Have you ever been so cold that you started laughing? That happened to me last night after the Cake concert. We got into the car and I was shaking and, for whatever reason, it was really funny and I couldn’t stop laughing. I believe now that it was a reflex to cause muscle activity that would warm me. It could also have been due to the amount of chronic I inhaled whilst at the concert.

The previous paragraph is what we call an introduction. It begins with some interesting tidbit or question called the “attention getter”. This draws you in and entices you to read more (So cold you laugh? Why, no, Eric, I haven’t, but please tell me more!). The introduction then segues (NOT segways) into “proposed organization”, or what the hell you’re going to actually talk about in the coming paragraphs. For example, from the above you could reasonably assume I was going to regale you with the tale of my Cake concert attendance. If you did assume this, congratulations, you’re right. If you assumed something else, you might want to check out McDonald’s. I hear they’re hiring. I recently realized that I usually do this when I write posts, even though I haven’t analyzed the exact practice until now. I will often start off with some meaningless sentence that sounds interesting, write what I really wanted to write about, then end it with some equally meaningless concluding sentence (the “punchline”) in its own paragraph. The point here, far from having to do with anything forthcoming, is to let you a) have a glimpse of what I usually think about, and b) know that I am awesome. You can expect the punchline a little bit later.

So the first act was this, which is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. They dress so oddly, and their music is so weird (they call it “gypsy punk”), it completely blindsided me and I loved it. They have incredible stage energy and presence, and it’s really fun to watch. They basically play and accordion and violin old-world style but update it with punkish drumbeats and guitar. The lead singer at one point put a fire bucket on his mic stand and beat it with some drumsticks. They have these two dancing girls who play washboards, and one of them had this sort of spandex band attached to her ankles. She does a handstand, spreads her legs, and the singer uses it as a slingshot to fire stuff into the crowd. I’m not sure what he was launching, it looked like t-shirts. They have a backup singer who came out for a couple of songs and did some ska-style shucta (no link, sorry, I couldn’t find one) as well as the “pick it up, pick it up” and then dove off the stage to crowd surf. They have a lot of… well, blood-curdling screams in one of their songs and the lead singer kept coming out into the crowd to have people scream along. I’m pretty sure he was standing on people’s shoulders.

It was a terrific act and I didn’t know it was coming. I’d pay again to see them by themselves. We bought their CDs and they’re pretty good, if you like gypsy punk. The songs are a lot shorter and less energetic, though. But I guess that’s why you go to their concert. The next act was Tegen & Sara, twin sisters who sounded for all the world like two cats (you have to say it like Penélope Cruz does in Vanilla Sky). Their music was pretty good but the singing like cats really killed it. It was also pretty boring and, no lie, I almost fell asleep, because they had no stage presence whatsoever. Oops, no, I take it back, they told us the story of how last time they were in Kansas City people blew up condoms and threw them around. Boy, that was exciting.

Finally, some egregiously interminable time later, Cake arrived on the scene. Let me begin here by saying that Cake puts on a terrific concert. They don’t use a set list, they just play whatever songs they feel like or whatever the crowd yells at them. Their singer’s guitar is held together by a great deal of duct tape.. it might have been the rattiest guitar I’ve ever seen. He did a really fantastic job of getting the crowd into it, dividing us into sections and trying to see which side could sing the songs louder. He made fun of the balcony because they were apathetic, turned the crowd against the frat guys who were making snide comments, and was generally pleasant and enjoyable, as well as singing all those old Cake favs. At the end of their set, the drummer threw his sticks to the crowd, but when they came back for their encore, he apparently had forgotten to bring more and he had to get them back, which was really funny. He made note of the disappearance of 3/4 time in American pop, and pronounced that all forthcoming Cake albums would be entirely 3/4 time.

Alright, so here we are at the end, and I still haven’t thought of a punchline to end things on. So just go watch that Chronic of Narnia video if you haven’t already, it’s funny.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.