Ballroom slam-dance
◊ Oh, hell, I can't think of any other way of saying what I did last night without falling into a predictable rigid linear narrative structure. I'm sure there are other ways of handling it, but they'd run the risk of sounding like Joyce at his most incomprehensible or Kerouac at his most irritating.
So. From the beginning:
Last night Dean and I went to see the Stiff Little Fingers at Slim's. It was an all-ages show for a scene-heavy kind of music in a scene-heavy town. Me being the snotty little indie rocker, I was prepared to stick my hands in my pockets and slouch into my hoodie all night if I had to.
The God Awfuls opened, and three out of four of them were wearing Creepers. That was enough to make my heart skip. Plus there are two cute band members, not just one, which bodes well for their commercial success. Not to mention the music is solid, smart and fun.
Doesn't matter how good they were, though; they were openers. I had dragged Dean to the single row of people lined up in front of the stage. The rest of the crowd hung back, leaving a 15-foot empty space on the floor. As the band harangued the audience for not crossing the "cool line" to get close to the stage and cranked out faster songs, the audience slowly crept forward.
Thing is, Dean and I never actually saw anybody moving forward. There'd be a vast Sahara of floor between us and the bored-looking audience, and then after two songs we'd look back and everyone was suddenly standing closer. We never saw anybody actually walking forward. It was like a club version of Red Light, Green Light.
Next up was Throw Rag.
Boy, howdy.
Um ... there were a bunch of people on stage. One guy was playing a washboard, and the singer was wearing a polyester leisure suit and a captain's hat and a string tie with what looked like a rodent's skull as the clasp.
"Psychobilly" just begins to describe it. They were ... well, imagine if your favorite rockabilly band spent less time doing their hair and more time watching Russ Meyer films and making balls-out crazy music that makes your spine feel like a live snake. It's a little hard to explain, the way it's hard to explain a sixth-grade crush on the school bully. I'll just say that they're playing Slim's again on September 5, so if you're near San Francisco you can catch the act yourself.
The Stiff Little Fingers were why everyone was there, though. The all-ages crowd was packed shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip before the roadies were done checking the gear onstage. There was everyone from dumb drunk guys to old-school punkers to punk rock fashion plates to skinny little kids in Nirvana t-shirts who were probably still teething when Kurt Cobain offed himself.
A few songs into the set, Dean and I forged our way into the — for lack of a better word — mosh pit. I hate the term "mosh pit" because when I was in high school, the huge sweaty muscle-bound types had just discovered it. They would charge around in circles bashing the shit out of each other at any sound louder than a toilet flushing, crushing anyone smaller than themselves to paste.
This was a much cooler setup: the floor was so crowded that nobody could get up enough momentum to hurt anyone, and there were some women and skinny teens mixed in so everyone was behaving in a not-total-asshole fashion. Plus most of the guys were my height or shorter, and most of them were skinny, so the potential for obliteration was low. The security guards would yank out anyone getting violent and would spray water onto the crowd to keep us cool. When I got knocked over, the people next to me would haul me back to my feet in no time. I didn't get grabbed or ground on — well, at least not on purpose. I know some people in the pit copped accidental feels, but I forgive them. I almost feel sorry for them: they got to feel my magnificent breasts and didn't even have time to appreciate it.
Silly bastards that we are, Dean and I wouldn't settle for just slam-dancing and pogoing. Taking a cue from the Supersuckers show, we grabbed each other's hands and started slam-slow-dancing in circles around the mosh pit. A few songs later, during a down-tempo number, Dean pointed to one side and said, "Look, someone's copying us!" There was another couple mashed up against each other in the crush of thrashing people, arms around each other and dancing. Soon there were three pairs of us swooping and bouncing and crashing around the pit. At the end of the song, I kissed Dean and he leaned me back into a dip. Some guy with a big smile and bigger hair tapped Dean on the shoulder and said, "OK, you guys win the prize."
After the Stiff Little Fingers' last encore, Dean and I sucked down the water the management had left out for the crowd (man, Slim's is good to their customers), recovered my lost sweater and checked for bruises (2, upper arms). I'd been clipped in the face once when I fell and didn't want to have to explain to my mom: "No, Mom, Dean doesn't beat me. I got the bruise from a total stranger at a club." We headed home after pulling 20 party fliers off Dean's parked car (I counted them) and headed for home, eating leftover pizza and reeking of sweat.
The End.