about last night ...

[jordan@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Jordan Hayes)]

so, john and i are sitting over a beer, talking about all the miserable
times we have had trying to see bands. we remembered seeing the
replacements playing a beatles song. the pontiac brothers opened. what
a foolish time.  husker du + 2 bands ... show starts at 9:30 ... we
arrive at 10 ...  husker du is already 10 minutes into their set ...
they play for another 20 minutes or so ... they were good, to be sure,
but ...

so it's no suprise that here we were, once again sitting in the
berkeley square, sucking on a long tall cold corona, watching 4 idiots
called nonfiction try to impersonate their way through an opening set
for ...  for HIM. the flyers at the door say `SEE JOE SING' ... `SEE
JOE DANCE' ...  `FOLLOW JOE OUT INTO THE STREET!' ... the last time we
had seen HIM he made it out just about to the liquor store down the
block with his fm-tranceiver-ed-flaming-orange guitar in a blaze of
tex-mex to tear the sucker down. well. yes, joe "king" carrasco was
back (with a vengence!), and we, of course, had paid the $7 to see him
(the flyer said "AND WORTH IT!").

sporting longer hair than ever (perhaps he hadn't cut it since we last
were graced by his highness) and a "viva nicaragua libre" t-shirt, he
and the crowns blistered into his opening song of 4 years now (at
least), "LET'S GO" and I was ready to do so. actually, he was a bit
late in coming on, and i had made parallel plans that evening, so i
caught 4 or 5 tunes before leaving ... deftly, the beat girl had opted
out of this one.

next stop ... das klub over on the other side of the bay. an
appropriate localle for the post-apocolyptic party you were planning on
throwing.  reminded me a lot of my pyramid days ... some sad people in
clubland tonite, yaaaasss. something didn't seem right. the beat just
wasn't there.  after hours (california is really tweeked about stopping
the serving of liquor at 2am sharp) a pair of correctly dressed lads,
caling themselves `tooth and nail' entered from the rear. a chris cross
look-alike from the '81 glory days of the blitz with a matching white
collarless-shirt and bass provided the drone, while a richard
smith-sound-alike fronted a wall of screaching guitar over-loaded with
effects pedals. i tried to count.  stereo chorus, active electronics,
reverb on 10; touching the strings made your skin crawl. he played very
delicately. no macho 6-string-phallus here, but it was then that i
realized that although the singing for the cure is horrible, it works.
this guy was just horrible.  they had a lot of potential, though. i
could tell because when they did an instrumental with a special guest
violinist, the amaturish feedback died out and i found myself moving to
the undercurrent. sort of a bauhaus meets the cure with really bad
lyrics.

sleep came down and we crossed the river, that one last river of ...
oh, i guess it was a bay, really. just thought you'd like to know.

/jordan