[from Portland,
OR]: A slew of men (boys) in nerd wear (skinny knee length shorts, high socks,
ugly shoes, psychedelic ball caps). Three guitars, a trombone, and drums. Wacky,
playful. Vocals sort of spoken. Music spare, 90s sounding. It was so familiar…
I inexplicably found myself thinking Minutemen and then they went all hardcore.
So, feeling myself, I decided they all live in a house together in NE Portland,
which is swiftly being gentrified by white people, especially white people who
are young and hip, and, to me, unimaginably privileged for their age. In this
house I built for them, lives the cadre of women (girls) dancing and frolicking
as professional fans to the left of the stage: one barefoot, one doing
bluegrass leg lifts in mom shorts, and one with orange hair and a purple bra
and an orange shirt. They’re actually verbatim Dead Milkmen. As hard as it was
to be new under the sun decades ago, it just gets harder? But I still believe
and make it a point to roll my eyes hard when people (middle-aged people, like
me) say there’s just no good music anymore. Some Ween, athough I might have
been influenced by a shirt I passed – happily, everyone pulled out their band
shirts for the St Johns Bizarre. Insane Clown Posse … except the opposite of menacing.
But the nerdiness was also very calculated – they worked the crowd, and me,
like threads and pinkies with their nerd banter and joy. So joyful. They introduced
several songs as covers of “this band Kulululu.” They did a super tight groovy
hardcore song called “Crab Daddy.” And then they did another song called “Crab
Daddy” (same song), thanking the crowd for the request. Even when they were
being stupid, they were being smart. The drummer, especially, couldn’t stop
smiling and then I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t either. The trombone
player was a sleeper star, magically playing from the back of the crowd at the
start of one song, ingeniously appearing as an inappropriately-cheering
audience member at the end of another song, and generally yucking it up on
stage. The only downside was the mom on a date, all the while trying to keep an
eye on her little kid who was literally losing his mind twenty feet from her
(shouting nonsense into the air)… On the bright side, a dumb drunk audience
member shouted during an interlude: “ROCK N ROLL!! … DAY DRINKING!!! …
FESTIVAL!!!” The main vocalist sort of nodded and yelled back: “DRINK WATER!”
See, smart ;) They ended their set with a collective nerd-wave (beauty pageant
style: elbow elbow wrist wrist wrist), calling on the crowd to return it – to
embrace the flapping skin, our mutual humanness. This band was, unexpectedly,
my favorite of the three I saw.
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