Weekend Concert News

We went to see Fountains of Wayne at American University on Friday. It was a blast. They played great, sounded great, and seemed like a bunch of likable, hypertalented guys who were genuinely happy to be on stage playing their music. Their performance pretty much cemented my belief that they are the perfect pop band: they have a Beatlesque ability to wed catchy, sophisticated harmonies to smart, funny lyrics. They make me smile.

The singer, Adam Schlesinger, turns out to be a tall rail-thin slightly effiminate guy with a friendly, hesitant smile. His voice sounds exactly the way it does on their records, which is to say, amazing: it’s smooth and nuanced, and can move effortlessly between sweet falsetto and rock and roll growl. There was nothing very inspired in the mechanics of the performance: they basically just lined up and played, with almost nothing in the way of embelishment or Rock God posturing, except for a little bit of camp near the end. They didn’t need it.

I can’t say I liked the band that opened for them as much, though, a group called Throne. They were a lot louder than they were good, and they did a lot of preening and hair tossing, and spent an inordinate amount of time wiggling their asses at us. The ass wiggling in particular I found a little tiresome. While I will say that they had fairly nice tushies, as these things go, they waggled them so much and so often that it just became ludicrous, and then mildly irritating. I realize it is not for me to set arbitrary limits on the maximum amount of butt wiggling that is acceptable during the course of a twenty-minute set, but I think it’s safe to say that anything over ten minutes is excessive.

Almost as much fun as watching Fountains of Wayne, though, was watching them with a bunch of college kids. I like going to concerts at universities. This one was in Bender Arena, a cavernous basketball stadium with a tarp taped to the floor, presumably to protect against unpleasant rock and roll secretions. The kids around us were an eclectic bunch. There was a hypercool guy with big aviator sunglasses leaning up against the stage barrier, flanked by two students of the shapely female persuasion; there were were a couple of semi goth girls that looked like they’d been wrung through Alice’s Wonderland a couple of times, with striped multicolored stockings and bright prismatic hair to go with their odd piercings and dark garments. There was the stock Couple Who Couldn’t Keep Their Hands Off Each Other; it was nice to see two people so obviously overjoyed to be in one another’s company. And then there were the Really Strange and Unclassifiable People, like the two guys running through the crowd, trying to slap each other’s asses and giggling maniacally whenever they succeeded. Very weird, but everyone seemed to take it in stride.

I didn’t get to many concerts when I was in college, alas, but I nevertheless found myself cataloging the differences between this event and the ones from back in the day. First, there are a lot more cellphones. Every other person seemed to have one. During the opening band’s set, the girl in front of us was simultaneously gyrating to the music and checking her email on her phone, occasionally holding it up and waving it along with the beat, perhaps in unconscious tribute to the lighters that her ancient ancestors from the sixties held up at their proto-concerts.

Of course, the cell phones in my era were brick-sized and tended not to work very well unless you were actually in hearing distance of the person you were talking to, so it just wasn’t feasible back then. Still, it would have been cool to have them, because … um … I could have, like, called the nuclear clock to get the correct time, down to the millisecond, right in the middle of the concert, man. Right in the middle of it.

Yeah.

Also the skirts at this show, where there were skirts, were much shorter, and the jeans, where there were jeans, were much lower. Shirts tended to end far above the midriff. I’m not complaining about the additional bared flesh, of course. That would be extremely unmale of me. It’s merely an observation.

Other than that, everything felt about the same. The charge that ran through the crowd when the lights dimmed for each band was palpable, and exciting, and I was happy to be a part of it. There’s nothing like the sensation of a press of people around you, moving to a beat that you feel in your sternum, the primal sensation of meat unhooked from its brainstem for a while.

We’ve got to do this more often. The last group, N.E.R.D., were pretty good too, I thought. The crowd loved them. Hard to classify the music, sort of a mix of guitar-driven rock and hip hop with an underlying groove designed to make one want to shake one’s tail feather, if one was inclinded toward tail-feather shaking, which, lord knows, I’m not. There are people whose tail feathers were meant to remain absolutely stationary during times like these, and I am definitely one of these people. The lead singer said motherfucker a lot in his inter-song interludes, and once said something about his more attractive fans’ asses being spaceships that he wanted to ride. I found this an odd comment to make, but they ate it up, and it turned out to be a seague into a song that featured this line prominently in its chorus. A pretty good song too.