the scourge of no dancing

i hate to say it, but some people are too cool for school. look, rock n roll is about dancing and having a good time. those are the roots of rock n roll. in the 50s and 60s, people used to dance to rock music and have fun doing it. then, for some terrible reason, things changed. people regressed from dancing to toe tapping to head bobbing to where we're at now: standing with your arms folded and politely applauding after songs. that sucks. i hate it. i hate it as a fan and as a performer. fuck that hipster shit. too cool to fucking dance? ridiculous. we played what i thought was pretty dancey set a week ago and most people were too cool to dance or show any kind of emotion and thought it more fun to enjoy a show with their arms folded while standing statue-like in corners. how is that more fun than being an active part of something? this is the other bad part of shows nowadays. people are legitimately afraid of coming close to the stage. what's going to happen? honestly! This is going to sound like sour grapes, but it needs to be said. Rock n roll shows are for dancing and some form of movement is always appreciated. I hate playing shows where there is a five foot buffer between the band and the audience. I hate seeing a huge empty space between us and you. It's stupid and artificial.

David Byrne

David Byrne makes music so beautiful that I want to quit making it myself because there is no way that I could ever do what he does.   I saw him tonight, kinda.  I could only see him on the monitors outside the Prospect Park bandshell, but I could hear him.  Oh yeah.  He sounds and moves like the 23 year old guy in the Talking Heads, except he's 57 now and wears white suits to match his white hair.  How is that even possible?  How does he still have it after all these years?  I saw him today, and I wanted to quit, just for a little while.  I've listened to his new album a lot over the past couple months.  It's gorgeous.  There's no other way to describe it.  Especially a song like My Big Nurse.  It's music I want to listen to while sitting on a porch and staring out to the abyss of the Pacific Ocean and drinking a beer poured into a stout glass.  

He drew a huge crowd of people.  He filled the whole bandshell area, and then that crowd spilled out to the playground area behind the stage, the grassy areas south of the bandshell, the picnic tables to the north, the street to the east that faced the stage, and the grassy area across that street.  People sat on blankets, ate sandwiches, stood, contorted, kneeled, sat on other people, sat Indian-style on the streets, grass, seats, makeshift seats and whatever else they could find.  And when he started Once in a Lifetime, everyone slowly gathered themselves and stood up to try and dance to it, except the audience is filled with awkward white dancing and the space to do that was nil.  A worth effort nevertheless, and at least some hipsters were roused to movement.  Beats standing cross-armed and silent any day of the week.

And when we thought we had our fill of humanity, we walked through the park, though it was more like a hurried jaunty wading through the crowds, and we found the subway home.

 

The Ideal Life

Breakfast: 2 eggs, fried, 2 sausage links, 2 crawfish cakes, remoulade sauce a must, home fries, 1/2 broiled grapefruit, coffee, orange juice and some combination of the following on the jukebox: Johnny Cash, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters.

Well, it's cereal, coffee and the James Gang for me instead today.  But hey, we've got a show tonight and it will be magnificent.  Really? Really!  Ok, so come on out.  

Oh No! and the Tiger Pit at the Cameo Bar - Early Show!

8am show at the Cameo Bar with the Nouvellas, the Mess Arounds (not the Mess Me Ups, unfortunately, but a man can dream), and Daddy Long Legs.  Good lineup all around and all that for only $7.  What a deal!  

Cameo is located at 93 N. 6th St, between Barry and Wythe, in the heart of all that is good and bad about hipsters, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.  L Train to Bedford and then it's walking time, down one block and west 1.5 blocks.  Not too bad, but a little exercise will do you good.  Ok, see you out.  I hope.

Support Public Radio

http://www.wnyc.org/splash.html

I listen, I like, I support.  You should too.  

odds and ends

I hate our MySpace page (www.myspace.com/ohnoandthetigerpit).  We've enlisted Frances as our latest person to help clean it up and make it look less like shit.  I did some minor work on it tonight and got rid of the gawd awful background picture and tightened up the spacing, but I still think the whole thing is an eyesore.  I want a cleaner look for it, even though we're a messy band.  

Speaking of bands (what a segue!), I keep listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival and I keep thinking that they're actually really great and don't get nearly enough credit for being a band that played straightforward rock n roll and even pulled off an authentic Americana sound without being from the Midwest or the South.  Quick bit of trivia: Where were they from? Don't check the Internet, you cheater.

Looks like we won't have a Kobe-LeBron NBA Finals after all.  Does anyone want a Magic-Nuggets Finals?  Shit, I'm combining blogs here.

The other thing I'm listening to is the King of rock n roll.  Skinny, young Elvis and the rest of the Sun Records lineup.  Jesus, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis all on the same label at the same time.   Yes, Jesus was on the Sun roster.  Had a great baritone voice and played a mean skiffle shuffle.

On the band front, yes, we actually still do stuff, sometimes stuff that's worth posting about.  Without giving away too much, it looks like we might bring back a couple of old songs for the show on June 6th at Cameo.  Look, I can't stress how good this show should be.  This is a good garage rock lineup and even if you don't like any other band, we play at 8, so that still leaves the rest of the night to do other things.  Yes, I'm giving the hard sell to like the 5 people that read this thing and would probably go to the show anyway.

boo-yah! New Oh No! short film

http://room5films.com/R5FOHNO.html

Watch a beautifully made video courtesy our friends at Room 5 Films (Greg and Ramsey).   They did a fantastic job with this.  

things i currently like and dislike

Things I like:

- Free WiFi in Philly's airport.  This should be a standard thing.  

- The ending harmonic bit of Bob Dylan's "You're a Big Girl Now."

- Johnny Cash's "Give My Love to Rose" and "Send a Picture of Mother."  They're the exact same song, but with different lyrics.  

- SMiLE bootlegs.  Yeah, Brian came out with the real thing a couple years back, but if he had finished this and released it 1967, our opinion of the Beach Boys, pop music and the Beatles would have changed.  As it is, even in its unfinished form, it's brilliant, and Brian turned a pretty good album out of it in 2004 and even Smiley Smile is a good album, but it's hard to listen to those two albums without thinking about what could have been.

- Rural Minnesota in the spring.  10,000 lakes and I think I saw a good 1/8th of that amount driving up and down the state.

- The NBA Playoffs - They're faaaaaaaaaaaantastic.

Things I no like:

- Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.  Seriously, that two terminal business where you have to take the light rail to get between the two, it's just too much for me to handle in the early morning.  

- Early mornings.  I was up at 4:10 this morning.  Jesus.  Nothing good comes out of a 7:00a flight.

- Calexico.  Kinda boring.  I keep thinking I'll like them because it's supposed to be indie mariachi pop, but it's really just a big downer.  Most of the songs are slow and there's nothing really distinctive about the singer's voice.  I think it might be worse to have a completely non-distinctive voice than a bad one.  At least there's character in a bad voice.  For indie mariachi pop done right, I'll have to settle for Beirut's latest EP, March of the Zapotec.