The Post-Rockist

Maybe I’m just completely oblivious, but I have never noticed security at a Billiken Club show before. So when one of the periwinkle security officers started encroaching suspiciously close to where I was standing, I asked him:

“Hey, what’s with all the security tonight?” (I’m extraordinarily eloquent in person, apparently.)

“Huh? Oh, yeah, we’re here all the time,” he lied.

“Funny, I had never noticed. Are you sure?”

“Well, after that incident at Wash U where the kid got tased…”

“C’mon, that was a different act entirely,” I replied. He was thinking of the Girl Talk show that took place on the other pricey private college in town, where things got out of hand and a student did, in fact, get tased. In the nude. It even made the news. “Look around, these are good people. Nothing to worry about.”

“It’s just a precaution then. In case things get crazy.”

“Well, isn’t that exactly what we’re hoping for?”

And thank god, that’s exactly what we got.

I won’t go into extreme detail, since we’ve already drooled over the righteous insanity of a Dan Deacon concert at Scrummage in the not-so-distant past, and A to Z and Toe Taps have already attempted much more thorough reviews of Saturday’s show. But I will say that if Dan Deacon wasn’t something of a sweatpants and microphone performance artist, he would make for the World’s Greatest Wedding DJ.

Located right in the middle of the dance floor, Deacon led the crowd in warm-up exercises (”Reach up with your left arm as far as it can go and wiggle your fingers around as if the sky was made of some kind of waxy hair”), ice-breakers (”Stare deeply into the eyes of a stranger standing next to you. Now imagine what’s the worst thing those eyes have ever seen.”), and revved us up with a little taste of Salt N Pepa’s “Shoop” before launching into his own song, “Okie Dokie,” and throwing all of us into a sweating, dancing, bouncing, perspiring, jostling, jittery frenzy. Did I mention sweating? This was quite possibly the worst smelling concert I have ever been to. Seriously. Note to future Dan Deacon concert attendees: apply antiperspirant liberally to underarms prior to attending.

The show was buck-wild insane. I loved every second of it. The school-yard dance-off. The endless human worm loop we formed. The non-stop arms in the air aerobic dancing (I hope I didn’t break any toes that I may have landed on). Dan even managed to convince one of the security guards to partake in the pre-song pose for “Wham City”: one foot on tip toe, hip jutted out, hand on hip, and another hand raised in the air in a regal gesture “as if you have just discovered an ocean never before seen by humanity.”

By all logical predictors, every fiber of my body should have been sore Sunday morning, but I think somehow my body released enough endorphins during the dancing frenzy to keep me doped up for the rest of the week.

Ad Astra Per Aspera from Lawrence, Kansas opened with a weird mix of Zappa meets Brainiac meets, I dunno, something weirder still. Before them, the Pragmatic from Edwardsville, Illinois started things off with a short set of spastic NES synth pop/garage disco, somewhere between the random bleeps and blurps of the Fiery Furnaces and a nerdier Postal Service. Although relatively new, they’ve been turning some heads, in part because Andre Allen Anjos, part of the RAC, has a remix of Radiohead’s “Nude” that’s currently ranked something like #6 in the whole damn world. But considering how quickly they got the indie kids dancing Saturday night, with their hunched over jumping and Lite Brite effects and a camera man filming every second of their show, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from them regardless.

Aw, nuts. Didn’t I say I wasn’t going to go into too much detail about the concert? And here I am, just rambling on again. Okay, let’s wrap things up with a video of a Dan Deacon. Not from St. Louis, but it gets the point across:

-Posted by Todd