create_destiny

The Sierra Nevada Brewery's Big Room









Bela Fleck

I want back the 4.5 hours of my life that I wasted seeing this show. I wasn't going to go until I read this in Chico's News & Review.

Yeah he founded a record company that I like (K Records) and yeah he's been in a couple of bands that I dug in the 90's, namely Beat Happening and The Halo Benders, but his solo performance miserably failed to deliver.

His first opening act was some Amish-looking kid on acoustic guitar calling himself, "The Broads." I'm sorry but this kid sucked harder than an airplane toilet. My boyfriend and I kept looking at each other like, "Is this guy for real?" I was incredulous. I kept scanning the sparsely populated cafe to gauge other people's reaction but everyone seemed to be stoically watching this wretched performance without batting an eye. For a brief moment I considered the possibility that I have become so unhip that I am unable to recognize how cool really bad music is.

But no, I do realize how cool bad music is. I'm an indie art-rock fan for Christ's sake. That whole Pacific Northwest indie art-rock scene in the 90's inspired a legion of clueless kids with horrible singing voices to pick up musical instruments they had no idea how to play and create crappy, off-key, amateur beats that rocked the house. I'm talking about Bikini Kill, Pavement, Mecca Normal, Scrawl, Babes in Toyland, Beat Happening, hell, even early Hole and basically just about any artist on Kill Rock Stars or K Records.

But there comes a point when all the liquor and art-rock pretensions in the world can't make talentless hacks seem cool. And this point was reached last night. Where is the guy who shot "Dime-bag Darrell" when you need him?

The second opening act was the Whysps from Santa Cruz. More bad art-rock. The thing that kills me is that I think that both the Whysps and The Broads could actually be decent if they would stop trying to sound so crappy just to be cool.

By the time Calvin took stage I had a dark cloud of disgruntledness hanging over my head. There were literally only 20 people present and it was pretty embarrassing to be honest. He droned out a handful of country-sounding songs and told a long, boring tour story that really only served to piss me off for having wasted a perfectly good Saturday night.

Well kids, this is a bit overdue, but it must be done.

The David Byrne show at Chico State on Aug. 22, 2004 was nothing short of fantastic.

Before the show began, I checked out the rapidly aging crowd and asked my date how we all got so old. "I blame the Republicans," he replied. "When Clinton was in office I was a lot younger." Ah, the urine leakage was worth it.

The opening act was a forlorn singer/keyboardist named Lisa Germano. I might have liked her if it weren't for a song she sang about having to put her cat to sleep. This subject matter caused me to sob like a little girl, while sitting next to my boyfriend of, like, five days. If he had broken up with me after the show I would have sued that bitch for outing me as an emotionally unstable basket case before I could trick him into falling hopelessly in love with me.

When David Byrne finally appeared on stage, he took one look at the Rogaine-scented crowd and asked if it was parent's night. He also made a comment about Chico having a lot of muscle cars.

He was dressed in a burgundy, long-sleeved shirt with matching jeans. How he's managed to maintain his skinny, geek figure over the years is beyond me. It's probably all that PCP* he snorts.

Byrne was touring with Tosca Strings, a six-piece string outfit from Texas. He was also joined by a sleek-looking black dude on bass, a kick-ass Latin percussionist and another drummer.

Byrne performed a nice selection of his solo work, some operatic stuff including "Um Di Felice" from La Traviata and several Talking Heads songs, such as "Once in a Lifetime," "What a Day that Was," "And She Was" and "Life During Wartime."

My boyfriend and I gazed lovingly into each other's eyes while Byrne performed an electric version of "Psycho Killer." This is our special song since we met each other through livejournal and everybody knows that 9 out of 10 guys that you meet on-line are psycho killers. My boyfriend is going wait until he impregnates me and gets some life insurance on me before he actually goes psycho and kills me. Ain't that sweet!

* by PCP I mean "Purple Cow Patties" which of course is legal in California with a doctor's prescription.