band and my own personal Morpheus in this case. My questions of “Does it hurt to be this awesome?” and “Genevieve, will you marry me? I’m just kidding. We can be engaged for a while first.” may’ve been cut due to time restraints, which I didn’t know a web show had. Maybe it’ll be on the collector’s edition DVD next year.
Derric & I were laughing outside before the show, waiting for the doors to open. I asked him if it would be appropriate for a straight 30-year-old black man to unironically use the term SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
You know, I can’t for the life of me remember his answer.
Nevertheless, while he did bring up the idea we might just happen to run into the band on their way in, I didn’t even consider the prospect. I knew what the wings on my back were made out of, and I could sense a big light looming overhead. There is such a thing as asking too much of a day, how awesome it may be going. And then the doors opened, and we got in line, and a white van pulled up curbside.
Derric & I both were like, “I think that’s them. Looked like Genevieve’s haircut, at least.”
Here’s what awesome and tragic about being a guy: we both could’ve been absolute dorks at that moment, but realizing we were in public, we were both kinda trying to be Jules-in-the-booth cool even though we’d both been looking forward to this for a while. The van hilariously takes about 2 minutes to parallel park. The line moves.
And that’s when my life stopped getting real and started getting scripted. I mean overtly scripted, to the point where if somebody had handed the following to me I would’ve laughed them out of the room and then forwarded it to all my friends so we could get together, get drunk, and a la the Office play the roles of the protagonists in a table read.
But this happened.
This happened.
I am 99% sure that this happened.
As I went to hand the bouncer my I.D., there was a small woman next to me, talking to a member of the establishment about getting in, and about to show her I.D. I found this hilarious, even though I could barely move and speaking was going to be out of service for a few more moments because while the bouncer may not have known, I knew exactly who she was and that that wasn’t a fake out-of-state I.D.
Genevieve, the lead singer of Company of Thieves.
Ladies and gentlemen…we have just lost cabin pressure.
I look at Derric in what I can only assume are the wild eyes of someone watching a car hurtling towards their child but it’s the mirror opposite of that, and it’s not: I am Homer, and this moment is the ghost train, and either I’m going to get splattered, or…that’s it. I am definitely going to get splattered.
I’ve been less nervous on dates. This year. And there’s 4578 buhbillion (scientific number above kajillion) things I want to say but they’re all in the doorway at once, and nobody’s getting out. And my arms are flailing, and Derric, being the kind gentleman he is, throws me a rope as he gets inside. Perhaps the wild look in my eyes was too universal to be mistaken for anything than the agogness that it was, and it’s he who says the words to Genevieve as I am too dumbfounded/paralyzed/starstruck/twitterpainted/retarded/happy/choose-your-own-toppings-and-have-fun to even be able to fully fake a movement that would constitute forward momentum in technical terms.
She’s actually headed in to interview with Chris, but will catch us after the show. And we introduce ourselves, and she shakes our hands, and she heads for the back, and that, kids, is how I met your mother.
Oh, I should BE so goddamn lucky.
In the same wave the moment brings me to shore it goes out with the tide, and all of a sudden every single verb, adjective and noun is dancing on my lips. Isn’t that always the way? Derric & I confer: that was, in fact, fucking awesome. We high-five (of course the hand she shook. It works like a power-up.). I may’ve quit Earth. I can’t remember. What I don’t need to remember, since I took the benefit of doing it to myself for myself (NOT THAT), was that I then proceeded to send a two-part Twitter.
Most of which consisted of the word SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! (Like Lindsay before it, heavy on the E.)
I bought a spanking-new Infect The Youth COT shirt (they really need to get on those COT Stole My Heart shirts, though, that is too good an one-liner to confine to a tote bag) and picked up the album Ordinary Riches for a combo deal. I had my favorite beer and Derric & I toasted, and then I changed into the shirt.
There was enough HOLY SHIT, DUDE in me to power a small town at this point. And yet I was still going to go nuclear. But I digress, as I tend to do so I can use the phrase “but I digress” non-ironically.
After meeting one of Derric’s old acquaintances and getting her back into the swing of things on Twitter we run into Chris after the show. He’s glad to see us and us him, a round of hail fellow well met ensues. Of course we ask him about the interview, and he alludes without giving away the farm. We all talk about being excited to see him, and I, of course, reveal that earlier in the day we have seen the COT ep of Live From Daryl’s House. Chris then says that show’s part of the reason he got into his Internet radio show which, of course, is how we ended up meeting earlier this year and how I found out about COT in the first place.
See what I mean? Table read stuff.
The opening band of hot Latinas played, but Derric & I were talking to Chris and then as they take down the set for the interview (in the back room at the Casbah, just off-center from the pool tables), we run into Mike, the drummer, as he’s toting the drum into the main room. We exchange well-wishes, talk to him for a few beats, and shake his hand. (Double power-up, activated. Also, I’m a colossal dork.)
Hey, did I mention I’m a colossal dork?
Watch me run right towards something nobody wise would admit to–we were hanging out with Julie, and her friends who’d gotten her into the band, and I was drinking my beer. Genevieve was in the doorway, with the white light from the perpetual Christmas lights surrounding her overhead. I hadn’t seen anything like this since Kristen Bell, but that happened because, well, let’s face it, I’m insane and was all mental. In this case, it was one of those stupid ridiculous a bunch of things combine at once to provide a moment moment, and I proceeded to let a version of SQUEE! that technically had no letters in it and I could only desperately try to explain it later as a high-pitched hum.
I also did this loud enough that everybody else in the group looked at me.
I hadn’t fully realized I was doing it out loud until that happened.
Did I mention I’m single?
At least that was an abberant reaction, and later got to the point where she & I could be in the same room together and not turn into a incoherent, slobbering mess. Still embarassing in retrospect–I’m more embarrased writing this now than I was when I was actually doing it yesterday.
Endless Hallway is blowing through a high-power, energetic set, and those boys are something. I, of course, am backtabbing that. I am trying to figure out who is controlling the Twitter account for the band. I do want to thank them, and assume it’s the merch guy I had the friendly discussion with earlier as I was the first buy of the evening when they were setting up. It is in fact the guitarist, Marc.
Marc is over at the merch booth, talking and writing.
Derric & I confer.
Well, we have to go for the FULL BAND POWER UP at this point, right? Dignity is for boring people who fall asleep on Sunday at 10:30 on the dot–I’ve got a motherfucking epic to write with life, and the 2nd awesome beer is hitting me just right, and I am no longer making R2D2 noises–Hal Jordan! Yes! Let’s do it!
So we meet Marc, and to commemorate another sign of me being too close to the forest to see the trees as I look at my CD he’s the only one who’s signed it, because he’s the only one I remembered to ask. He’s got glasses on and is just as nattily clad as he is in the CD pamphlet, and there is an internally awkward moment where I realize he is firing off the setlist for the evening as he’s talking to us. Oh, I could’ve stopped there.
But fuck that shit: I want to know about Daryl Hall’s place. I am sure it is nowhere near as awesome as that video looked or as I have built it up in my head.
Marc told me it was, and let me in on a couple of behind the scenes setup stuff for the show.
Awe is still beating jealousy, but it’s a closer game now.
Marc goes off because Endless Hallway is winding down, and that means it is almost something we industry insiders call motherfucking go time. So D & I are ready to go inside when we bump into Mike again, and in the dim recesses of my mind I remember what Jancee Dunn taught me: you want to talk to somebody, you talk to the drummer.
Mike is smoking and we hang out for 10 minutes, and he is tremendous to hang out with. I say, of all the drummers in up-and-coming bands, he’s #1 AND #2. He’s that funny. Our conversation pingpongs about like he isn’t put here in our town to commence melting our faces off momentarily, so we find out all sorts of sweet road stories: why he can’t hear the word Monster without flinching, why Mobile, Alabama & fans of the Plain White T’s suck (so awesome to get a suspicion confirmed from an outside party with inside connections, on both counts), what is really going on with the Twitter account and how they’re using it, what covers are coming up during the show, how we found out about them…just, the surreality of the moment is pretty fucking high, I can tell you, but something happened at the outset of the night that set the template for the evening, and I am no longer the wide-eyed innocent who was waiting in line. I almost feel like…this should be happening, almost.
Oh, and Mike confirms that he wasn’t in the LFDH episode because his session drummer is the guy from SNL in the days of Myers & Carvey, Sandler, et al. If you’re going to lose to somebody…
Also, Mike says that Daryl is actually living at two mansions from consecutive centuries, one next to the other and the newer one brought in from Maryland to his place in New York. I asked him if it was true Daryl Hall once kissed a man so hard he turned into Scarlett Johannsson, but at this time he had to go rush the stage and be super-awesome. After hearing about Daryl’s mansions, I have now got on my bucket list “GO TO DARYL’S”. Ridculous. The rare story where the more you hear, the more you go no fucking way.
Ah, but here is the story, loyal reader. Here is the part where the wheels come off the doors and it strikes midnight and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin and while I find out they are entertaining, witty people, they are, in live actuality from the third row (dammit), a horrible, horrible live band.
In the immortal words of Tom Cruise, go fuck yourseeeeeeeeeelllllllllllllllllllllf.
They pretty much blow through the entirety of Ordinary Riches and I would publicly like to pay them one of the biggest compliments I can pay a band of their style:
These motherfuckers play like they’re going downhill.
Even through the cheeky cover of 1979 they threw a couple verses in during the middle of the set. (Indie band from Chicago trying to make good off of alternative music, epic guitar hooks and singalong chorus? Pfft. That’ll happen.)
Whatever was in that cigarette has Mike slamming the beat like an irate guest at a hotel trying to get the bellhop, glasses off and still dressed way better than I’m ever going to be Marc is fucking barrelling, barrelling through the album like somebody’s got a gun to his head and if he dips down below “super awesome” the stage is going to be painted bright pink with his cerebellum, and Genevieve’s voice is really an instrument. Sometimes I’m reminded of Billie Holliday, though I’ve heard Regina Spektor and there’s some of that there, too, for sure. She is rocking out so hard I can see sweat coming off of her. She is smiling with glee as we clap and jump about. She is beating the tambourine so hard somewhere in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area Chris Brown was like “Maybe you should take it back a couple notches. Just saying.” She is going so full throttle I’m literally worried she is going to have an asthma attack onstage.
They do the new single “Pressure”, and about 4 other songs that either are going to be or should be singles, and then after having caught their collective breath, decide that they want to get an already rabid audience dancing and launch into “Oscar Wilde”.
This year, I’m doing a new thing. Sometimes, when a moment is getting to me–really being A Moment, whether it’s something ephemeral like a breeze & the sunlight hitting me at the right time or celebrating good news or seeing an awesome band launch into my favorite song of theirs–I close my eyes. I blot out my primary sense, trying to power-up the others. Times are going to suck. Things are not going to go my way. The usual issues will remain the usual issues, since I’m human and all.
But every once in a while, even I–even I of the high-pitched letterless hum–get A Moment. And if I’m not trying desperately to absorb it, to let it consume me so I keep it forever and ever until they put me into the ground–then what I am doing is a life.
It is not living.
So Marc lays down the freight train guitar and Mike is kicking down the door with the drum and the tambourine in Genevieve’s hand is practically singing “Nutbush City Limits” and everybody around me is clapping their hands (fortunately, something I can hear and feel and not need to see for the impact to land) and for that moment, for A Moment, in an couple eyeblinks I am fortunate, I am blessed, I am everything right and I know I’m going to have this forever and ever until they put me into the ground.
And now I am taping with my camera (shoddy audio be damned), and smiling so big my nose isn’t visible, and singing along to every single fucking word and stomping my foot along to Mike’s beat (no personal healthcare be damned) and it’s not a wave washing over me anymore, but a wave I’m into. Part of. Riding.
They close the show and go out back and the crowd is screaming for more, for an encore, and they get it in the form of a couple of the slower songs off the album, and a pretty awesome cover of Buck Owen’s “Act Naturally”, one of my favorite thumb-in-the-eye-of-Hollywood songs of all-time, playing Gary Jules to his Tears For Fears to strip away the musical veneer to get to the underlying veneer and bleakness.
I said to somebody who asked me what I was doing yesterday that they were like the Cars mixed with the Carpenters, but that is crazy talk; they rock harder than the Cars and I can’t see any of Genevieve’s ribs. Portishead on meth? A less-bouncy more-awesome Veruca Salt? the Pixies if Kim Deal fronted them and went quiet-quiet-quiet and loud-loud-loud during songs and didn’t ping-pong? the Breeders if…well…Kim Deal HADN’T been fronting them? I dunno.
All I know is I staggered out into the street after with a head full of feedback, and while my eyes were wide again this time the source wasn’t a surprise: I’d seen an awesome show. A top 5 of all-time show on my list. (Seems unfair to put them above R.E.M., who did a bunch of slower things but did them just as awesome. Above the RHCP and STP. Probably behind A Tribe Called Quest and George Clinton, in that order.) And I got to see them before they got horribly popular, though I would both love and hate it if that happened for all the obvious reasons.
So Derric & I get our pictures taken with all the COT stuff he & I’ve gotten, then a pic and some hang time with Mike, who’s mostly recovered, and the same with Marc, who is happy and asks us about the cost of living here vis a vis Chicago. We even get in digs on our transplantedism and the fact that they mysteriously got the hell out of Dodge in February to come to our shores. They are looking forward to coming back to town. Good to know. I might show up.
There was really only one way to end the night, and only one way to get the DOUBLE FULL BAND POWER UP–ah, jeez, and I embarrass myself again. Around a pretty girl, no less. I suppose it comes with the terrain.
As Marc & I are talking and Derric & I are letting him know that all the @replies he has to look forward to for the next 24 hours are actually probably us and not bots or anything. Not only that, I don’t even have the dignity of getting out through the over-the-top two-part caught-up-in-the-moment SQUEE! post, as he mentioned he saw a little uptick in their movement and I self-mockingly reiterate the post I made in the afternoon, that odds of me yelling out I LOVE YOU, GENEVIEVE! have been taken off of the board in Vegas.
And a feminine voice, exhausted, from behind me, about two arm reaches away: “Huh?”
And I turn, because that’s what happens: Charlie Brown charges the football, Daffy Duck turns the gun, BET continues to air–well, you don’t have to be Clouseau to guess who. But that handshake was hours ago, and after I get over my initial mortification (with Marc being highly amused at the “ah, shit!” moment writ large over my face when it happened and who the hell could blame him? From the outside that shit is HILARIOUS) I just reiterate my express gratitude for the whole night and the band’s performance to Genevieve, who hauls herself off of the curb and thus I am able to close out my evening without my full range of dignity but at least a moment, almost A Moment, a little something I can hold onto and be a little proud of:
Anyway, if I haven’t sold you on the Company of Thieves, that’s perfectly all right from this corner.
I just wanted you to share A Moment.
And thank the awesome Chicagoians and San Diegans who made it possible.
Like I said…a pretty goddamn awesome weekend.
Would you care to guess what song I’m listening to right now?
DOWNLOAD: “Pressure”, “Even In The Dark”, “New Letters”, “Quiet On The Front”, “Oscar Wilde” (obv.)
