MP3: Spoon - "Cherry Bomb" (country demo)
I saw Spoon at the Vic in Chicago last Friday, and they were great. I'd seen them before at Lollapalooza and at Fr0kf3st, but they kinda sucked in an outdoor setting. Like most bands do. Inside, though, they were great. Their sound guy was doing all kinds of crazy dub shit with the effects. It was cool. The absolute opposite of this acoustic demo, ha ha.
One weird thing about the show was the insane amount of Camel stuff everywhere. By now, we're all used to the typical "Brought to you by..." banners, etc., but Camel took it to the next level. There were huge neon Camel logos on every wall, video screens playing a non-stop loop of Camel ads, plus this bizarre three-dimensional Camel shrine:
Not only that, but there was a weird t-shirt making station next to the bar where you could select a size, a color, and a design, and they'd silkscreen a custom shirt for you on the spot. Brought to you by Camel, of course.
And upstairs was something even weirder. There was a "photo studio" where you could try on a platinum wig and Elvis shades and pose for a photo with a Flying V knock-off. I'm not sure why anybody would want to do this. Is this perhaps the next level of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band phenomenon? It's fun to pretend to be a heavy metal motherfucker.
I asked the girl running the photo station how many people had done it. "A lot," she said.
"More than a hundred?" I asked. The Vic's capacity is 1,300, and the show was sold out.
"Around that," she said, unconvincingly.
Who knows? Advertisers are getting desperate. And weird.
Chicago setlist:
Thanks to Jolie for sweet-talking the setlist off the soundguy. And to Duz and Lusty for taking us to the show!
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I was at the Detroit-area show a couple of nights later, and was also blown away by the Camel-sponsored advertising. My best guess is that cigarette makers are fairly desperate to keep public smoking bans out of as many bars and concert venues as possible, and this is some sort of attempt to influence people that yes, even if you don't smoke, you don't want to let your state legislature ban smoking in bars 'cuz then, none of these great free Camel shows for you, right?
The Black Keys did a set of these shows last year as well...weird trivia - which band opened for both tours? The Walkmen, of course, which is either not surprising or highly ironic if you remember the cover for their album "Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone":
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:0nfuxq90ldse
The thing is that Chicago already has a smoking ban. No smoking indoors. And yet the Camel stuff was everywhere!
well there goes that theory...
nice work with the setlist! gotta love the shorthand for all the song titles...did they play "My Mathematical Mind" as the encore, or last song? They skipped it at my show, which was the only thing even remotely disappointing about it...we did get "The Way We Get By", which I don't see here, so I guess there was some tradeoff...