Tonight, I needed to be talked down from the ledge. The ledge of quasi-academia, that is. I’m reading Ellyn Kestnbaum’s Culture on Ice as part of my research for EMP right now and earlier this afternoon I had tea (how “cultured” of me, BAARF) with Margaret Atwood and a gaggle of feminists/English students. Naturally, these two things play a huge part in creating a Death Star-sized dent in my confidence to cobble nouns and verbs together for analytical intent. When hysterics usurp my mental and critical well-being, it’s obvious I need to step away for a breather.

So I went to the TLA for a rare event — an all-local show. If some concert promotion company had the sense to hire me (hint, hint), I’d book shows like this all the time. You don’t need to remind me of package tours and the fickle showgoing behaviors of audiences and How The Business Works In General; I’ve got my shit pretty down. I’ve always complained that one of the reasons Philly bands don’t Make It Huge is because they’re always playing smaller capacity spaces, the Indie Rock Ghettos, if you will. Believe it or not, but there are some bands in town worthy of playing to larger stages or being given the opportunity to expose themselves to larger audiences.

I’d like to think that one of the reasons these three bands found their way to a 1,000-person capacity venue is in some part (even a small one) Plain Parade’s doing. We saw these bands relegated to crappy mid-week opening slots at the Khyber and knew they deserved better. Because we made them headliners on our shows, this instilled some importance on these bands and encouraged more and more people to check them out over time. As a result, these bands were able to develop and tour, widening their fanbases at every step of the way. Should senility ever strike me, I’d like to take a moment and note that watching these bands flourish has been the most rewarding aspect of Plain Parade’s existence. It is the kind of thing that keeps me inspired to continue doing this.

So of course it kind of bums me out to see thirty folks tops, watching National Eye when I finally arrive on the scene. The rest of the audience was either non-existant or too busy in the drinking section. Allow me to state the following: I am a woman of many requests, all of them relatively simple. Could people give up the cool’n'jaded’n'aging thing for a moment to stand closer to the band? Give it a try for one song. I swear you’ll like it. I could understand if this was a smaller space, but this is the motherfucking TLA. Thankfully the stage lights are so bright you can’t see past the first three rows, otherwise it might have bummed those dudes. (But lucky for them there were rows of teenagers who looked totally fucking JAZZED to be there.) But they did a good job, doing what they do. Unfortunately, I only caught the last two songs.

I thought I was gonna have a long wait for the next band to set up, so I hunkered down with the stupid book that was driving me insane earlier. (I brought the ledge with me…) Expecting to blow through another 3-4 pages, you can imagine my surprise when I barely made it past 2 before the Teeth were ready to play. Were they sharing equipment or something?

One of the things I love about the Teeth is the rawness and energy of their performances, somehow made more impressive by shitty club PA’s. This made me curious to see if the band could hold its own with a professional sound system backing them up. It was like seeing the best Teeth show in my life times a jillion, made even better by the band’s friend Thaddeus coming on stage in a workout suit to aerobicize during their set. The crowd sensed this too and everyone was freaking out in their own way, even the frat dudes who stumbled in, the types I usually love to hate at shows, were having fun. Life was good.

Once again, another quick set change and the Spintos were up. The TLA might be the only stage in Philly large enough to comfortably accomodate the band and they looked excited to be on it. I love these kids. They’re like every crush you ever had in high school contained in six little sloppily dressed energetic bodies. They ran through a 12 song set, busting out a majority of tunes from Nice and Nicely Done with a couple brand-new songs thrown in. The second new song sounded like two separate songs mashed together but unwilling to coexist with the other half. But this is what touring is about — working out those ideas in a live setting where the audience can provide feedback (though I suspect indie rockers don’t want to make these nice lads cry and may display total indifference). Also, can someone please get Nick Krill some Thayer’s Slipper Elm Lozenges? He’s gonna have to sing “Oh Mandy” every night for the next three months, so he needs all the help he can get to preserve his voice. Poor kid sounds ragged already — what did the Arctic Monkeys do to him?!

Overall Analysis: B+, perfectly acceptable entertainment for a Thursday night. Amazingly enough, this show was finished by 11:30 PM, clocking in at 2 hours from the start of the first band. Afterwards I went to a little afterparty at Jon’s Bar & Grille down the corner (who hosted this thing?), a place I will always remember as the location of where that one guy on Real World Philly came out to his roommates, you know, the two dudes that looked exactly alike except that one was two feet taller than the other one. And! I got to meet a bona-fide reader of this here blog, which blows my mind on so many levels. You have no idea. (Actually, you do.) And so, I dedicate this entry to Mark. I salute you for slogging through countless entries filled with grammatical errors, harebrained ideas and oh so much more. Ain’t no stoppin’ us now.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 3:24 am and is filed under live performances, local.