This Weekend: Alive In The ’90s
FRIDAY:
>>> This is kind of bizarre: An outsize portion of tonight’s big rock shows could have very easily been taking place ten (or even 15) years ago. Of course, The B-52’s are riding a cultural wave of “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance” once again that makes their original run during the Reagan/Bush era seem positively quaint by comparison; they’re at Electric Factory. But if you wind back the clock just ten years,you would have found your younger self in bottle blonde and gas station attendant shirt at the American Music Club show, David Foster Wallace clutched tightly in your messenger bag and a bright hope in your heart that someday, you might be a famous rock critic! (Ten years ago, they still had rock critics, and for a time, American Music Club were the sole beneficiaries of them.) Holy hell: I am time-warping so hard right now that I might have to give myself a fresh bump of bad ought-years coke and Sparks just to snap out of it. At any rate, AMC plays Johnny Brenda’s with Buried Beds and Drink Up Buttercup, and while I am definitely being a total dick about this, don’t mind me: This show will very likely be great. I simply suffer from great unease with the 1990s, which, for the record, I also suffered from even when it was the 1990s. Caterpillar, with whom I bro’d down so much during this time, will definitely understand: They were a pastoral, freakish psych band in a time of grotesque, stomach-turning irony and pre-post-sellout age posturing. But guess what? They beat the clock! They’re back together! Scratch that bump of coke and line me up for some ’shrooms, because along with Brother JT (who knows a bit himself about wild time travel), we’re going to take the Khyber back to the place where it and Old City should have been frozen in time: An ancient bar in an ancient neighborhood that no one cared about, lined with greasy spoons, machine shops, and cheap as hell warehouse space. While I am not particularly proud in any respect of even being alive during the 1990s, I take immense pride in knowing that I once rented Bryan Dilworth and Jason Kourkounis‘ old apartment next to the Phantom Gallery with two other people and like 50,000 square feet for just $1200 in 1997. Pre-gentrification Philadelphia, of thee I sing: I can hear the heart beating as one.
SATURDAY:
>>> HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUTHIE C!
>>> And as a kind of punchline to everything else I just said, Poi Dog Pondering is at the TLA. But if you did any of the ’90s shit last night, as your physician I feel I must advise you that it’s high time you started living in the NOW, Mr. Valania. And yes, I do know that Urge Overkill is playing at the North Star, and Son Volt, God bless their hearts, are playing at the Trocadero. I can’t understand it, either; cry with me for a spell and then do what we should have done back in 1997 — snap the fuck out of it. It’s the future now, languid depression and a Paxil high is only for those left who can afford it, and as you know, that’s… no one.
>>> Japan-to-NYC-to-Philly transplants Colette Columbirch play SugarTown at Tritone, welcome them and listen close. We may be through with the past, but the past may not be through with us.
>>> And at the Barbary, Live Forever with JHN RDN, Designer Drugs, Club Lyfestyle get ready for the inevitable 2005 nostalgia that you are already feeling but don’t know it yet. But back at the Khyber again, DJ RMT + Oh Murder! Inc. — kids who we’re guessing were roughly seven years old in 1997 — spin upstairs, wholly unaware that Black Landlord, the Philly band most directly descended from the Goats, are playing downstairs. I really need to get an existential detective on the phone, this is simply too fucked up to merely be an accident.
SUNDAY:
>>> And as promised, Greyhounds round out their Khyber residency with an entire set of Guided By Voices songs. I give up: Advertising looks and chops a must, NO BIG HAIR! Songs mean a lot, when songs are bought, and so, are you; FACE RIGHT DOWN TO THE PRACTICE ROOM, TENSION AND FAME’S A KOREA, A KOREA, A KOREA….
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April 25th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Happy Birthday Ruth!!!
April 25th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
re: “…as your physician I feel I must advise you that it’s high time you started living in the NOW, Mr. Valania.”
Mushrooms suit you very well Philebrity… sometimes your harsh amphetamine rush speak can be a bit much.
April 26th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Happy birthday, Ruthie.
Never seen one of those outdoor urinal kiosks before; the whole outdoor rock festival thing eluded me in the 90’s.
That whole Pavement “aw shucks” indie rock coyness always seemed a bit preening. Never trusted it. Not saying they weren’t a good band, though. But I am saying they should have worn makeup and capes.
April 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Happy Birthday Ruth and thanks for mentioning CC.
I spent the first half of the 90s loving them, the second half loathing them. I actually started to miss the 80s at the close of the 90s, but of course, an 80s I was too young to experience. So Sugar Town is just as much influenced by the Raincoats/Slits era of bands as it is riot grrrl or The Breeders.
There is a sort of pre-internet innocence of the 90s that I miss though. Everyone was really their own person and to find out about shit, you had to hang out with someone cool, and then your experience (old movies or music) had your own unique adventure attached to it.
Though I have to say as a miserable teenager of the 80s, the internet would have saved my life (and X Ray Spex).