I only caught two songs of the Andrew WK show tonight, but just with those, it was the most rock 'n' roll show I've been to this year. He launches into "Party Hard" and immediately there's this stream of kids--and I mean kids, like actual teenagers, and how weird is it to see them at a show?--just starts piling onto the stage, hordes and hordes of 'em. And there's already four axemen and a keyboard on the stage, pretty close to the edge, to say nothing of the drummer, so it's getting pretty crowded up there. But no one seems to mind! Security's trying to drag them off but Andrew just grabs as many as he can and hugs 'em and dances with them. He loses his mic, he doesn't care, one kid sings the chorus, it's cool. He gets this one 14-year-old boy in a denim jacket and a homemade "AWK" t-shirt up on his shoulders and they're twirling around and it's wonderful. "I Get Wet" is the finale and during the midst of that a girl makes her way onto the stage and gives someone what looks like panties and Andrew hugs her away from security and gets her up on his shoulders and puts her down and she's dancing and it's great. It was total chaos and anyone and everyone could sing, and it was loud and fun and dancey. Great shit, man. What people miss about Andrew is that yes, he's not serious about stadium rock, but the problem with stadium rock is that people take it seriously. He's just realized how fun it is for many people to engage in and does it with all the joy that requires. Awesome.

Joan Jet was pretty cool, too. She's oldish but a total badass, in that Madonna way, except cool. The great thing about her music is that it's definitely punk rock (guitarist looked about 17 and had a mohawk and an agnostic front t-shirt; bassist looked like Joey Ramone except, um, he had an eyepatch) but it's also definitely 80's--you can do "the 80's dance" to it. Which is kind of fun. She did this one absolutely horrendous song she wrote with, natch, Kathleen Hanna. It was bad enough while it was going on--lyrics about how you take a picture is that your camera or is it a gun bang bang and make your own identity, UGH--but it just looked worse when they followed it with a cover of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song, which was trite, I guess, but totally awesome. And then later they covered "Crimson And Clover," which was odd but good.

Warsaw still sucks--there was this tiny little door to let people outside to smoke and the bouncer yelled at all of us and got spit on me. Ah well. And, of course, the sound was horrible. The crowd was pretty good, though--older punkers who actually danced!
posted by Mike B. at 2:32 AM 0 comments