bobafred

Yeah, I wish.

Dave and I saw a pretty crappy band called Homeroom last night at Smith’s Olde Bar. I guess, to be fair, it wasn’t them that necessarily sucked, it was more that the volume on the mics was all jacked up. The back-up singer guy (a very skinny Hurley from Lost) was way too loud to the point of making my ears hurt. It’s unfortunate because they sounded pretty good on the instruments, but I just couldn’t enjoy it.

The real reason that we were even in the upstairs music hall was that when we arrived at Smith’s I saw that Five Eight was playing. If you don’t know who Five Eight is or have never seen them live, I feel a little bad for you. But, I felt bad for you anyway. I mean, you’re you.

I’m pretty sure I said this to Dave last night but I’ll go ahead and say it again: Five Eight is my favorite live band of all time. They’re great on their albums, it’s just that they seem to really turn it up live. Lead singer, Mike Mantione, is an interestingly weird character on stage. For the opening song, the band started playing and Mike was nowhere to be found. Then all of a sudden, from the back of the room, he comes storming through the crowd, jumps on stage and starts to sing. It was as if he just woke from a nap or had to finish one last cocktail before he could go on.

The set seemed like a pretty fair mix of new and old. I recognized a few tracks from other live performances, a few from the albums I own and then a few that I was not familiar with at all. While they didn’t play my favorite song, Weirdo, they closed with Behead Myself, another favorite from the Weirdo album. All the songs were loud and rocking, the way a live show should be. Mantione and Dan Horowitz killed on lead guitar and bass, respectively, and Mike Rizzi was thunderous on the drums.

Pretty much all the concert cliches were there too. There was the guy that swayed a little too much to the music. He would do this really exaggerated head turn thing, almost like he was looking to see if any ladies were checking out his groovin’. He was also tall and goofy, which added to the humor of it all. I think Dave got some video of it. Next, there was the guy with his fingers in his ears. Ear plugs are ok, but standing there for an hour with your fingers in your ears is just plain dumb. And finally, there’s the guy that wears a shirt of the band who is on stage. Those guys make me laugh.

Oh yeah, also in attendance was duane, but he had to leave before the show started because he had something in his eye.

In summary, I’m glad we happened to be at Smith’s last night and Five Eight happened to be playing and that they put on an excellent performance, but that part was expected.