Old folks dancing

That pretty much describes the concert, and not necessarily in a negative way. There were a lot of rather drunk 45-60 year-olds doing wonderfully awkward "parent" dancing--the type that's guaranteed to leave their teenage children mortified to be seen anywhere near them. Although I'm still embarrassed when my family members engage in that sort of activity, it's not like I fault them for doing that. When I'm that age, I plan to be going to concerts and dancing my ass off, whether I look silly or not. Good on them.

As for the band, they actually (besides the obvious tracks) played mostly stuff from their new album, which was...good, I guess. It was all fun and dancy and whatnot, and everybody loves "Love Shack," but I can't help but feel that the whole band was really awkwardly trapped between "oldies touring band" and their normal weirdo new-wave/punk/retro-ness. It was especially odd with them, because the B-52s pretty much DEFINE kitschy/campy, and in a very strangely cool-by-way-of-uncool way. It was strange to see a band that was always hip by being square be forced into square-dom unwillingly.

The opening act (The 88) was pretty cool. Because youtube seems to have taken down their only music videos, this is the best clip I could find of them:



...and yes, that's from four years ago. I've heard a couple songs of theirs and always really liked what I heard. They're unabashedly poppy but also just write good guitar pop songs without any pretension or over-affectedness, which is growing increasingly rare. At this point, they're mostly famous for having songs in what seems like every single teen TV show ever. According to Wikipedia, they've been featured in Grey's Anatomy, What About Brian, Men in Trees, Kyle XY ,Emily's Reasons Why Not, Three Moons Over Milford, Greek, The O.C. (4 episodes), Pepper Dennis, Kitchen Confidential, Head Cases, How I Met Your Mother, Numb3rs, Tuesday Night Book Club, Gossip Girl, 90210, One Tree Hill, Summerland, Bedford Diaries, Laguna Beach, The Hills, The Real World, Making the Band, Dawson's Creek, Roswell, and Access Hollywood. Plus some other shows I'd never heard of.

I chatted with the keyboardist after the show for a while about playing shows in Canada, gave him First You Get the Sugar's Web site, and talked to him about how they managed to get so much shit on TV. Really nice guy, and the fact that he actually asked for my band's website, made sure he had it written down, and asked more about us all after I just made an offhand comment about playing in a band up in Montreal was pretty nice of him. Who knows, maybe someday we'll open for the band that opened for the B-52s.

On a final note, seeing the B-52s live made me realize how much FyGTS is indebted to them for our sound. "When She Stops" is obviously a bit "Rock Lobster"-ish, but more generally there's something about that very...shiny? Neon?...sound that they have that I've always heard in our music. Something about twangy guitars and shimmery organs.