The Second Moon of Adonis

Crossposted from Last.fm:

Thu 14 Jun – The Queers, The Methadones, The Manges

 Yesterday morning I got a shout from creativelybored [editor's note: exiledsemfiltro here] to enjoy my "blast from the past," referring to the Queers gig I'd be going to at the Bottom of the Hill here in San Francisco last night. I appreciated the sentiment, but a blast from the past? Didn't I just buy Munki Brain a few months ago? It couldn't have been that long ago; they still don't have a link for it here.

I just let the implication that I'd become old and nostalgic settle into the back of my aging skull. I'd been looking forward to this gig for too long to worry that I just might be a dinosaur.

I'd never been to a gig at the Bottom of the Hill before, and I was pleasantly surprised that, even though I arrived almost right at 9:00 when the show was slated to start, I got a parking spot right across the street from the front door. I'd heard that parking on the street was easy to find, but if you've spent any time in San Francisco you know that "easy parking" here would be anything that doesn't require at least an hour's worth of driving in circles, a GPS, and a half-ton of quarters.

I was met shortly thereafter by xanderx, who I feel the need to mention looks nothing like his LiveJournal avatar picture. Well, he looks a little like the parts that aren't squished. Anyway, he's a smart guy, friendly, has a ton of good stories about parts of the world I probably couldn't find on a map, and he doesn't scream as you almost blow through a red light at 1:00 am, which makes him pretty cool in my book. If you can ever talk him into hanging out with you, do it.

First up just after Xander's arrival and a trip to the bar was Italy's The Manges. I will confess that I was slightly disappointed. I've liked these guys for quite a while (in large part because I love a punk band with a funny accent; cf. my Nicotine fetish). I can't completely blame them -- they were the first band up, and the sound was not right. It was muddy and trebly and just generally bad. However, they had a lot of energy, and their guitarist is a gorgeous, tattooed, olive-skinned hunk of a guy, so I managed to keep from being annoyed by the bad soundboard work by studying the way his triceps moved as he changed chords.

After that was a short trip to the patio area for a smoke, another run to the bar, and by the time we got back The Methadones were starting. While they weren't bad, they did have sort of a generic modern punk-pop thing going, a bit like what you'd get if you threw Good Charlotte, Van Halen, and The Cure in a blender. While most of it was pretty "eh," I thought a couple songs were brilliant. Not many, but I did come away with a slightly higher opinion of the Methadones than I had going in.

Next up (after another patio run): The Queers. My little blast from the past. Well, Mr. Bored, you were right. The set was pulled almost entirely from their old staples, from the opener, No Tit, all the way to See Ya Later Fuckface at the end of the encore. The only song from the new album was Duke Kahanamoku, which they apparently played for the first time live. It was a long set, and included literally almost every song in their Top 50 tracks here.

They sounded great, and other than a few minor mishaps like a blown amp and a random stage-crasher singing really bad backup vocals on a cover of Sheena Is a Punk Rocker before diving back into the crowd, they were pretty consistently good all the way through. It would also like to point out to my dear friend Peter that, although these guys have been around in one form or another since around the time I graduated high school, old guys can still rock. Hard and at great length, I'd like to add.

I just found out that Pansy Division is playing a show at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco on April 21st, opening for the Avengers. I think I’m slightly engorged.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

I’ve got tickets to go see Bowling for Soup again tomorrow at Slim’s here in San Francisco. I’ve been looking forward to it… well, since I saw them last summer.

Go ahead and laugh if you want. I realize BFS tilts a bit toward the pop end of the punk-pop scale, and that it may not do wonders for my rocker cred to listen to music so relentlessly happy that the band’s own guitarist once described it as being “like being licked by seven puppies,” but I love these guys. They’re funny, they’re out of shape, and they always look like they’re having a really good time on stage. It’s like watching a band full of your drinking buddies, except that these guys can actually play the instruments. Even drunk, I suspect.

I’ve loved them since the first time I heard Almost from A Hangover You Don’t Deserve while radio station-surfing on my way over the Bay Bridge a couple years ago. After hearing that one track, I stopped at Best Buy on my way home and bought the CD, along with Drunk Enough to Dance — the first new CDs I’d bought in a very long time. I credit BFS for reigniting the love of music I’d somehow lost track of in the years before I heard them, and for showing that there was some pretty damned music that I wasn’t hearing on the classic rock stations.

So, yeah, they’re not angry, they’re not dangerous, and they smile a lot. I’m fine with that. Everyone should be licked by a puppy once in a while.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

The Me First and the Gimme Gimmes gig was last night at Slim’s, and I had a blast.

If you ever get a chance to take Katie out on a Friday night, I highly recommend it. She had me laughing for most of the night, she looks good shakin’ the read hair when the music gets good, she hails a cab far better than I, and she wasn’t kidding when she said she’d buy beer. However, if you do ever get her out somewhere, I do have one warning: “You don’t mess with the ta-tas.” I’m not sure I want to go into the circumstances that prompted her to tell me that.

The opener was a literally painful set by a band named The Charm School Dropouts — though I have to give a small grudging bit of respect to a band who can manage to cover both a song by Turbonegro (Good Head) and a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd (Freebird) in a roughly six-song set.

What the Charm School Dropouts lacked, though, the Gimmes more than made up for. While they did play a decent amount of stuff from the new album, Love Their Country, the set covered a range of songs from every album in their catalog. The only real disappointment was that they never played Mandy, which was a bit of a bummer for Katie.

Still, I can’t complain about the set. Any time I get to see a bunch of tough-looking young punks viciously slam-dancing to Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Danny’s Song and Tomorrow, I’m going to call it a good time.

Speaking of young punks… maybe I don’t get out as often I used to, or maybe it’s something in the water out here in San Francisco, but I’d swear they’ve gotten better-looking than I remember them. Out of respect for my date for the evening, among other factors, I restrained myself from drooling on any of them the entire night, but it took a constant exertion of self control to pull it off.

Oh, and I’m glad to say I survived a brief brush with the pit. It wasn’t as intentional thing, and it was only a brief moment on the periphery, but I made it through without breaking a hip. Hooray for me.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

To my own surprise, I’ve actually received a few entries to my “Win a Date with Me and the Gimmes” contest. I’m going to have a hard time picking a winner, especially if I keep getting entries as good as the ones I’ve seen so far.

At this point I’m chalking it up more to the drawing power of Me First and the crew than to my own ability to get a date, but either way it’s good to know somebody will be using that second ticket.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just posted an offer in my Last.fm journal that I’m already wondering if I’m going to regret.

I’ve got a couple tickets for Me First and the Gimmes Gimmes show coming up in December, and I’ve been having trouble finding someone who wants to go with me. I hate to see a ticket go to waste, and I’m going, alone or not, so I’m going with Plan B: offer up myself and the second ticket to the entire Internet, and see if anyone’s interested.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Or maybe the offer’ll fall on deaf ears, and it’ll be completely uninteresting.

If all goes well, though, I’ll probably end up doing the same thing with the spare ticket I’ve got for the Vandals a couple weeks later.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.