A week ago Friday, I went to see Cowboy Mouth play at BB King. When I found out that they were playing so close to my birthday, I think I damn near shit myself with excitement.

Seriously.

They’re that good.

Plus, they were playing at BB’s which might I remind you is where my James works his monitor magic, so on top of getting to see a shit your pants good band I get to carry around that internal badge of pride that I’m going home with the man who’s making sure the band can hear what the fuck their doing.

I love going to shows James works because of that. It just makes me all squee inside.

Anna came with me, cause she’s my loyal concert buddy and well… after you’ve seen Cowboy Mouth once (the first time we saw them was at Highline Ballroom back in June) you’ve got to see them every time they come to town. It’s just one of those things.

We started out towards the back of the room because we got a table because she wanted to eat, but since we wanted to get up and dance and be merry with everybody else we closed out during the first song.

And dear goddess was it LOUD.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like loud. It’s just that… well… if my ears are telling me “OW!” in the first song, that’s not really what you’d call a good thing because if you start in the “OW!” range by the end of the show you’re going to get to the “OH MY GOD! I’M GOING TO KILL THE FUCKING ENGINEER!” range and well… I happen to like sound engineers and don’t like to make a habit of murdering them. (So, if you happen to be Cowboy Mouth’s engineer and you ever find yourself at BB’s again, hint. Start slightly quieter than you think you need to be. Kthxbye!)

So, I turned to Anna and made the executive decision that the best place in the house to be considering the volume was somewhere over by monitorland. What I didn’t expect was for James to invite us to hang out in monitorland.

And this is the part where I geek out just a little bit and admit how stupid I am at times.

I don’t know why, but the whole concept of monitors sort of eluded me. I mean sure, I got the fact that the monitors are what the band uses to hear themselves, and I knew that each member of the band has their own mix which is tailored to what they need to hear but somehow I missed the memo in regard to how it was possible for the monitor engineer to mix several different things at once and manage to hear himself think.

In case the concept of this has eluded you too, I’ll fill you in on a secret. There’s a button. And when you press it, it plays whoever’s mix you want to listen to and adjust. You listen to them one at a time on the monitor that’s at your feet.

OH MY GOD! It’s like MAGIC OR SOMETHING!

I also felt like a pretty damn big idiot for not realizing that’s how it works without having to observe the phenomenon myself.

But anyway. The name of the band is Cowboy Mouth!

Not from the show I went to, but to give you a little taste…. You Can’t Always Get What You Want / I Believe In The Power of Love filmed at WI State Fair in August 2010.

One of the things that I love about Cowboy Mouth shows is that no matter what sort of sour mood you came to the show in, you leave at the end of the night believing that life is amazing and that you can do anything that you want in life.

They never cease to amaze me and inspire me.

When Anna and I met up with James after the show at the bar we always go to, he dutifully brought momentos of the show. Anna and I both got one of John Thomas Griffith’s guitar picks and he gave me the set list from the stage.

Now, if I could only train him to get things signed…

There are really some connections made on this here Interwebz that when you start to follow the trail of how they were made in the first place, you just find yourself saying, “Well, damn, son… that’s abstract.”

Such is the case where I find Dare Dukes‘ new album “Thugs and China Dolls” in my hot little hand.

When Dare sent me a message on last.fm back at the beginning of November saying that I’d posted a song of his on my blog awhile back and wondered if I’d be interested in reviewing his upcoming album, I found myself scratching my head a little bit. Well, of course I want to review the album… but who is Dare Dukes? Certainly I would have remembered if I’d blogged a song of his… Right?

So, I did what any self-respecting nerd with a last.fm account would do… Check to see if I’d ever listened to this guy in the first place. And I had. Twice, in fact.  Which lead me to conclude that I most likely had listened to him on thesixtyone, an indie (mostly) Internet radio website which I listen to with stunning irregularity these days, but for awhile was quite enamored with…  and then I realized, that up until maybe about a month ago, all of my last.fm listening habits landed on my tumblr because up until like a month ago, I just had all of my feeds pointing there… so that’s probably how I had featured him without knowing. Crazy, eh?

So, at any rate… “Thugs and China Dolls” ended up in my mailbox for my listening pleasure.

The first thing that struck me as I was listening to the album was Dare’s voice. He’s got a unique one…  in that sort of way that I fear that some people might call initially grating, but trust me… it grows on you. Also, I couldn’t put my finger on it who he reminded me of for the longest time…  James had suggested Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse,  but I thought that was a stretch at best… I decided today he sounds much more like John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.

Meet You at the Bus by Dare Dukes

Before I’d gotten my hands on the entire album, I’d been listening to the single, “Meet Me at The Bus” on pretty frequent repeat. The track boasts Thayer Sarrano (Of Montreal) on piano and the same horn section that was on TV on the Radio’s most recent album and some rather excellent harmony that you can’t help but find yourself singing along to.

However, I feel the gem of the album is the lovely yet melancholy “Lament of the Subway Rider” with it’s accordion and haunting strings. I absolutely adore the chorus…

I want a stereo lover
Broken like in a country song
We’ll help each other suffer
Pretty like a sing-a-long

Maybe it’s just that I’ve have a love like that.

Dare Dukes’ “Thugs and China Dolls” goes on sale January 16, 2012 on Bandcamp. For my fellow New Yorkers, he’ll be at Union Pool in Williamsburg on January 25th at 9pm. For tour dates elsewhere, check his schedule.

Growing up, my favorite Christmas movie was an hour long Muppet TV special called A Muppet Family Christmas which originally aired on ABC in 1987. My mother taped it off the television, and I watched it every year.

When I happened to notice that someone posted it up on YouTube…. I figured, hey… What the hell, let’s have an unauthorized screening of the film right here on on my blog. Merry Christmas!

James and I went and saw Electric Six at the Bowery on Friday night. It was the first time that I’d been to a show with James that he wasn’t working, so it was a little bit of an experience. You know those people who hate to be passengers in the car? They have to drive or else they feel super anxious? Well… James is a bit that way about shows. If he’s not behind a sound board, he feels out of his element. So we got as close as we could to that and stood behind the sound booth.

It was actually a pretty an interesting vantage point to watch the show from. The sound booth at the Bowery is up in the balcony so there’s this amazing view of the crowd and the stage, plus the added bonus of being able to spy on everything that the front of house engineer was doing. AND THEN since James is all smart about this sort of thing he started pointing out all of the sort of things you listen for as an engineer.

The highlight of the show for me shockingly enough was not Electric Six (though they were quite fantastic). It was the second opener, Kitten.

I’m one of those people who pays attention to the openers. I’m a cynical critic at heart and there’s something sort of perversely entertaining to me about picking apart the act of a band that I know absolutely nothing about and am pretty much primed to hate because it’s just another thing I have to wait out before I can see what I came there to see.

The question that sort of prevailed the evening was “What makes a good show?”

That conversation started during the first opener, New York Rivals set… who were listenable, but didn’t win me over. If I were to pick a few reasons why, it had a lot to do with I felt like their set list was all over the map stylistically (cohesion matters, folks!), the fact that their lead singer kept dropping the f-bomb in between songs and he sounded more like a whiney kid than a badass motherfucker when he did it, and the fact that the only person who seemed to have any comfort on stage at all was the singer… Well, until they invited some other guitarist guy on stage to play with them on their last song and it finally got the bassist to relax enough to actually face the crowd, he’d spent 90% of the set with his back slightly to us.

Which brings us back to Kitten.

Since I didn’t like the first opener, I was a bit scowly and primed to dislike the second opener. Also, the lead singer of Kitten is a girl and I’m about a hundred times more critical of a frontwoman just based on the fact that watching a lady perform kinda brings out my “I want to be on stage.” envy. My skepticism permeated the first song to the point where I’m pretty sure I didn’t even pay attention to the first song.

First things first…. Kitten’s frontwoman, Chloe Chaidez is probably one of the most animated performers I’ve seen on stage in quite some time. By the end of the set, I was extremely impressed by her ability to do handstands, jump off speaker cabinets and dance like a badass all while still being to sing it like a pro. But in the first song? The thought was more, “Oh god… Is the chick gonna blow her load in the first song?”

Also, my eyes kept being dragged stage right to the guitarist, who sported a black and white checkered shirt and a light colored guitar… but he was a pretty boring band member to be staring at… it wasn’t like he was jumping around like a rockstar, he was just playing guitar.

Just as I was beginning to get crotchety about things, James poked me in the ribs and pointed down at the engineer, “Well, he’s digging it.”

Well shit. I’d completely forgotten what the point of going to a rock show was in the first place. To listen.

“Try turning your eyes off for awhile,” he suggested.

When you closed you eyes, perspective changed. It sounded perfect. Everything was where it was supposed to be, and goddamn was it breathtaking.

James always says that’s what it’s supposed to do. If it’s right, it’s either supposed to make you sing or make you tear up.

I cried through two songs.

And that’s when it dawned on me.

The problem visually had to do with color.

Everything that was behind the band was black. Chloe was wearing a black shirt with a darkish red on the bottom. Despite all her movement, she was blending into the stage because she was wearing the same color as everything behind her. The eye naturally gravitates to contrast, and since the guitarist was sporting the lightest colors on stage I kept finding myself looking at him despite the fact that he was otherwise pretty boring instead of the pretty lady doing visually interesting things, you know… like handstands and jumping off of speaker cabinets.

James, who’s life work is to make things sound beautiful, asked me, “Does it really matter?”

I think it does.

Performing is all about capturing the crowd and holding their attention captive with your energy, and in the context of a rock show… cause that energy to spread throughout the crowd so everyone is moved, whether that be physically or emotionally… preferably both. To be able to do this, you have to earn the crowd’s trust and help them the crowd overcome all of the insecurities that they may have about being vulnerable and moving their body and feeling emotion in public.

The opener at a reasonably sized rock show tends to be at a disadvantage in moving the crowd because they don’t have the benefit of already being familiar and they’re contending with the fact that the crowd is probably in a mood where they’re merely tolerating the fact that they have to wait to see what they came to see.

Everything about the way you present yourself on stage says something to the audience…. From the way you carry yourself, to the color of the clothes that you wear, to the notes that you play, to the words that you sing. If something feels amiss, the crowd won’t respond.

In the case of Kitten, the fact that the guitarist wore white and the singer wore black drew your visual attention to the wrong person. The singer was setting what the tone of energy ought to have been by her motion, but the guitarist’s brighter clothing overshadowed her and drew the focus to him. Since he wasn’t a particularly animated performer, his energy wasn’t inspiring the crowd…. and since your average sighted person relies much more heavily on their eyes than their ears when making a judgement, regardless of whether they actively realize that’s what they’re doing or not, your visual energy proves to be quite important in selling yourself to a crowd full of people that don’t know who you are.

If James hadn’t reminded me to close my eyes, I would have never noticed that it was actually a very well put on set, and I wouldn’t have had the positively blissful moments that I had during it, and I probably would never have noticed how much I rely on my eyes… even at something that’s supposed to be an auditory experience.