Pachycephalosaurus?

Another double feature family show/rock show at LPR on March 28th. The family show was billed as being in celebration on their recent Grammy win (YAY!). Much less trouble getting there this time. We still chose to stand in back since the view was so good over all the people sitting and we were ensured of no one in front of us because the club had set up barriers between the seated families and the folks standing in back.

While we were waiting inside the club for the doors to open Dan Miller came out a side door in the lobby and hit my boyfriend with the door. He apologized very politely and it didn't hurt much but it made for a great Facebook status update, "just got hit with a door by Dan Miller." Heehee.

Setlist: 813 Mile Car Trip - I Am A Paleontologist - Alphabet of Nations - Pirate Girls Nine - Seven - Istanbul - Apartment Four - E Eats Everything - No! - Clap Your Hands - Particle Man - Doctor Worm - Alphabet Lost and Found - Fibber Island/Zilch - Four of Two - Broom - One Dozen Monkeys - Never Go To Work - WDTSS?



My entire memory of this show is eclipsed by the premiere of I Am A Paleontologist. I believe I have stated before that I love everything that Danny does and boy do I love this song, from the first time I heard the opening chords. I also really love that he plays bass while singing since he usually plays guitar when he does Where Do They Make Balloons? The song has the perfect mix of rock and silly and Linnell reading off dinosaur names was priceless. I don't have any pictures of it though, because everyone stood up and I couldn't see. I spend hours, after they started doing this live, watching YouTube videos of it at various concerts trying to sort out the lyrics for TMBW so I already knew it by heart by the time Science came out. Fortunately, I don't think I will ever tire of it.

Also new to this show, Fibber Island led directly into the Monkees' song Zilch. Linnell, Flans, Dan and Danny each took a part and went faster and faster until they couldn't manage it anymore. It went off pretty well, though I can never hear Danny when they do it. That may be mostly because he is one of the last to start. It sounds kind of like a train if they get it going right and it got a lot of laughs from the parents. I think the kids were kind of confused.



Broom was pretty funny, going on about his next gig at Pianos. He made Linnell laugh a lot. Hannah was back to sing One Dozen Moneys again. She really is quite talented.






This was a pretty short set with only one encore. Curt was back to rock the solo in I Never Go To Work. They did talk about the Grammy win a little bit but didn't say anything memorable enough for me to remember (the quote from one of the official newspaper reviews is "It's an honor just to win"). Seriously, the whole section of my brain devoted to this show is just going "diggin, diggin, diggin, diggin."

We tried to get a setlist after the show but there was nobody around giving them out. We did get to see Marty hanging out afterwards with his family but didn't say anything to him (I never want to bother him when he's with his kids). I do have to say though, without trying to be creepy at all, Marty has the one of the cutest little boys I have ever seen. I've seen the family at a bunch of shows and that little boy is just adorable!

We went to get pizza again between shows then went back to waiting in line. Got to see most of the band leaving the venue between shows, presumably to seek out food but oddly, did not see many of them return (though they did all manage to sneak back in.)

The theme for the evening show was Venue Songs which was cool since I hadn't seen many of them performed before. They had invited their friend Joshua Fried to appear as an opening act and read the narration for the Venue Songs.

Fried's act Joshua Fried's Radio Wonderland is one of those things that you might be really skeptical of when reading about it but it is actually is quite awesome. He has a set up with a steering wheel and upside-down shoes rigged as drums, attached to his laptop and a boombox (which he entered carrying on his shoulder). He finds a song on the radio (which was a bit difficult in the basement club) samples it into the laptop, mixes it up, then uses the shoes to provide percussion and the steering wheel to control the sound. He turned Better in Time, I Will Survive and even a commercial into nifty techno beats and had the whole audience bobbing. He was also bobbing quite a bit on stage. It was fun to see the audience move from confusion to grooving in just a few minutes. Startlingly good. He only played with three or four loops before he finished but he was definitely a success.



TMBG did a few songs to warm up for the Venue Songs set: West Virginia, New York City, She's An Angel, Ana Ng, They Might Be Giants, WDTSS? and WDTSRS?, Subliminal, My Evil Twin and Unsupervised. I had never seen They Might Be Giants outside a Flood show so that was fun. Subliminal made me deliriously happy. And I had never seen My Evil Twin outside the Apollo 18 show either. Flans asked Linnell to do the spoken part on WDTSS? again but when Linnell got to the section he started talking about how he had watched The Three Faces of Eve the night before and how he had really wanted to find a way to work it into the show but hadn't figured out how yet, and then never did any nuclear reactions. It was really funny because no one else had seen the film so no one knew what he was talking about.



Every time they made a mistake Flans would cry "Celebration!" as a signal to stop and try again. Apparently, this was something they had worked out for the family show to avoid saying "this show is killing me inside" (or really to avoid swearing, probably). I think they only used it once or twice in the afternoon but it appeared several times in the evening. It became quite a joke. The really funny thing is they've kept doing it. I've heard them say it at several shows since then.



Joshua Fried almost missed his cue to come on for the Venue Songs narration. I was surprised and pleased to discover that they had adapted the narration from that on the DVD so it wasn't exactly the same. It wasn't even the same as that heard on the recordings from the Venue Songs tour. And it was really funny. Fried did a great job with it, trying to play it really straight even when it was silly, though he did slip and laugh a few times. Linnell was laughing quite a lot. He seemed especially amused by it even though he must have heard it before.



They did not do the Venue Songs in the same order that they appear on the DVD. They also didn't do the Orange Peel one. I didn't realize until after the fact that it wasn't on the recording of the Venue Song tour show that I downloaded either. Kind of sad since it is one of my favorites. I wonder why they don't do it?



The order for this show was Los Angeles - Anaheim - Albany - Dallas - Vancouver - Pittsburgh - Glasgow - Charlottesville - Asbury Park - Brooklyn. They really did write some great songs when they were doing Venue Songs. I find it hard to believe that songs like Los Angeles and Vancouver in particular were written in just a few hours. Just a testament to the band's brilliance I guess. One of the most amusing things about the set was that because the songs were so short Linnell didn't bother taking off the accordion while he was playing keyboard on at least one of the songs. He just leaned over to play with it still strapped to him. I wonder if he can play both at once?



They finished out the show with Older - Withered Hope - Seven - Four of Two - Drink! - Experimental Film and The Mesopotamians. Dan went up and stood on Marty's drum stand for Older and wacked Marty in the back with the neck of his guitar.



For encores they did Museum of Idiots (YAY!) - Spy - Birdhouse - Clap Your Hands and Doctor Worm. It was really funny that they chose to do Spy because I had just been complaining to my boyfriend that I hadn't seen it. We keep a list of all the songs each of us had seen and of all the songs he had seen that I haven't, Spy was the one he had seen the most that I hadn't seen at all (he'd seen it seven times prior to this). The most embarrassing part was I didn't even recognize it when it started so I didn't know what he was talking about when he poked me and asked, "Happy now?" Stan Harrison knocked the sax solo on Spy out of the park. It was phenomenal. The song led into Linnell conducting the audience, the horns and the band in making various bits of noise and music before Flans took over and really got pretty silly with it pointing to one group, then another and back again, trying to confuse everyone. And Linnell had the craziest expression on his face every time Flans pointed to him. A good bit of goofiness to round out the show.



The didn't play LPR in April because Marty had to do something with his family. And I couldn't get to the shows they did do in April because I had to go to a bridal shower that day, so nothing in April for me. They were back in May for one last LPR experience. But there is another double feature show in Tarrytown, NY between us and that show. Coming soon (as it my next show, only 2 more days!).

As always, more pictures of these shows can be found on my Flickr page. Link on the right.