weekend « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

weekend

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15
Feb 15

Guster

Here are a few clips from the Friday night rock ‘n’ roll concert with Guster in Atlanta.

They do not play Airport Song anymore. Haven’t done it in years, despite the people throwing ping pong balls. A friend saw their show in Birmingham and sent me the set list. I kept asking about Airport, but he just glossed over it, ignoring my question. So, I convinced myself, it must be a surprise in the encore or something, but no.

This seems a bit odd. Airport Song was their first break into the mainstream, if you will. And 99X in Atlanta (then WNNX, now WWWQ) basically willed that song into being a hit. I’m sure it got a lot of play elsewhere, the single climbed to #35 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart. I listened to a lot of 99X streaming over the web when I was in my internship in 1998. That song played a lot. The Clinton scandal, 99X and learning more and more about Photoshop were among the basic highlights of the year. Hearing intern jokes at work, listening to that compressed-but-streaming over RealPlayer ping pong game (and a ton of Harvey Danger) while studying pixels took up some time.

The video, as all videos must be in retrospect, was weird and underwhelming:

I have four or five Guster albums on my phone, they come up a lot when I’m running. And yet, still, I was surprised by how easy it is to forget how much you enjoy some people’s live shows. Adam talked in between songs about how the fans have stayed with the group as they have gone from a three-piece acoustic based group to this slightly more trippy electronica thing they’re doing now. And he also said they’ve been noticing that for a long time their audiences stayed the same age, young, but, lately, the audiences were now their age again. So maybe a lot of people are figuring that out.

Anyway, good show, great fun, go see ’em.

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14
Feb 15

Kishi Bashi

Last night we were at The Tabernacle in Atlanta to cash in on my Christmas present. The Yankee got us tickets to see Guster play. I fell in with the band on their second album almost 20 years ago. Her god-sisters are also Guster fans, probably from college too, but, somehow, my wife never caught onto the band.

She knows about three of their singles with something more than a passing familiarity, but she may be converted after this, her first show. It was my first Guster show in years — you can forget how much you enjoy a specific band if you don’t see them often, I realized.

It was my introduction to this guy, Kishi Bashi:

He’s doing a one-man show, looping vocals, beat boxing and his violin and running it through a sample-loop device at his feet. This just works better to see it. Here’s a sample:

Each song takes a bit to build up because he has to build the layers — and how you keep that in your mind must be a fairly impressive feat, I’d think. Some of these are very pre-determined, but he’s also just experimenting, as well. It is all very happy — there’s a song serenading a particularly tasty cut of steak — and it probably helps that we were surrounded by Kishi Bashi fans. It occurs to me that if the guy isn’t from the future his art is a bit futuristic. Who needs a band anymore if you can make a full sound right there on stage, all by yourself?

He’s playing, with his full band, on the Letterman show next week, by the way. Go see Kishi Bashi.

Also last night, of course, was the featured act: Guster.

I’ll have a few clips from them tomorrow.

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8
Feb 15

Catching up

OK, OK, these are slightly older now than the usual motif for this weekly post, but they’re worth sharing, I think. And, I promise, no more cruise shots for a while.

Read this last one. When do you think it was manufactured?

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7
Feb 15

Splat

I forgot I had this. It runs 36 seconds and it is worth every bit of that much of your time.

Just imagine yourself in a warm place watching these people doing this:

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1
Feb 15

Catching up

The post with the most — leftover photographs, that is.

First, a series of talented people flipping, and the always enjoyable people watching in the background:

It was “Are you shorter than Jeff Graba?” night. The promotion was, if you were smaller — Graba is five-foot-five — then you got in free. This is the only shot of him I got tonight, apparently:

Often, these are mixed vegetables. Occasionally, this is a vegetable medley. This week, they were Italian vegetables.

When they are Italian, I learned, that means they are the opposite of fresh.

Look who I’m hanging out with. They’re doing yoga. They call it black cat pose: