Buzz and I played a brief set at Club Europa last night, but not the club you might have seen many notable shows in the past (Shellac, Melt Banana, Lightning Bolt). No, our show was down on the ground floor. Turns out a couple weeks ago Europa renovated the lower bar and turned it into a little venue in its own right. Gone is the pool table, gone are the tables and tubular metal bar stools. The bar has been shortened, lights have been dimmed, red velvet banquettes brought in and a somewhat awkwardly-designed stage has taken their place. This came as a relief to me, I had been dreading the thought of our lil two-man operation trying to plug away in the cavernous upstairs space. Best of all they didn't charge a cover, marking 2 locations I now know of (along with GBM) that have free shows around here. I don't know if they'll keep that up there, but it was a fun time.
After the show we scampered over to Club Exit, where the F Yeah Fest was winding up its tour. The headliners were the Circle Jerks, yet another reunited band from days of yore back on the sing-for-your-supper circuit. Keith Morris still has the voice, but those dreadlocks are nasty. I guess, better than a mohawk, extremely long, scroungy white-guy dreadlocks are the ultimate physical proof that you probably don't have a regular day job. They could still play pretty fast, though they played a version of "Back Against the Wall" that bordered on reggae, it was so slow. How odd. Odder, they closed the show by playing what I figure was every single song that Morris performed when he was a founding member of Black Flag. At first it was cool, but then it just got weird. Why so many Black Flag songs? They're awesome songs, and I like Morris' voice way more than I ever liked Rollins (though my favorite Flag vocalist is still Ron Reyes), but it became like a bizarre idol-worship move, having the Circle Jerks play backup to the "An Evening with Keith Morris" show.
Perhaps the weirdest thing, however, to come out of this show was the revelation that the very fat, Cpl Henry Blake-style fishing hat, and mountain-man beard was none other than ZanderSchloss, whom geeks like me might better recognize as the character Kevin from Repo Man (the super geeky guy Otto works with at the grocery store).
