...or, The Old Married Couple Goes to a 'Gig'
It was a fine anniversary get away, topped off by an orgy of rock
The poor weather proved a excellent tonic for Santa Barbara's California Beach Theme Park iconography, and last night I got my lightning storm. A bolt landed smack downtown as we were enjoying lamb vindaloo at the Taj Cafe, eliciting a chorus of genuine screams from the street and knocking power out for a few minutes. Hooray for candelit dining!
After, we wandered vaguely up the street until the telltale hipster spoor of slouched, hoodie-clad smokers and thumping bass alerted us to the hidden presence of the club.
I've never been enthusiastic about these things except in the abstract. It was easy for me to suss out the show and buy tickets and be excited when it was two months off, but premonitions of doom inevitably haunt the day of. Pure idiocy given my 100% success rate over the years. Happily, the wife cajoled me from our plush hotel womb with the paramecium decals on the wall, saving me from the tragic folly of trading a peak musical experience for an all new episode of Cake Boss.
The venue was nice, the gal found my name on her clipboard with no problem, and we secured one of the tables on the dining podium for a base camp (protip: avoid the scrum around the bar by bribing a waitresses to bring you drinks). Proving how out of the loop we are we picked up a couple of tee shirts before the show, which I then had to carry around all night. Silver lining, I was able to wave them overhead like a pirate flag once the crowd reached a fever pitch.
People kept pouring in, opening bands played, we killed time drinking and people-watching. Three gin and tonics set me back 30 bucks, the price of the crawfish stuffed blackened Filet Mignon I'd enjoyed at The Palace Sunday night. I'll take the steak ten falls out of ten, but at least the drinks were made correctly (and you can't attach a dollar value to the spectacle of the 50-something couple mauling each other like teenage first timers who just raided the folks liquor cabinet- the Wife nearly wept when they migrated beyond our field of view, presumably to strip and start humping in the middle of the street outside.
The openers were okay but missing something. The musical ground between 'awful' and 'brilliant' is broad and thickly populated by talented, hardworking bands that can't manage to make real impression. I always want them to be better and feel kinda bad about saying "they were okay", because even being the local opening act for a touring band takes a tremendous amount of work and dedication.
That might be part of my show day nerves. Watching people give something their all when their all isn't enough makes me a little depressed.
But eventually the openers wound down, the place filled up and the hopeful migration to the dance floor began.
It being 'all ages' show, we got about 10 feet away from the stage via the simple expedient of hitting the 'no drinking' side. I was (as usual) the tallest person in the room and had an excellent view of the stage and the tops of a lot of people's heads. The Wife's vantage was less salubrious, but the sonic assault was still able to massage her soul.
I'll post a pic of the shirts later, since they nicely summarize the Sleigh Bells experience (basically the uncensored title of this post writ large in white on a black tee). In the meantime, my humble prose will have to suffice.
They didn't so much take the stage as explode.
One second we're all jostling for postion while a couple of people up front try to get a "Sleigh Bells!" chant going, the next we're being blown back like a field of wheat in a tornado by Tell 'Em.
It was so ridiculously great and huge and over the top, so much better than my sniveling inner critic expected that I roared with laughter, which seemed the only way to adequately express the pure joy of the moment.
And there wasn't much let up.
They played the whole album at peak intensity, with every song hitting at least ten times harder than the recorded version. The only exception was Rill Rill, which is IMHO the best sounding tune on the record, but sort of a muddle live. No matter, everyone had a great time singing along anyway and the whole rest of the show sounded fantastic and hit like a semi truck being towed behind a jet fighter.
The climax was (as I'd hoped) Crown on the Ground.
Youtube pulled the only high quality live clip, but this one at least lets you extrapolate the energy level and volume involved.
It takes a hell of a song to push an already epic show to another level, but from the air-raid siren guitar intro through the fake-out ending the whole audience was fused into a single spasming organism, something primitive and mindlessly evolving like the paramecium from our room.
We howled for an encore, but as the nice lady pointed out when she emerged from backstage to face the ravenous crowd, "have you listened to our album? it's only 34 minutes long- we haven't got any more songs!"
A few albums down the line Crown can take its rightful place as their stadium-annihilating encore, for now it makes a final number nonpareil.
If my point has somehow proven elusive, allow me to make it explicit:
If these cats play anywhere nearby, you owe it to God to go see them and be rocked off your foundations.
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