The Wily Filipino

Devo / Bow Wow Wow / A Flock Of Seagulls, Bill Graham Civic Center, SF, 10/28/06.

Sometimes concerts don't quite work. I and ten other people had met for dinner at Suppenkuche prior to a promising lineup of bands: When In Rome, Animotion, A Flock Of Seagulls, Bow Wow Wow, and Devo. Devo was perhaps the odd band out, a band whose big hit was somewhat contemporaneous with the other bands, but whose career had more in common with the arch, postpunk, agitprop bands of the previous decade.

The concert was supposed to start at 7, and it did not bode well that by the time we got to the venue a little after 8 pm, two bands had already played. (I had already seen When In Rome and Animotion previously, but still... I wanted to see them again!) The sad part was that the venue was literally only a third full; I suspect that by the time people actually arrived, all the opening bands had come and gone.

We caught A Flock of Seagulls do the last 4 songs of their set (granted, the set may have indeed been four songs long): "The More You Live, The More You Love," "Space Age Love Song," "Wishing," and "I Ran." They sounded good, but it sure looked like only the lead singer / keyboardist was left from the original lineup. (This touring version included a drummer who would stand on his stool at the end of each song and non-ironically point with a drumstick at the audience.)

Bow Wow Wow, however, was great. Annabella Lwin looked fantastic (a quick calculation on my fingers figured her out to be about a totally hot 40), and so was the band with an excellent short set. Quite a feat for a band whose biggest hit in the U.S. was a cover:

- I Started Something I Couldn't Finish (yes, the Smiths song!)
- Aphrodisiac
- Go Wild In The Country
- I Want Candy
- C30 C60 C90 Go!

Devo, alas, was something of a disappointment: yes, the band sounded great; yes, it was odd to see them riling up the crowd with bizarre walk-on characters like "Jihad Jerry" and a guy in an Osama bin Laden mask, and yes, it was great to hear my favorite Devo songs ("Gut Feeling" and "Gates of Steel" -- you can tell I like the jangly guitar songs better than the synth ones) -- but good lord, they looked way too... portly to still be dressed up in their yellow jumpsuits and wearing the red hats.

I wondered whether, in ten years, the same venue would be hosting, say, a big Weezer / Nada Surf / Third Eye Blind tour. In any case, it seemed that nostalgia had played us for fools, kind of. My friend Marco commented that the sparse audience was a clear comment on the survivors of the decade: if you hadn't gotten sick, or OD'd on coke, then you'd probably be there. But babysitters are expensive in San Francisco, I added.

Later Eloise and Sean and Romeo and I ended up at the Cat Club. Sixth beer in hand, dancing to "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" and "Tainted Love," looking around me at the people dressed up joylessly as Madonna and Slash, I started feeling this clumped-up ball of regret and inexplicable sorrow growing in my stomach, envisioning my metabolism screeching to a halt, imagining the grim reaper of middle age smoking cigarettes by the club exit waiting for everyone to file out. We could have been dancing to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" and it wouldn't have made much of a difference.

Posted by the wily filipino at December 10, 2006 12:24 PM