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April 23, 2008
Just Can't Stay Away
I can't help it. I'm a sucker. I wasn't particularly impressed with the last Mike Doughty show, but when I found out he was coming back to town, I didn't hesitate to get a ticket. Just me this time, just one ticket, thanks, and I would happily go alone.
The day of the show, my friend Mark, who went to and like the last show but said he'd opt out of this one, called. “Do you have anyone to go to the show with?” he asked. Nope, just me. “Do you want someone?” he asked. Had he changed his mind? He picked up on my pause. “I mean, not me,” he said. “I have some friends that are going.”
So I went with Mark's friends.
I met them beforehand at a pub down the street from the venue before the show, where I take notice of two men who, like us, sit at the bar. They, like us, are older than most the crowd, so I suspect that they, like us, are visiting the university district to see the show. [My new friend Treasure and I theorize that a man in his late 40s wearing a sweater vest and trying to chat with the customers, on the other hand, has come here for the youth. We make up the conversation he may have had with the hotel concierge before coming—'Where in town is really happening? No, no, like... You know, young energy. Somewhere closer to the university. Does the student union have a bar?' A little creepy.] I hope that they are. They are both tall, as am I, and one fits my instinctual profile—tall, thin, dark curly hair. I can't help myself. I don't know what it is. (Actually, my friend Mike first came up with my profile in college after we each went through a list of who all we'd had crushes on, but the original version was 'tall, thin, smokes a lot of pot.' Even though I myself didn't fall into the latter category. I somehow exchanged 'smokes a lot of pot' for 'dark curly hair' in grad school. So far I've come. So mature I've gotten.) Right. So sucker me is checking out this tall, dark-curly-haired guy kitty-corner across the bar and hoping he's going to the show, trying to do so subtly because I just don't know my new friends well enough to be obvious. Besides, I'm drinking a Coronita (a one dollar, baby Corona), which I think is both absolutely adorable and hilarious, but also a little embarrassing.
The two guys leave before we do—we're stalling, because what show ever starts on time? My guess is that we'll have miscalculated and will get to the show just as the opening band is finishing, but I'm wrong. We've actually missed them completely, which is disappointing. My new prospective best friends from the bar (after Treasure and Nate, of course) are loitering in the lobby, so I ask the dark-curly-haired guy on the way in if they caught the opening band, and then whether they were any good. Guy is friendly, and says that they only caught the last song, and that—he hits my shoulder with the back of his hand—'to be honest, I was like, Is this Mike Doughty?' Ah, I said. One of those opening bands that matches the headliners. Bo-ring.
And I should mention that Guy (I didn't get his name, so as far as I know, that's not it) probably fits my original college profile as well. Just a guess. Thought I didn't hear him chuckle, so, hard sayin'.
When we (Treasure and Nate and myself) got situated in a great little spot up on the side of the venue, an announcer came out and assured us all that Mike would soon be back on stage, this time without the fake mustache. Ah-ha! So the opening band was a pseudo-band. And I missed it. And curly-dark-hair was right in thinking that it sounded a lot like Mike Doughty, because it was. I could have commented on it in passing if I saw him again, but I didn't. I mean, I did see him, but not close enough to comment on it again. So that's actually the end of him. Sorry if I got your hopes up for something more interesting. I just thought it was funny that I saw him and thought, Huh, he's kinda cute. Huh, fancy that, he's tall with curly, dark hair.
On with the show.
I observe crowd dynamics from my sideline perch.
Suffice to say, people's behavior at concerts makes me laugh. I love it. And I find myself doing a lot of the same things that I laugh at others for doing. We get lost in it, we get found in it, we relate to others in it without even talking to them, and, for some reason, we sometimes have the need to prove ourselves. To somebody. In a venue this small, to the band maybe, and in bigger venues, just to our concert neighbors. We sing along, sometimes enthusiastically. There's a guy in the front row of this same show—unfortunately for Mike, all the people in the front row are guys—who tends to jump up and shake his arms and sing exaggeratedly to half the numbers, and I get him. I know what he's putting out there. Deep down, from the core of his very soul, what he needs to say is: “I KNOW THIS SONG!” I've been there. Some of us just need to say it louder and more emphatically than others.
Later in the show, the band plays the song that brought Mike Doughty as a solo act back to the mainstream radio stations. The band warms up to the song for a while, and I already recognize it—they're not doing anything different with the music—but when Mike Doughty sings the first line, “The Cuban girl...,” someone in the middle towards the front thrusts their hands enthusiastically into the air with 1st and pinky fingers extended—rock on, man—and I think, Is that a Cuban girl? Celebrating Cuban girl status? No, pretty sure not. The 'Cuban girl' is relatively tall, with long, brown, unkempt hair. Pretty sure it's a dude. The unkempt hair is really what gives him away, and his stocky build which I can only just make out around the shoulders of his concert neighbors. Maybe he just *likes* Cuban girls. But then at the chorus he's going crazy, raising and shaking his hands again like a crazy ape (go figure), and then it dawns on me. I think, Oh—that man feels like he's looking at the world from the bottom of a well. (Which is the chorus of the song.) Like, he's *been* there. At least that's what he seems to be saying.
I myself think about what it would be like to be looking at the world from the bottom of a well. Mainly, I think what it would be like to be at the bottom of a well. Sounds damp. And uncomfortable. I think about the feel of the stones, slick, cold and the quality of the light—dim, with some faint highlights on the rocks around me—and about the muted sound of being so far from flowing air and so close to the water's surface below me. I am glad that I'm in an old well rather than in a plastic tube. Wasn't a baby stuck in a plastic-tube-well for a few days sometime in the 90's? Gah. That would be horrible.
Mike announces that after this gig at the Fox, he will be DJ-ing down at Trilogy, which is where he played last time he was in town. I'm curious but not convinced, and Treasure and Nate are willing but cheap. They'll check it out so long as it doesn't cost anything, but when I get down there they are on their way out—they've already been in and rejected the $5 cover. But you can hear the music from the bathrooms (which are in the hall between the front of the venue, where there is no cover, and the back, where there is), so I decide to go in while I'm here. Why not. And from the hallway, I can indeed hear the music. And it sounds great. What's five bucks, anyway?
When I walk in, there is a buxom woman with glowing poi (the balls on string that Polynesians and hippies twirl around) up on a small stage behind the DJ, who I notice shortly is not Mike Doughty. Huh. Okay, I'll stay until Mike comes out. Maybe. Not sure if I'll last that long. But the woman with the poi is still whirling and twirling them, and the guy seated at the table I'm standing next to asks me loudly, “Do you have any drugs?” “Nope, nothing, sorry man,” I say. I thinks it's funny that he's even asked me, since I'm feeling very very very straight in my sobriety (I'm cheap, since I'm unemployed) and the fact that I'm here alone, which makes me self conscious and stiff. Maybe he's too drunk to notice. He's got a dark cap pulled low and dark-rimmed glasses and dark hair and a dark shirt. “I don't even do them very much,” he says, “but I just thought with all this--” he gestures with his arms to the buxom glowy woman and the guy just in front of the table working at an easel on a piece of art with black-lit paint markers and maybe the DJ-- “that it would be kinda cool.” “Yeah,” I say, “they should probably just hand out X at the door.” “Yeah!” he agrees. “But,” I say pragmatically, “then I guess they couldn't charge 5 dollars.” “They should just include it,” he says. “15 bucks. With that you get entry and a pill. There could be two options. One with, one without.” And then somehow he dropped it down to “Three bucks, entry and a pill.” Huh. “It's a good thing you're not running this business,” I said.
My new friend leaves, but Mike comes in, wearing a black t-shirt and faded jeans hanging off his medium build, tall, almost but not quite stocky. A tattoo working its way all the way up his forearm shows in the low light which illuminates the DJ station. (The tattoo happens to be in Amharic.) I can't leave now that he's here and going to get started. I'm curious. What's he going to do? What will he put on? The poi girl leaves and a woman with a glowing hula-hoop takes the stage. Candles are flickering on the table of the DJ station, in front of the equipment, illuminating the empty glasses as they are discarded by the drinkers and dancers. These are the things I notice and am mesmerized by after Mike takes over, because he plays the same beat the whole time. I guess I would have been okay with it, if X was handed out at the door. But since my new friend isn't in charge, that isn't the case. Still, it's hard to pull myself away, like it's hard to pull yourself away from watching a campfire on a cold night. What, I have to join the world out there? Rather than being a loner in here with my feet glued to the floor? Or my butt glued to the stool, actually, because I had managed to score the one from my drug friend after he left.
Eventually, I do it. Out into the chilly night, back to my car, music behind.
And I think to myself, Hey, I feel as though I am looking at the world from the bottom of a well. A really, really big one. With buildings and lights and cars and stuff. So next time I'm at a Mike Doughty show, I can rock out as hard as the guy in the crowd who was shaking his arms so vehemently in the middle of the audience. The one who definitely was not a Cuban girl. But who, you know, probably likes them, just the same.
Posted by beth at April 23, 2008 10:03 PM
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