The Wily Filipino

Animotion / When In Rome, Red Devil Lounge, SF, 7/21/06.

So I'm a little jealous that my brother Bulletproof Vest met and chatted with David Sedaris. David Sedaris!

However, I did get to meet some celebs of my own over the weekend; I'll skip the best for last.

The risk one runs when watching a one-hit wonder band -- in this case, When In Rome -- is that you spend the entire set waiting for that song to be played, and of course it comes at the very end. (Yes, "Heaven Knows" wasn't a terrible song, and "Wide Wide Sea" could have been a follow-up single, but still...) That was, of course, "The Promise" (one of the hands-down best singles of the late '80s), but it doesn't bode well when your last song -- a cover of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" -- gets the quarter-full club more excited than it had been for the previous seven songs.

Animotion, however, was a different story (why they played first I'm not sure), as they had a long string of great songs: "I Engineer" (which I was yelling for), "Let Him Go" (a fantastic version of which opened the set), "I Want You," and of course, "Obsession" (surely one of the era's defining moments, period). The band simply rocked, despite a misbehaving Mac; by the end of the concert, I (and the band) was grinning from ear to ear, particularly after creative use of the big pole almost in the middle of the stage.

And then I met two of the band members! (Full disclosure: I wouldn't have been able to meet Bill Wadhams if it weren't for the mindblowing fact that the V-Monster's SO is his brother.) Plus Astrid Plane came and signed stuff at our table upstairs!

Pictures of the concert are at my Flickr "concerts" set.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 27, 2006 10:37 PM