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Monday, February 25, 2008

Messiah

A friend of ours has recently started listening to a band called Band of Horses and was quite excited to find out that they were coming to play at a nearby club. He went and bought four tickets, and asked if Nathalie and I wanted to join him and his girlfriend. I immediately agreed.

Several reasons:
1. Nobody likes being rejected. There's nothing more soul crushing than mustering up the courage to ask someone to do something and then having them reject you. So I make it a policy that I usually agree to pretty much everything (within reason, of course) so that the other person never has to face that.

2. You start declining invitations, and next thing you know, you're not invited to things anymore.

3. I like live music, and I like being exposed to new music.

And lastly, I like hanging out with this guy.

So he gives me a CD to listen to while the day of the concert approaches. They sound kind of like The Shins. Nathalie and I listen to the CD the past several days as we commute back and forth from work and decide that it's pretty good.

A few observations from the concert:
1. The Shins look like a group of Microsoft computer programmers. That is to say, just a group of average looking nerdy guys that you would easily overlook if you passed them at a local mall. That's what I expected Band of Horses to look like, since they sounded so much like them. But instead, the guys from Band of Horses looked like Appalachian hillbillies: skinny, long scraggly hair, and long beards. I half expected them to start distilling moonshine during the middle of the concert. There would be absolutely no mistaking these guys for The Shins.

2. Apparently, long scraggly hair and thick beards and looking like Jesus is the "in thing" right now. The club we went to is near a local college, and that was the look the local college guys were sporting. I'm sure the acoustic-folksy sound of the band had something to do with attracting these bearded guys to the venue, but it looked like 50% of the college guys could have easily been mistaken for Jesus.

There was Tall Skinny Jesus, Malnutrition Jesus, Very Large Head Jesus, Needs A Shower Jesus, Jock Jesus, Jesus sporting a popped collar, Jesus with too many shirt buttons unbuttoned, Really Hairy Jesus, and just about every other kind of Jesus you could imagine.

3. When we got to the club, we staked out prime real estate near the bar along the wall. It was a good vantage point for watching the band as well as people watching. And then it wasn't long before I realized that everybody looked awfully young. And at that point I realized that my friend and I had become the "old dudes" that tend to congregate in the corner of the club. Back when I was in high school sneaking into clubs, and even in college, I would always see a couple of old guys standing in the corner. "Hey man, you're out of place," I would think to myself.

And now, I'm the guy that's out of place.