Finally, regarding the Eyes Adrift show:
It was an early show, starting at around 6:00. The downstairs was filled the all ages crowd wearing their Sublime and Nirvana t-shirts. A short 40-year-old man in a mohawk shared his pipe with a couple of teenagers. But there were a couple of girls hippy dancing off to the side, that was kind of cute. Upstairs was smoky, the of-age crowd stood around with their drinks, watching the stage.
The opening bands, Cookie and Blood Brothers, were both self-consciously cheesy. The first relied a bit on, uh, pyrotechnics and the second had a pair of (literally) screaming vocalists. They were fun bands.
After the nearly unbearably long period where those guys – you know the ones – wander around on the little stage poking at microphones and such-like, the band came on stage and started playing. I stayed downstairs and watched the attention of the audience focus itself on Krist Novaselic towering frame. He hammed it up for the kids, getting up close and striking a couple of poses for the cameras.
The music was good – very much in line with the Meat Puppets – Kirkwood’s nasal voice wandering through semi-stream of conscious lyrics and hard, often countryish, guitar-work. (I don’t have the knowledge of music or the vocabulary to do any better than that.)
About halfway through the set a few people started to make asses of themselves in small ways. There were calls for “Freebird” or “something by Nirvana”. A group of kids started jumping up and down exageratedly and formed a sick parody of a 1994 moshpit.
This really put me off, it was undoubtedly not the intent, but it was like the audience was mocking the band – really disrespectful. I can see that someone might think I was over-reacting. It was a rock show and the opening groups have some self-conscious elements of mockery to them that the audience might have fed on. But, after standing for awhile, my back tenses up and I can get a little uptight, so that was my frame of mind. Maybe it was just me.
I escaped upstairs, the crowd had really filled out up there and there was a low-rumble of quiet conversation. I found a fine vantage point for the rest of the show.
The band finished playing the song that had inspired the moshers and Kirkwood made some dry flip comments, “That’s great! Isn’t this super!”, and he wandered over to a corner and faced the back of the stage where he stayed until his vocal part in the next song came up.
To summarize: The music was great. I look forward to the CD. I was embarrassed to be a part of that audience.