B-list celebrity encounter: Got invited to see the show from one of the boxes. Met Lance Bass.
« January 2004 | Main | March 2004 »
I like MxPx, but I really wanted to see Simple Plan. (You'll notice from previous posts that one of my alter egos is a thirteen-year-old girl.) And since they have a new album out, and they're in heavy rotation on MTV, I figured they'd be the headlining act -- that is, going on last. Wrong. They played next-to-last. Came late. Missed them. No big deal, they'll be back.
If you don't know the Huntridge, it's a 1940's era movie theater that was converted into a concert venue in the early '90s, hosting bands like Nine Inch Nails, Bad Religion, Korn, Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the place is a dump. It's old, it's ugly, the roof caved in a few years ago, and I saw parts of the building being held together by duct tape. Sure, it's the ideal environment for a punk show. And a lot of Vegas kids have fond memories of the days when it was virtually the only all-age venue. But since places like the House of Blues moved into town, it's simply no longer economically viable, and it closed its doors permanently just after I saw Eve 6 there.
Which brings me to Eve 6. Their music was good, but never anything especially innovative. It was the lyrics that paid the bills. Yummy, twisty, trippy, tight, confounding, vulgar lyrics. But then they slowly forgot how to write those lyrics, and they quickly took a back seat to the indie-rock revolutionaries who were doing new and interesting things with their guitars.
Now, I'm a big fan of "intimate" performances, but it was just sad when the 50 or so people who showed up for this concert just barely filled a fraction of the venue's airplane hangar-sized interior.
The moral of the story? If you want to stick around, you gotta stay relevant.
