Last night, I saw
Camper Van Beethoven and
Cracker at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia. It's the only venue in town I know of that has free parking, so that's always a plus. CVB played through the first set pretty quickly, without much between-song chatter. I'd seen them live three times before, and they played a lot of the same stuff, but it was the first time I'd seen "Seven Languages" done live.
Cracker's set included a few favorites of mine, like "Merry Christmas Emily" (they said they rarely played it, but added it to the set for the holiday season, and just kept it in after that), "Mr. Wrong," "Happy Birthday to Me" (Johnny Hickman played the harmonica), "How Can I Live Without You?", and "This Is Cracker Soul." There were several songs with Johnny on lead vocals, which was interesting because he didn't sing much at the other Cracker show I saw. Maybe David Lowery was trying to save his voice, since he WAS playing for about three hours between the two bands. David talked considerably more during the Cracker set, telling a story about how an old lady in Santa Cruz shouted out, "Play the song about the whore!", and how the story didn't go over well in Germany. During Johnny's guitar solos, he thought about why the Germans didn't think it was funny, and initially figured that they might have found it offensive, but then invented this whole idea about Germans having a whole lot of traditional whore-related songs. According to someone in Copenhagen, though, the explanation was simply that "Germans have no humor!" The song that the old lady meant, by the way, was "Eurotrash Girl," which they did play. I'm not sure they ever have a show where they DON'T play that and "Low," though, so it's a good thing I'm not sick of either of them yet. {g} Before "Yalla Yalla," David told another story about how, when they played for the military in Iraq, it was mostly somewhat older people who showed up, and some of the younger soldiers who did attend told the band their parents would freak when they heard about it. I have noticed that Camper and Cracker concerts tend to have generally older audiences than other shows I attend, which I guess makes sense. Then again, I think Camper started around the same time as They Might Be Giants, and the majority of their audience tends to remain on the young side (and I'm not talking about the kids' shows, which are another barrel of one dozen monkeys). On the other hand, when I saw the Decemberists, it looked like I might have wandered into a school assembly by mistake. I suppose it's a good thing that I like music that appeals to both older and younger audiences, right? Anyway, for the encore, Jonathan Segel showed up to play violin on "I Ride My Bike," and the members of both bands joined in on "Interstellar Overdrive." They were signing stuff after the show, but I wanted to get home, and I didn't notice any merchandise I wanted and didn't already have anyway.
You can see my entire set of pictures from the night
here.
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