So last Tuesday Stacie, Rob and I went to the big Sadcore show over at Harper's Ferry in Allston. American Music Club played and some other bands opened.
The night started out strange when almost immediately after we sat down at Le's, Mark Eitzel walked in and sat down at the table-in-progress next to ours, which had Vudi and a bunch of girls. I had the Mi Xao while trying to avoid eye contact.
Everyone seemed to hate Barn Burning, like nails on chalkboard hate them, while I was able to just ignore their Counting Crowsism. Ad Frank & The Fast Easy Women were cute for like half the set - mostly it was like watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch, only without a tranny. It just seemed to go a little long for me.
So American Music Club. Hmm. Well, I've seen Mark Eitzel a bunch of times now, and his shows always have an ACOA vibe to them, and tonight was no exception. Before they started in he proclaimed his love for Boston, but admitted he always gets too drunk here, scowled and started looking like he would fall over. Would he yell at us? Smile? Is this happy Mark or angry Mark? How about poorly-lit Mark?
Much like his solo 2007 show, this turned out to be a quick by-the-numbers "I get paid anyway" run through. The first 40 minutes was spent on new material, then a few back catalog numbers and they barely played an hour. Two song encore.
What was good about the show? "Hello Amsterdam" and "Wish the World Away" - Mark had banned songs from AMC's final record "San Francisco" up until now. And they were amazing. I realized I actually have never seen Mark in a simple proper rock band set up before, and once I adjusted to the vocals being unusually low in the mix I thought it was great. The merch table was fierce. I had to stop myself. I picked up the "Atwater Afternoon" tour rehearsal disc and the long OOP "Come On Beautiful" tribute record. Apparently someone found a box of them in his basement and gave them to Mark. I stopped short of a shirt because I do not poop money these days, but they were WAY classier than the last batch of shirts, and I might have to order one.
The crowd was super small [I mean, like there couldn't have been more than 50 people, and really only 30 actively watching] and fucked up, and I don't mean drunk. Just a lot of creepy, creepy people - but I suppose I sort of fall into that category a bit myself. My favorite part was how some of them kept turning around, glaring at and SHUSHING the people talking at the bar. AMC could have cared less, they were still getting paid.
No, wait. The saddest part easily was when Vudi asked the bartender for a Guinness, and pleaded "I have money", and pulled a crumpled fiver out of his pocket. Then bartender actually took the money before bringing him the beer. Not one of us in the crowd was classy enough to buy it for him. Not a single one.
And the Upcoming Shows Muxtape has been updated.
Continuing my latest obsession of cataloging and reviewing all of the records that I buy this year, two weeks ago saw new releases from American Music Club and Mike Doughty.
Because I've only named this web-log and bought a domain based on American Music Club songs, I should be all over this. It's certainly not bad. But it's got me thinking about the whole "American Music Club" mark II phase they're in, which sadly, isn't a phase at all. I mean, when Spinal Tap went all jazz odyssey at least it was different. The latest two AMC records have unfortunately drifted in and out of my speakers and I've barely even noticed. For that matter, I barely even noticed that half the band had changed for this record. I mean, if you're going to replace half your band, I think you'd at least want to bring in new sounding blood, and not just replacements for the old blood. Still going to the show though.
Can I tangent strangely here for a moment? Back in the mid nineties, and I'm not going to place this in context, my friend Maura gave one of the most brilliant arguments against killing yourself that I still hold dear to today:
But what if Ride makes another record...and it's good?It's kind of my exact sentiments about American Music Club.
Remember when I subscribed to eMusic? Yeah, those were good months. One of the things I picked up was an exclusive live recording by Mike Doughty, and on one song he riffs right into American Music Club's Firefly. The new Mike Doughty record? Probably his best yet - certainly his best solo outing. The recipe didn't change but it just tastes better this time.
OK, "Fort Hood", "More Bacon Than The Pan Can Handle" and "Navigating the Stars at Night" are actually downright amazing. Stacie and I already have our front row mezzanine tickets - she has promised to embarrass me and I can only hope she makes a banner to hang off of the balcony.
Well now, that was fun.
So sometime yesterday morning while I was working on some - comment keywords - I broke my database, corrupted a table, whatever. The point of the story is that I'm real tired of php, SQL, CSS and fuck it. I'm just going to let Blogger do the job.
Originally, I published with Blogger for a long time, onto a domain hosted by Geocities. Unfortunately, that domain name was a little too close to my own, and I wasn't all into being Googled.
Next, I took a domain from a line in a Interpol song. Also published by Blogger, hosted on Geocities. Also, there were issues with capital letters back then.
I outgrew Blogger then in two ways - comments and tagging posts. Back then Blogger was not comment or trackback friendly AT ALL. Additionally, I liked the idea of categories, and made the decision to jump to Wordpress. Why Wordpress over Movable Type? It installed on my server easier. I bought a new domain, hosted by iPower which not only allowed server-side scripting for these state of the art web-logging tools, but 3 times as much disk space for 1/3 the cost. Multiple weblogs on one page. Mmm.
Of course, that all meant that I now had to administer the web-log, which got real old real fast. With this latest crash and all the advances Blogger had made in the past few years I just decided it's easier to come back to Blogger and publish here. When I first started on the sickoffood domain, I commented to Joshua from Crabwalk that in continuing naming websites after American Music Club songs from Everclear, my next one would be:
The Dead Part of You. And so it is - just with a 'blogspot' instead of a dot-com.
I'm keeping sickoffood.com for now - files, podcasts, whatever. Playing around to try and get back into the old database. I'll probably turn the redirect off at the end of this month, so update your bookmarks now [as "The Dead Part of You", please]. This has seriously been the worst week ever.
Download American Music Club's Everclear, free 'n' legal.