Two people who were going to be making the trip with them ended up not being able to come, and since it was in downtown Los Angeles, which is understandably in our vicinity, we got invited.
The show was at the fancy Orpheum theater, at 9th and Broadway:
If I've been coy with the bands' names, it's because I had never heard of them; er, it, eh, who is playing?
Corrie and I had that conversations a few times. But I want to be clear: it was awesome. The main band is Streetlight Manifesto, if you couldn't read it from the marquee above, and the other band is labeled as BOTAR. When we arrived I couldn't tell what the hell was going on, but Michael explained it to me as best he could later in the night, after the show.
BOTAR stands for Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution, and is comprised of members of Streetlight Manifesto who fought with their label, lost money but retained the rights to their songs. Bandits started playing those songs with an acoustic bent, and the rest is...history?
The stage was set: an 80+ person orchestra backed up the musicians in front, five horns (trumpet, trombone, and all three saxophones (alto, tenor, baritone)) two guitarists, a stand-up bass, and a drummer. On one side of the stage was a grand piano, but the pianist only played in between the songs.
When the band came out and started the show, the crowd went wild. It sounded pretty cool, like a symphony playing punk rock, with horns, but that's because it was. Afterwards as Michael tried to explain the intricacies of the band to me, he touched briefly on the different eras of ska, and how Streetlight came about during a good time for ska...or something, and I remember the punk-with-horns ska band that he called awful and "giving ska a bad name" from back during a bad era.
The show rocked and I enjoyed it, but obviously I wasn't singing along, like nearly everyone else. Also, plenty of the fans were quite drunk, and the desire to mosh---only natural at a punk show---was rendered moot by the fact that everyone had nice chairs in this art-deco theater. Drunk punk fans in sweaty tank-tops head banging at their seats populated the view from our spot in the back.
The pianist would play before the band, and at first it sounded like he was playing a punk song on the piano, and the crowd would go crazy, and then the band would actually play the same song; the pianist did a lead in to each and every song.
One thing that was difficult for me, since I knew none of the songs, was that they all sounded like the same song. I started to have a philosophical inner-conversation: if someone had never heard Led Zeppelin, but was invited to see a band backed by an orchestra acoustically play the entirety of the album Led Zeppelin 2, would it all sound the same to them? I have the double album Wu-Tang Forever, and if it all sounds kinda similar to me, imagine what my late Grandpa Tom would have thought?
There was no opening act, and after about twenty minutes I figured that this wasn't the kind of show that would be having an intermission, so our original guess of it ending near or after midnight (it started around 8:30) seemed unlikely to come to pass.
That was always the concern: a concert? In DTLA? Starting after 8? So we need a babysitter? And on a school night? Corrie's sister even asked, while we chilled in our seats beforehand, "Is everyone ready for you to be completely out of it tomorrow?" I smiled and said I could pull it off, but really, we weren't about to eat mushrooms or get into the evil, so what was anyone really worried about?
When it ended just after 10, we all went for a drink at a nearby watering hole where we had the educational conversation about the Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution.
The show was awesome, and my ignorance helped shape my feelings through what can only be a natural open-minded curiosity.
No comments:
Post a Comment