TEN concert criticisms with Marty & me...

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Most of the quotes / events of this night are purely from my memory so it may not be all accurate.

Alright so I was at the Early November's last show at the Trocadero taking notes for a concert review that I hope may be published in a magazine in the near future, I realized that it would be even more comical if I chronicled my concert experience with the ever-opinionated Marty. He's got great insight into a lot of different things and he's pretty funny about it at the same time. So here are some of the conversations we had while watching the opening bands, OneTwoThreeFour and The Verdict.

So the night that we went to the show, there happened to be a pretty good downpour for most of the day and it went well into the night. So we were rushing from the car to the venue to avoid getting completely soaked. On the way to the Troc, Marty mentioned in passing that he would prefer to stop and grab something to eat before we went in because he was starving. Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention to him at the time, and he just simply followed me into the Troc. Keep in mind that Marty complained for the rest of the night that a) he was hungry and b) we should have stopped for some food before we went in. Marty quote: "Buy some goddamn QTips and clean out your ears." It also ended up that I had mistaken my notepad in my pocket for my wallet, so I now had no wallet and we therefore had no way to get up to the bar area up in the balcony. So I was batting a thousand now at this point and it didn't help that doors had opened at 6:00PM but the first band didn't go on until after 7PM... I fucking hate when they do that. The odds continued to be stacked up against us when we realized that the median age of the crowd was about 17-18... that really makes me feel old.

So the first band walks on stage (OneTwoThreeFour) and it ends up that their lead singer is a chick (also keep in mind that this blog is not meant to be politically correct). Marty turns to me and simply states, "I hate bands with chicks in them." It ended up that this chick was Ace Ender's sister so that kind of picqued my interest. It also kind of helped that she was pretty cute (Marty may disagree but fuck him) and she had an alright voice. In observing the band, the one rhythm guitarist caught our attention because a) it didn't even look like he was playing and b) he spent half of the songs tuning his guitar. What would have made my night would have been if he spent a whole song tuning one of his guitars, not playing at all during the song, and then simply put that guitar down and grabbed another. He came pretty close to doing that. Marty had the winning comment by saying that that guy was only in the band because of pity. It was as if the band was like, 'Alright I guess you can be in the band, but we're probably not going to let you plug in.' So the band was done in about 20 minutes and I / we learned a few things from them. Anyone can be in a band if they can act like they're tuning their guitar and are not actually plugged in. Chicks in bands aren't always a bad thing (my opinion). And finally, OneTwoThreeFour is not that bad of a band (they remind me of Eisley) I downloaded their 4 song EP from here: http://www.regularmusic.net/

The second opening band was The Verdict from North Carolina. Just hearing that they were from North Carolina made me feel uneasy. This was another case of having a chick in the band, except this time she was not the lead singer, but instead the keyboardist. She was also extremely hott (girls definitely get bonus points from me when they're in bands). This band had a definite country twang to them, with three vocal part choruses. At times I felt like I was at a Big & Rich show or some fucking shit like that. All we needed was some square dancers. And speaking of dancing, the lead singer was all over the place and his dance moves had a fairy-esque feel to them. "The dude's too happy". The lead singer also mentioned the band's myspace page way too many times and one of the highlights of the performance was when they had tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus by themselves and nobody fucking sang. Classic. The Marty quote of the performance came when the chick walked off stage for a good portion of one of the songs. "She probably got her period." God I love being over critical of bands and of the whole scene in general.

I don't really have much to write about the Early November's performance because that's who we were there to see and there was no need for us to be overcritical of anything. Plus I was immersed in taking notes for the review that I have since wrote. If it has no chance of being published there's a good chance i will post the review on here in the near future.