Interpol & The Raveonettes & I'm moving back to Orlando (what you haven't heard that band before?? they're grrrrrrrrrreat!)
In April (or at the latest, July) I will be moving back to Orlando. I've been away for around 2 years now, and had been living under the assumption that I would remain away for good. But, I need to move to a bigger city, I need to be around more musicians and an actual music scene. And yes, I know, Orlando isn't really the place to make it big in the music industry unless you want to be the next Backstreet Boys or Creed. But, it's the one place in this world I can say feels like "home" to me. It's big enough to attract a variety of good touring bands, but small enough not to be so overwhelming to a musician who is still developing her music and is still shy about playing it in public. I'm going with the theory that if bands I enjoy are coming to Orlando on their tours, then there must be fans living locally who share similar musical tastes as myself, and at least a few who are also musicians, and out of those few, maybe there's at least 1 or 2 I can work with. All I can say is I have this gut feeling that Orlando is where I need to be right now. Not forever, but for a little while. My intention is to be there 1-2 years, hopefully find some other decent musicians to work with, play a lot of shows, get some good solid material together, and then see where the music takes me. I'm going back on Saturday to see The Decemberists at Will's Pub, and then I'll spend Sunday driving around the area, trying to figure out where I want to stay.
If I ever have to go back to The Club @ Firestone in Orlando to see another show, just drug me and lock me in a refrigerator with my arms chained to dead animal carcasses and my tongue frozen to a pork chop, it will be a more pleasant experience in the end. Interpol is a great band. They get flack for reproducing their album live in the same way at every show (so, in other words, if you've seen one, you've seen them all) but it's quite an amazing experience to see such a great album come alive before your eyes, especially with the intense light show they have going on behind them. Now, I've been to sold out shows before, I've been packed in with the sardines at concerts, but I've never experienced such rude fans as the ones at the Interpol show, mostly trampily dressed women pushing their way to sit on the corner of the stage. I'm kind of thinking it had more to do with the venue than with the band, though, any club that has foam machines attached to the ceiling and starts a rock show at 6 pm so they can hold a 10 pm DJ dance party disturbs me. They don't come across as a venue that truly cares about the bands that are playing, they just use the stage to handle the overflow from The Social so they can book more gigs and make more money. Of course, I don't really know if that's true. I could just be holding a grudge because the pink-haired security nazi took my camera away from me. Not only were there no signs posted about disallowing picture-taking at the show, it wasn't printed on the ticket, and I was never even given a warning. He pulled me away from my spot at the front of the stage with a bullying attitude, giving me the option of leaving or taking my camera to the front of the building for holding. I asked him if he could take it up for me, but no, he followed me to the front to watch me hand the camera over. It really wasn't fair, if it hadn't been for the nice girl I'd been standing next to, I might have lost my spot that I showed up early to get. I didn't do anything wrong, I had no idea they were going to be such pricks about cameras, if I'd known I wouldn't have brought it, or I at least would have hidden it until Interpol came on and then only taken flashless pictures, which I had no problem doing. Next time I'll know. Even at the Bjork show in Brooklyn, in which the tickets specifically had "no cameras" printed on them, the guards still didn't take them away, they just said don't use the flash. This club has major attitude problems. This is only my second time going to it, but the first time I also had a horrible experience in which I think something was slipped into my drink, because I remember next to nothing about that night, and I've had plenty of experiences drinking way more than I did that night in which I remember the majority of things that happened. Apparently, I was acting out of control, too, and I had to hear about some embarrassing events the day after, which is so awful. It's a scary feeling to black out like that, I never want to experience it again.
So, anyway, despite the mean security guard and the rude fans, the Interpol show was great. When I talk about Interpol I always worry certain people will think I'm being phony, because it took me a while to get into them, and I've told more than one person that I just didn't "get" it. I think part of the problem was all the hype that surrounded them, it always makes it difficult for me to really get into a band or an album when everyone's telling me how "great" it is, and how much I should like it with my musical tastes. I liked a couple of the songs, but mostly I never found myself wanting to sit down and listen to the rest of the album. It wasn't until a couple months ago when I put the CD on in the car to give it one more shot to find out if I could hear what everyone else was hearing in it, and WOW, from the first few notes of the opening song I was blown away. I couldn't believe I hadn't been able to hear how great that band was before. I left that CD in the player for a couple weeks, it was the only thing I wanted to listen to. Then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kept me from "hearing" this music the first time. I partially think that it's taken me a while to really develop my ear for hearing what I like about music. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I've always been a kind of half-hearted music listener. I didn't have the patience to sit there and listen to an entire album - if an individual song didn't grab me, I probably wasn't going to listen to the band much. I would claim how much I liked bands without knowing more than 1 or 2 songs from them, and really wasn't much of a fan at all. It's rough to call yourself a musician when you really know and appreciate so little about music. My old roommate had a lot to do with teaching me what it meant to appreciate music. It's funny to be someone who needed to be taught that, especially at 30, you should know what you like by then, shouldn't you? They should really teach music appreciation starting in grade school, and I don't mean band class, I mean true music appreciation that teaches kids how to seek out the music that moves them, and why it's so important to know how to do this, to know what you love, and how to *find out* what you love, because not everyone automatically knows this. I have always been a musician, but I never knew how to appreciate other artists, I never knew how to appreciate music in general, I listened to whatever my friends listened to, I had a couple bands I bonded with for various reasons, but none that have stayed with me for any length of time, because my reasons for bonding with them were more surface than music-related. It's because of all this time I spent not knowing how to appreciate music that I've struggled with my own songwriting and identity as a musician. When you know what moves you about music you are able to focus your mind and heart on a more singular direction as opposed to someone who likes "everything" but really doesn't care about any of it and spreads her musical energy so thin it becomes transparent and virtually non-existent.
Well, anyway, I was sad that I didn't get to take any pictures at the Interpol show, because of the lighting I think they would have come out amazing. I got to make up for it at The Raveonettes show in Tampa on Sunday. I have to say, I really like that band. They write this noisy, incredibly catchy, ambient pop with a 50's and 60's flair, and their whole concept seems to come out of a B-movie from that generation. I think you either love this band or hate them, there's no in between. They get compared a lot to The Jesus & Mary Chain, who I haven't really listened to much, but I've seen reviewers go as far as to actually call them The Jesus & Mary Chain, as if The Raveonettes have no unique identity of their own. I can't comment on that, since I don't know, all I know is they're fun and I like them. They developed their albums with rules. All songs are 3 chords only and must be under 3 minutes. For their first album, Whip It On, all songs were (I believe) in B flat minor, and for Chain Gang of Love they're all in B flat major. Whip It On surprised me, because on first listen all the songs sound the same, for the most part. I kept reading people say how it doesn't make you want to keep playing it over and over, but it didn't have that effect on me, I got the songs stuck in my head, I put the album on constant repeat, and it didn't get boring to me. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they're some great, revolutionary band, I just think they write good songs, they're fun, and whether or not they are on the marketing tool bandwagon a la The White Stripes doesn't matter, I just know that I enjoyed the show, I enjoy their look, and I enjoy both their albums. And I really enjoy the pictures I took. The Twilight in Ybor City is my favorite club to see shows, the lighting is great, and it's usually not difficult to get up to the front to take pictures. Especially at this show, there weren't many people there. Too bad, they missed out on a fun rock show.
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