The Post-Rockist

It’s Tuesday, two days after the 2008 Riverfront Times Music Showcase, and I’m just starting to recover. It wasn’t so much hangover symptoms as it was an overall body ache, like I had been run through the clothes dryer a few times and then kicked down three flights of stairs. Ugh. Twelve hours of shuttling back and forth between music venues under the unforgiving Missouri sun isn’t something you just jump into unprepared. No, you need proper training, like a marathon runner: practice zig-zagging through the city’s bars and nightspots (preferably with runner’s weights on your ankles for strength); staying up progressively later in the nights leading up to the big event (or foregoing sleep altogether in favor of power naps); warm-up stretches of your required clapping muscles and devil fingers; maybe even a trip to a tanning bed if you burn easily. (If interested, Camp Prockist is accepting applications now for Summer 2009!)

Proper attire for RFT Showcase attendees: Hat to block out the sun, spectacles to witness acts of awesomeness, camera to prove you were there, bag for refreshments and CDs, comfortable shoes, and shorts that breathe.

Or… not. Your call. You can always just do what I did, which is show up with barely enough cash for the $5 all-access wristband and only the faintest idea of what bands you’d like to see and where all the venues are located.

The Livers

I arrived just after 1:00 in time to watch The Livers kick things off. I was already starting to sweat so I was relieved that they were playing in the dark confines of the Duck Room under Blueberry Hill, where Scot Freeman and Luke Roulston, the band’s guitarists and vocalists, had set up their video screen to project Scot Freeman and Luke Roulston, the band’s bassist and drummer. After watching their two-part promotional mockumentary, as well as an excellent Lo-Fi St. Louis episode featuring the Livers, I knew I would be a complete and total putz if I missed this show. They didn’t disappoint. The show was genius to an almost absurd degree, as if they were rock’n'roll idiot savants stuck in 1996 with 21st century A/V skills. They chatted with their pre-recorded counterparts, changed costumes in time, found a spare arm to lean on, and, when they remembered the right cue, took four shots of whiskey amongst themselves. The crowd was eating it up, and it didn’t hurt that the songs were killer too: “She-Wolf,” “Autistic Girlfriend,” and “Humble Pie” are three of the most memorable, ridiculous, straight-up rock songs I’ve heard all year. They closed their set with “2 Legs 2 Dance” and invited the audience to shake their money makers. As far as I could tell, only one lady in mom jeans took them up on the offer. (Continued)

Huzzah! The 2008 Riverfront Times Music Showcase is upon us! Ladies and germs, feast your eyes and ears upon the magnificent, stupendous, astonishing line-up of town troubadors, warblers, and aspiring legends converging from all corners of metro St. Louis for one day, and one day only! Ring the bells! Wave the flags! Blast the trumpets! This event is one for the ages, and not to be…

Huh? Oh, you’re not buying it? Ahem. Well then, let me start over. I admit it’s a little difficult to get excited for an event with a title as quaint as “Riverfront Times Showcase”; it conjures images of job fairs, where you half-expect the bands to be lined up in little booths handing our fliers and demo CDs to aimless undergrads. At least in Detroit the local paper named their music fest the “Blowout,” which has a little more zing! bang! pow! to it (Not to mention it was four days long, none of those days being a Sunday. C’mon, St. Louis, step it up). So far, the reaction I’ve gotten from friends about this little shindig have ranged from, “A local music showcase? Wow, sounds like a blast. I’d love to go but I’ve got to, uhm, iron my socks. All day. Sorry,” to “Meh, it’s just the same few bands that play every year.”

I get this creeping feeling that the Showcase audience will consist entirely of other bands, their girlfriends, and myself. Nevertheless, I remain cautiously optimistic in hopes of a better turnout. After all, I’ve only lived in St. Louis for less than a year now, which hasn’t been nearly enough time to make me feel jilted and jaded toward the state of local music. (I’ll give it another year before I, fingers crossed, find indisputable proof that So Many Dynamos, the Bluebird, and the RFT are engaged in a secret sexual tryst/malicious cabal determined to overhaul all St. Louis media and poison the milk in our schools’ cafeterias to turn the children into goth indie zombies. Or whatever it is they’re supposedly up to. Jinkies!)

As strange as it may sound, I really am excited for the Showcase. Twelve-plus hours of the best live music St. Louis has to offer — a lot of which I’ve seen already, but most of which is going to be brand spanking new to me — condensed into one easy serving. Plus, it’s dirt cheap. Based on who I’ve already seen, who I’m hoping to see again, and who I’m hoping to see for the first time, I’ve cobbled together the following hour-by-hour unofficial Post-Rockist itinerary: (Continued)

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When the members of Wilco shuffled onto stage Friday night, dressed like librarians on happy hour, the crowd went bananas. Wild, uncaged, totally unexpected excitement. Don’t get me wrong, I like Wilco. Pretty much everyone I know likes Wilco. They’re a very likeable band. But they’ve been granfathered into that rare indie elder band status, occupied most notably by the likes of Yo La Tengo, where they’re still young enough to be releasing amazing, vital records, but they’ve also been around the block enough times that everyone sort of takes it for granted that they’re a Really Good band that consistently puts out Really Good songs. In another ten years or so they’ll be selling $100 tickets at the Fox to middle-aged fans in business suits. Nobody gets out of their chair, screaming bloody murder excited for a Really Good band, do they?

Apparently, they do. (Continued)

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. (Continued)