Street Tar And Summer

Spoon @ Rockefeller Park 7/11/2007
Eddie’s Ragga / Don’t Make Me A Target / My Mathematical Mind / Small Stakes / The Underdog* / Stay Don’t Go* / I Turn My Camera On / Black Like Me / Rhthm & Soul / Chicago At Night / Take A Walk / You Got Yr Cherry Bomb* / Jonothon Fisk* / I Summon You (* = played with four-piece horn section)

1. I almost gave up on going to this show. The weather was pretty harsh in the hours leading up to the event — some serious torrential downpour stuff, and I got caught in it. If it weren’t for my friend’s optimism, I would have just gone home. We got to the park around 7:00, and the rain tapered off, and the place was at 1/3 capacity. It was pleasant, actually. More people filled in, but it wasn’t nearly as crowded as it would’ve been under normal circumstances. Also, hey, it wasn’t disgustingly humid anymore after all that rain.

2. Aside from the person I went with, all of my friends who were going to the show bailed or assumed the gig was cancelled. This includes my fellow Movie Binger Meg Deans, who ended up seeing the new Harry Potter movie at a multiplex a few blocks away from Battery Park City. After the film was over, she found out the show had gone on and walked over to see if she could catch an encore. Instead:

It was over, and as I texted sad things I realized I was standing next to Britt Daniel. This annoyed me for some reason so I walked away. I paused to photograph a sign and found myself suddenly surrounded by Mr. Daniel and about fifteen hangers-on. This time I thought it was funny particularly since he was discussing Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga‘s iTunes rank as I wove among them to get to the train station.

3. Spoon performed with a four-piece horn section on four of the songs. Britt only referred to them as “these guys.” “Cherry Bomb” and “The Underdog” felt looser and more energetic than the album recordings, and the arrangement for “Stay Don’t Go” gave that song this subtle, soulful drag that I quite liked. “Jonothon Fisk” was the best of the four, and I feel that we should all get together and politely petition for the band to commercially release a recording of that version because it might actually be superior to the one from Kill The Moonlight. Interestingly, even when the band were performing as an octet, they still sounded incredibly lean and sleek.

4. The person I went with told me a few times before that she’d been mildly traumatized by a crowd of fratty assholes at a Spoon show in Florida circa 2002, which is why she hadn’t seen the band play since despite being enough of a fan to get the cover of “Jonothon Fisk” tattooed on her bicep. The thing is, the audience actually was full of fratty dudes. I mean, they weren’t the worst kind, but they made frat dude noises and gave off that particular macho vibe. Also, I’d say that a majority of the men at this thing were more like that, and the typical “indie guy” type were in the minority. I don’t know what this means. Maybe that indie types wuss out when the weather sucks? Fun fact: fratty Spoon fans looooooooooooooooove “I Summon You.”

5. There was a woman to our left who was cracking me up because she’d start clapping at seemingly random points in the songs, and she was pretty much always off beat. She was so happy, though!

Spoon “Black Like Me” – For the first month that I knew this song, I didn’t understand what Britt was singing. He garbles a lot of his words, and so the most crucial line in this song, and possibly in his entire discography gets a bit slurred: “I’m in need of someone to take care of me tonight.” It’s so perfect, so simple, so gutting. Then I noticed the name of the girl he keeps mentioning, and I realized that if this song came out three or four years ago, I wouldn’t be able to handle it, and I would’ve had to have delete it from my computer to keep myself from listening to it. Even without any particular pain to hang it on, the song still manages to sting a bit. I listen to it over and over, and I zero in on the way he sounds so hopeful even though everything has gone wrong, and it’s mostly his fault. He spins his pathetic situation into something romantic and weirdly dignified, and just as things seem to be looking up, the song suddenly cuts out, or passes out, or vanishes into the night. (Click here to buy it from Merge.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site with mp3s from William Parker Quartet, Deerhunter, and Of Montreal.