Maxwell Demon @ Bad Dog Ale House, 11/30/07

Maxwell Demon rocked the fucking walls off at Bad Dog Ale House tonight in El Segundo and frontman Raymond had a lot more energy than I've seen in a while. It reminded me of the good old days years ago when they'd play clubs like 705 and Westchester Sports Bar and Grill. I fucking love this band; they're by far my favorite South Bay local act of the last 5 years.

In a great finale to the show, Raymond jumped up to rip down a Coors Light banner. A bartender chick who wasn't too happy about this immediately rushed over to scold him, but don't think he cared nor will he remember it, haha.

José González, Cass McCombs @ Henry Fonda Theatre, 11/27/07

Cass McCombs opened for José González tonight at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. It was a good show, but I'm pissed at the audience as usual for being too fucking stupid and loud during the opening set. Cass McCombs was playing acoustic and a handful of dumb bitches up front were being too loud the entire time. People were shushing them and telling them to be quiet, but they must've been fucking drunk for the first time in their pathetic young lip gloss covered lives, because they laughed and kept talking.

Anyway, Cass McCombs didn't play "Equinox" so I was pretty disappointed. I was really surprised to see bearded bassist Rob Barbato (of Los Angeles psychedelic shoegaze band Darker My Love and more recently of the legendary The Fall) at this show...he was playing bass for Cass McCombs. I also read that he played theremin on the album. Pretty interesting stuff!

Swede Jose Gonzales, who is mostly known for his folk cover of The Knife's electronic Heartbeats, performed an incredible solo acoustic set, with a spotlight shining down on him the entire time. The entire Henry Fonda crowd was respectfully silent. A moving experience, but maybe more of them should've had some respect for the opener that I went to see.

The Hives @ The Avalon, 11/7/07

The Hives played at the Avalon tonight in Hollywood, supporting their more-of-the-same-but-good new album, The Black and White Album . These Swedes rock hard (as most of them do) and were extremely tight and poppy as expected. Everyone in that band must have been hyped up on a Costco crate of Pixie Stix or something because those guys are nuts!

The Hives are known for being completely wild, and saying very ridiculous, nonsensical and seemingly cocky and arrogant things between songs. At one point, frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist wanted everyone to applaud louder and louder and he wasn't satisfied so he said "don't make me come down there and set the rest of the city on fire Los Angeles!" What a low blow! He's referring to all the fires in Malibu. The crowd "oooed" and "booed", then the singer was silent for a minute, and then said "ah fuck you guys!" and they kept rocking. Hahahaha, crazy Swede.

Highlight of the show for sure: in the middle of the song "You Dress Up For Armageddon", right after the line "who is the man with the microphone? Today he is here but tomorrow he is gone" the entire band froze exactly like wax figures for about 30 seconds. Silence. Then the crowd applauded louder and louder, until Pelle Almqvist broke the stillness with a smile, and then two seconds later the band continued with "but I disagree!!!" Awesome. And lucky you, bathtubexplosion blog reader! I have a clip of this below!



Only real letdown of the night was, I didn't know it was a fucking KROQ show! Yes, KROQ! The same idiots who fucked up radio with all the same shitty bands. Seen the "I Am KROQ" billboards? Incubus, Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters...get over them already, FUCK! These shows are always filled with a bunch of kids and idiots. There was a loud fat Mexican chick in front of me the whole show who kept crashing into people, and a bunch of high school kids who smuggled in beer cans and were obviously drunk for the first or second time because they acted like fucking fools and talked too loud in my face. I wanted to smash heads. But that's the price you pay to get up close and take sweet ass pictures!

Yo La Tengo @ MOCA, La Jolla, 11/5/07

Oh how I love driving all the way to San Diego on a whim. I did it recently to purchase a white maple necked Eric Clapton Strat, and I did it Sunday night to go see Yo La Tengo do an acoustic set at the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Arts) in La Jolla. This show was sold out so I posted an ad on Craigslist and luckily enough I found a seller who sold me two tickets for face value of $25 each. What a fucking deal.

I drove all the way to La Jolla from Los Angeles and arrived at a very nice area in La Jolla with upscale shopping centers and plenty of coffee shops and restaurants. I had learned earlier in the week that Yo La Tengo were touring and playing special intimate acoustic sets which included audience Q&A's in between songs! I wasn't sure how well their feedback heavy sound would transfer to acoustic performances, but they sounded fucking fantastic!

They performed mellower versions of songs throughout their career (for an audience of almost 500), such as Autumn Sweater, Stockholm Syndrome, Griselda, and Mr. Tough. While many of the songs were sung so mellowly you'd swear you were having a flashback to a Simon and Garfunkel concert, some of them really picked it up with Ira Kaplan breaking out into Proco Rat distorted acoustic guitar solos. Very similar to the guitar in Tom Waits' Hoist That Rag! And his head-bowed-down-on-and-rocking-back-and-forth stage stance is very similar to Mr. Waits as well. Badass! This guy can really switch between soft guitar to fucking heavy fast shit--very similar to Thurston Moore's guitar playing.

The highlight of the night was definitely when I yelled out to Ira: "The song The Room Got Heavy relies so heavily on bongo drums and organ--is it even humanly possible to transfer such a song to a live acoustic set?" Mr. Kaplan smirked, and said "I don't know if that's ever even been done...is this a dare?" and they played a fucking awesome acoustic version that found simple amplified acoustic riffs opening the song, which eventually turned into some heavily distorted power chord shifts to finish off the climactic organ solo from the original version on I am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

This was one of the best shows I have been to all year. I won't soon forget the Ira Kaplan's between song commentary and soft spoken words of benevolence. He really seems like a nice guy, and handled the transition from "song--to audience question--to song (related to the audience question) very smoothly!

Thurston Moore @ Echoplex, 10/30/07

I met up with J. Giovanni and B. and B. Hart tonight for the soothing sounds of Thurston Moore's new "Trees Outside the Academy" tour. I have already heard many die hard Sonic Youth fan's, such as (Raymond of locals E>K>U>K and Maxwell Demon) say that Trees Outside the Academy was everything that Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped should have been. Relying heavily on acoustic guitars and stringed arrangements, this warm and lush album transfers excellently to the stage live.

I worked my way to the front of the hardly packed Echoplex and waited through one of the shittiest 27 minutes of my young adult life. Scores (featuring Heather Leigh Murray and Christina Carter who sings on a couple tracks on Trees Outside the Academy) opened for Thurston, and regrettably so. This female duo on electric slide guitar and lap steel started the night with a whole bunch of high pitched howlin'. This is obviously music from the soul, but maybe it's left better kept in the soul rather than in the ears of the audience, who seemed squeamish the entire time. Scores sounded like a gang of ghosts raping a pregnant lesbian wolf bitch while riding the Matterhorn at Disneyland and listening to Cocteau Twins. And don't get me wrong, I love Cocteau Twins. This duo was a bunch of bullshit in my honest opinion (which you're going to get whether you like it or not; you're reading this.) Seriously, it was just two older chicks howling for at least half an hour and playing some slow and droney guitars. The music DID NOT CHANGE the entire time. So fucking repetitive I wanted to walk on stage on start peeing on their faces so they would fucking leave already. If there was talent on stage, I didn't see it, and neither did the handful of people from the audience who walked away during their set.

Finally the cacophonous cries for mother's milk ended and the man, the legend, Mr. Thurston Moore came on stage! He came out calm and cool, and mentioned something of having a Halloween mask. He asked if we wanted to see it. Of course we did! The audience cheered and screamed. He went backstage, and came back with the corniest skull mask I have ever seen. Then he jumped into the audience and got on his back and began having what appeared to be a violent fake seizure of some sort. He growled and he hissed for a minute, then got back on stage. I don't know for sure, but I think I was the only one who was amused by this. I didn't know he'd be so playful and geekily down to earth. The audience was pretty silent.

He ripped through a tight acoustic set composed entirely of songs from his new album, and then came back with an encore that consisted of a couple songs from Psychic Hearts, the highlights being Queen Bee and Her Pals and the title track which were the only songs he switched to a Jazzmaster for. And Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley (surprise!) beat the hell out of the drums the whole time. Rock on!