NVinNYC

Mike Doughty has posted a picture of his concert in at Webster Hall on his blog. It’s an overhead shot of the entire audience from the right hand side of the stage, and, if you look real close, you can find me in the picture. If you do find me you get a gold star next to your name. Here are some hints to help you: I’m wearing a light blue shirt and I’m on the left hand side of the stage.

Did I mention that I dressed up as Waldo for Haloween one year? This year I’m going to be a lonely & sleep-deprived college-student who procrastinates about doing his problem sets.

Update: We have a winner! John “Silent Bob’s Right Hand Man” Feldman gets the star. Congratulations John, now everyone visit his website. If you’re still wondering about where I was (what’s wrong with you?), check out this picture.

I saw Mike Doughty in concert last weekend (Saturday 10/22) at the Webster Hall. Here are some of my thoughts & observations about the event:

The venue was a rather nice concert hall that apparently has something like four stages on different floors so that they can put on different events at once (or have a variety of different music themed rooms) for parties. The layout of the stage that Mike was on was very similar to the House of Blues in Hollywood (though the general atmosphere was much better). Basically it was a stage about a bit narrower than a basketball court in a square room about half again as large and square with a balcony that overhung the floor in the back. The floor was just open for standing except for some small tables along the walls on either side along the walls.

The opening act, Orenda Fink was very mellow, it seemed very similar to Cat Power, and consisted mostly of Orenda singing and occasionally playing some guitar with her band-mate (missed her name…) playing keyboard and doing backup vocals. I might have expected this given that Orenda is half of the band Azure Ray. However, Orenda’s music lacked the mix of strings and piano with the synthesized sounds that I found very appealing about many of the songs on Azure Ray’s most recent album, Hold on Love. Don’t get me wrong here, I really like mellow music but it didn’t match with what I was expecting from someone opening for Mike Doughty, who is definitely not mellow. They did do a very nice cover of The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize that worked especially well with just keyboard and vocals.

True to form Mike Doughty started off his set joking around with the wordplay, “The name of my band is the name of my name!” before introducing himself. This attitude, which carried on throughout the concert, kept the audience engaged and excited throughout his set. At one point, after breaking a string and holding up his guitar by the slacking wire he proclaimed “I would get a backup guitar, but everyone seems to love the drama.” He also made up extravagant names for his drummer Pete McNeal that became more flourished with each telling; what stated with “Raul” became something like “The Duke Raul Ledgebar von Faren; a mysterious man cloaked in enigma and mystery” by then end (I wish I remember exactly what it was because it was even better than that). In another humorous moment during the show, the upright base player, Scrap Livingston, delivered the random “Scrap-Fact” of the night (which was: “The shortest verse in the bible is ‘Jesus wept.’”).

The band’s performance was excellent with a precise, yet free flowing style that complemented musical style very well. I was particularly impressed when, while Mike changed his guitar string, the band, consisting of the aforementioned Pete & Scrap as well as Dan Chen on keyboards improvised a tune that morphed into the next song of the set as Mike finished tuning. In another part of the show, Mike ushered the rest of the band of the stage for the “Show Within a Show” were he played a few songs from his earlier solo effort Skittish & Rockity Roll albums (his newest album Haughty Melodic was first recorded with a full band) as well as St. Louise is Listening, a Soul Coughing tune.

Another part of the praise I seem so desperate to heap up is how great Mike treats his fans; before the last song of his encore he announced that he’d be signing stuff after the show at his T-shirt booth. True to form, he showed up twenty minutes or so after the set ended eager to actually talk to each of us there, pose for pictures, and sign all kinds of merchandise. This provided me an excellent opportunity to give him a DVD of Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Part 1 since the whole band apparently loves the show. Mike’s response when I gave him the disc: hand’s it to his manager(?) and says “Guard this with your life!” A man after my own heart… sigh… I hope you enjoy every minute of it Mike.

For your curiosity/ammusment, some pictures from the show are available on Mike’s Blog.

I had the honor of seeing Ambulance LTD perform last night at the The Mercury Lounge as part of the CMJ Music Marathon. A few notes from the night, in no particular order:

-If you go to a concert at the Mercury, make sure to show up early, really early. I arrived at 10:20 PM in hopes of seing Robbers on High Street who were scheduled to go on stage at 11 PM. No dice; instead I end up waiting in line until about 12:40 PM and get in just in time to catch the last part of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who were pretty good and full of energy). The reason for this seems to be that the club was so small (the stage area was about the size of a school classroom) that they could only let a limited amount of people in at time, so people in line had to wait until people left to get in and see the show.

-Once I got in, I realized just how cool such a small venue could be: after Clap Your Hands finished up I was able to walk right to the front of the stage to stake out my spot for Ambulance (in huge contrast to the pushing that defines Coachella and most other concerts I’ve been to without seating). Even once Ambulance started, I didn’t have people pushing on my back and sides.

-First thing that I noticed while watching the Ambulance guys set up right in front of me: Benji Lysaght has grown a thin mustache and has consequently gone from looking like Elijah Wood like he did at Coachella to a young looking Bob Dylan. I was so close during the concert that I could see him scowl in concentration while playing. He also closes his eyes most of the time while playing. It’s very strange looking and hard to describe accurately. No offense, though because he still plays some amazing guitar.

-Ambulance played 5 new songs during the night, about equal to the number of songs from their current LP. I recognized one of them, the song they opened with, as the currently untitled song that I heard them play at Coachella and the Glass House. Here is an acoustic version of it that I ripped from a streaming download (so the quality isn’t that great). I guess this means the new album is coming together!

-Disappointingly, Ambulance was back to just their founding members for the show; meaning they had no keyboard player. As my friends from Coachella know, that dude is one of my favorites because he mashes up keyboard while he is jamming. I hope this was a temporary thing, maybe he couldn’t make it for this show or something but maybe he got kicked out after their major tour ended. I’ll just have to go see them again to find out I guess.

-While the NYC subways are for the most part excellent, weekend nights seem to not be their strength. For example, while it took me about 35 minutes to get to the concert from my apartment, it took me almost an hour and a half to get back. Some of the complications included having to wait 20 minutes or more for a train, having to change my route because both the B & D trains going uptown were not running as scheduled, and, my personal favorite, an emergency brake that went off by accident under the car on the 7 train causing the operators to have to go out and look under it with flashlights for 20 minutes to fix the problem.

-Finally, on a tangent, I didn’t think I would see those crazy dudes from Dr. Dog again, but I guess I was wrong. If you saw the schedule I linked to above, you know that they played at the show last night too. While I was waiting in line they were loading up their gear into their truck (hopefully it wasn’t stolen this time). Those guys looked fubar as usual though; though the safari hat was not to be seen, the dude with long red hair had some other crazy looking sombrero looking thing on. *Sigh…*