Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
We’ll Make a Lover of You (Les Savy Fav/TAN!, Bowery B’room)
In what will undoubtedly be the concert highlight of the year, Les Savy Fav’s Tim Harrington repeatedly took a belt to the backside of a bent-over Ryan Allen (of LSV’s labelmates Thunderbirds Are Now!). Who’s your post-punk daddy, little boy? [Brooklyn Vegan, bless his protein-starved little heart, took the picture above; more pics here.]
*
Could there have ever been, or will there ever be, a more captivating front man than Tim Harrington?
I’m asking, here, because this was my very first Les Savy Fav concert and I’m in total awe. He was engaging, endearing, innocent, insane, terrifying, brilliant, moronic. He screamed, and hugged – no, really, what’s the last punk show you went to where the lead singer ordered everyone to “pass the hugs around” and you were afraid not to?
It didn’t feel like G.G. Allin-style desperation shtick – there’s no busting bottles over heads, no threatening the crowd with poo; nor did the Fraunch-monikered Performance Art-punk band – formed at the same Rhode Island art school as the Talking Heads – exude pretentiousness. There was some sort of fat, sweaty, low-budg Vision at work here, one with an intelligence and a sense of humor that obliterated the boundary between compulsion and showmanship.
The music – smart, solid stuff that could certainly stand on its own – almost seemed beside the point in concert. The band, a tight, driving, self-contained unit, was often relegated to providing the soundtrack for the Tim Harrington Show. Though the energy was overwhelming, you didn’t want to wind up in the mosh pit for fear of missing whatever the man decided to do next.
The concert wasn’t a set list, it was a series of actions. And then he this and then he that and then and then and then.
“I want...” Harrington – tall, balding, bushy-bearded and pot-bellied, wearing a “Pony Boy Honeydew Melons” T-shirt (and, thankfully, pants) – humbly gathered his thoughts after his friend Fred Armisen was all but booed off the stage (see below). “I want us all to make an answering machine message, but I think that it’d – you think? – probably be tough to get in... sync. Here, take down my cel number – XXX-XXX-XXXX – that’s my parent’s number, so... don’t lose it. We’ll need it later.”
“Show us your pussy!” someone in the crowd yelled, and the band members all pointed to their wives/girlfriends in the balcony. “That’s mine, up there,” Harrington said. “We, um, planned that. That was my sister who yelled that out.”
The band started playing, and he started licking things. Mic stands, Seth Jabour’s guitar strings. Someone in the crowd wanted to give him a string of pearls; he dragged her up on stage so that she could put it on him. When the latch broke, he grabbed a bottle of water and unsuccessfully tried to swallow the necklace. Dollar bills that audience members had shoved into the singer’s shorts were given time to marinade, then removed and eaten. Someone threw a (wrapped) tampon on stage. That went into his mouth, too, and after someone threw a lighter up, he tried to light the string. “That’s the worst candy cigar I’ve ever had. Must be vegan.”
He tried to set fire to something else, too; I can’t remember what.
One song was sung into four stage mics, simultaneously, which probably did nothing soundwise – but was an amazing sight.
There’s already too much I can’t remember. There was a video crew on stage, three folks – no doubt friends of the band – with cameras and a flashlight. Very early on, Harrington commandeered one of the cameras. Did he lick that, too? Drag it over a guitar? Did they give the guitar to one of the crew members? I do know that Harrington and the camera made it into the crowd; he gave it back after “pieces of plastic [started] flying off.”
He did have to chide the crew – who were unprofessionally overjoyed (well, duh) – to get out of the way. Once he was done playing with them, they were no longer part of the show.
After one dip into the audience – “It’s so crowded” – he stopped everything because a fan lost his glasses in the crush up front. After a few seconds with the camera crew’s flashlight, Harrington pepped, “You didn’t need those glasses! They were just a crutch! Move on!” and led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck you, glasses!” Moments later, when someone came up with the specs, Harrington stopped the band again. “I think we all owe those glasses an apology.”
And then and then and then.
Harrington spotted something in the crowd. “Give me your belt! No, you! Your belt!” He held the belt, which had an electronic display, up for the audience. “GOOD LORD... IT’S LES SAVY FAV!” scrolled across its buckle... The opening acts – Thunderbirds are Now! and Rahim – had lined one side of the stage all night, occasionally joining in on some form of percussion. Harrington ordered TAN! singer Allen to his knees and, well, see above.
“That belt is... futuristic,” Harrington said as he handed it back to its owner.
This was my first LSF concert, so don’t ruin it for me. I know that they once sang “There is nothing accidental in this song,” but it all felt unplanned, it all felt genuine. I’m the biggest skeptic in all the world, and it just feels so good to think someone has created a unique moment right in front of me. There was this despair, many years back, at my second Pink Floyd concert; I realized that, not only did the band play the same songs during the same show every same night, but that every little inflection was rehearsed. Practiced to death. Broke my heart.
Last night, Tim Harrington’s bunch of mad merrymakers took my heart and taped it back together. And then, of course, licked it.
Some preparation had gone into the encore: Harrington came out in a low-rent version of a Frilly Shirt, a simple, costume-style eye mask, and lace gloves; he held a bulging plastic bag from Party City. The bag was full of masks – “Don’t worry, there’s not enough for everyone” – which he started handing and throwing out to the crowd. “I don’t want to remember your faces,” he explained. “I just want to remember your bodies.”
“There are feathers,” and there were, a few, coughing out of the bag. “We can rub ourselves with them.” He went on a bit about sensuality, how we shouldn’t be ashamed. While he sang, he doused himself with water, took off the shirt, and matted reclaimed masks and feathers on to his sweaty body. Someone reached up out of the crowd and left an ink-black handprint on his belly. He poked an armhole in the Party City bag, and did his best to wear it as a shirt.
He sighed: “This isn’t at all like what I imagined the New Power Generation would feel like. I thought... I mean...”
During their last song, the band started to break down the stage, leaving only drummer Harrison Haynes, whose drum kit they dismantled around him. When only a single drum was left, Harrington pulled that away and Haynes followed him, followed him down through the crowd and up through the balcony and into whatever other recesses the ballroom had to offer. By the time they had made it back to the stage, most of the packed house had already gone home happy.
*
I caught about four or five songs from the first act, Rahim; their music seemed a bit spare for my taste, but grew on me a little as their set went along.
All three members of that band joined tourmates and “best friends” Thunderbirds Are Now! for a pair of songs. The TAN! (I just realized how that acronym makes it look like I’m very excited about a pale shade of brown) boys put on a good set, a few minutes longer than their incredible headlining show back in May (Allen even jokingly said, “They sure fit a lot of people in the Knitting Factory, tonight”). They clearly won the crowd over, even though Allen’s voice was creaky. They’re headlining at the Mercury Lounge next month (9/21); best to get tickets now.
Former member of Blue Man Group, former LSF-tourmate, and current SNL-member Fred Armisen was given the thankless job of going on at midnight between TAN! and LSF; no one wanted comedy, then. Technical difficulties – a video projector phutzed out – and high-concept comedy sabotaged his act. He seems so sweet, you feel bad for the guy. He did have some interesting ideas – Saddam Hussein as a cultured English rocker – and some good lines (as “Native American comic Billy Smith” he offered, “It sure is wonderful to be on this island of stone mountains and yellow horses... Now, what’s in the news?”), but it just wasn’t going to happen.
*
From the moment they took the stage LSF totally decimated the crowd – and thank God. I found myself stuck near a bunch of drunk NYU students (Oh, I’m just guessing...) who moronically blathered on about how security was so lax at the venue that they’d been able to smuggle a bottle of whiskey in. Pathetic, annoying bunch, one thought he was so funny that we should all listen to him try to distract TAN!’s psychotically energetic keyboardist by asking him to do splits; another, desperate to make everyone think he knew something, dismissed Armisen’s take on Hussein: “He’s copying Chaplin.”
Meanwhile, behind me, some abbreviated lush bellowed out throughout Armisen’s act with hard-to-ignore, ignorant spew. Her parents didn’t pay enough attention to her, and now we all have to suffer. “One Way Widow” this, kid.