We were lucky enough to see Beck play at Element, a small club in Hollywood on Tuesday night. On Monday morning we got an email telling us about the last minute show, and we were lucky enough to snag a couple of tickets.

Element is a small venue, it probably holds a few hundred people. This is great because on Beck’s current tour he is playing places that hold thousands of people. He recently played two shows in Los Angeles at the Wiltern theatre. We got there fairly early and picked out a great place to stand, on a raised platform about 30 feet from the stage. Both Michele and I were able to see the whole stage with no problems.

The show was really good, but for different reason than I thought it would be. Beck, unlike most solo artists, was not the whole show, it was the entire band that had a great performance. There were six people, including Beck, on stage for the whole concert. The other five musicians played really well and seemed really into the music. They constantly switched and changed the instruments they were playing. There were two drum kits on stage, a few keyboards, bongo drums, and they kept bringing various other instruments like guitars, basses, a recorder, a harmonica, even what looked like a big, empty bashed up tin can that someone hit with a drumstick. Beck himself had a guitar strapped on for most of the show.

Even though I’m not a huge Beck fan, and was not familiar with most of the songs (I only have one CD), I really enjoyed the show. It was cool to be able to see him in such a small club.

Johnny Lydon (nee Rotten) is on Jonesy’s Jukebox (Steve Jones the Sex Pistol’s guitarist) this afternoon, and I just heard him say the funniest thing:

Is that the best of Bread CD? Let me see it. Can I borrow you glasses, Steve, I’m as blind as a bat.

Doesn’t really sound very punk does it?

Roland Shanks is a new band I heard this morning on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. They played a new single by them that is going to be released on February 13th,Cutting Teeth. I really like their sound, reminded me of The Jam a little. They are a from London, and haven’t released an album yet. I’m looking forward to the day they do.

You can hear some of their songs, including Cutting Teeth at the Roland Shanks MySpace page.

One of my current favorite bands, She Wants Revenge, performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night. I have seen this band a few times at a local club, so it was cool to see them on their first nation-wide performance. They played their song “Tear You Apart”, but understandably had to change the chorus from “I’d love to fuckin’ tear you apart” to “I’d really love to tear you apart”. Other than that I thought they sounded pretty good.

I expect big things from this band in the future. Their self titled CD doesn’t come out until January 31st, but they already seem to be getting a big buzz.

They are kicking off a national tour soon. To see tour dates and listen to some of their songs, check out their MySpace page. They also have a couple of videos on the She Wants Revenge website.

I also just noticed that the video for Tear You Apart will be out on mtvU.com on January 30th.

Even though I bought tickets for the Nouvelle Vague show at Tangerine last night, we didn’t see the show. We got to Tangerine and there was a line to get into the lounge. We stood there for a little bit before we realized the line was not moving, so we went to the front of the line and said we had bought tickets. It turns out the people in line didn’t have tickets, and we could get our tickets via will call. I gave my ID to the girl and she started looking up my name, but couldn’t find it. Strange. Luckily, we had the receipt along so we showed her that. She looked at it for a little and pointed out that I had bought tickets for Thursday’s show which was the day before. Doh!

I really should learn to double check things before click the ‘purchase’ button.

I just bought tickets for the Nouvelle Vague show at Tangier on Friday, and I was glad to see they did not use Ticketmaster for the tickets, instead they used a service called Virtuous. I have been getting sick of paying Ticketmaster’s outrageous fees lately. I bought tickets for the upcoming Cake/Tegan & Sara show and the tickets were $35 each, but the total came to $93.45. That’s $23.45 in fees! Yuck!

In contrast, Virtuous only charged $3.00 per ticket as a fee, and in addition:

Every Virtuous ticket purchase helps support people in need, close to home. How? 10% of our profit from each ticket purchase helps support the local food bank serving the community hosting the event.

For example, each ticket purchased for a Los Angeles event will help the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank obtain and deliver much needed food for the 350,000 individuals they serve each week through their network of over 1,070 charities in Los Angeles County.

How great is that? I hope more venues start using Virtuous.

Dave Navarro, who I try to listen to every week on Camp Freddy Radio (Saturday’s 6-8 PM on 103.1) has been doing a sporadic radio show from his house. It called Spread Radio Live. I’ve never been able to catch it, but he’s doing another one today at 7:30 PM, so I’m going to try to check it out.

We went to see Bauhaus at the Wiltern on Saturday night. We were pretty happy when we found out they were playing. When we had to miss Coachella earlier this year, this was on of the bands that we were really disappointed about not seeing.

Our seats weren’t the greatest, we were in the second last row of seats. But the Wiltern is small enough that even these seats weren’t terrible. We were expecting an opening band, but there wasn’t one. Luckily our timing was perfect, the lights went down as soon as we sat down.

The band sounded good, but there were a few times I heard some feedback that was a little annoying. Peter Murphy’s voice was great as usual. The stage was pretty bare except for the usual instruments and amps. The light light show was pretty snazzy. Unfortunately the lights meant that I wasn’t able to get any pictures at all. For one song, Daniel Ash took a break from his guitar and played the sax, which was pretty cool.

For there main set, they played for about an hour, playing a variety of Bauhaus songs. They took quite a few minutes to come out for their first encore, making the crowd work for it. The first encore they only played one song and left again. After a little bit they came back out and played a Love and Rockets songSlice of Life from Burning From The Inside. Daniel Ash was singing, so Peter Murphy was just playing the tambourine and singing a little back up. They then played T-Rex’s Telegram Sam, and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.

After the second encore, they left the stage and the house lights come on in the theatre. We just looked at each other and said “What? They aren’t going to play Bela Lugosi’s Dead?” We were a little disappointed and started leaving the theatre. But then we heard the crowd starting to get a little louder and decided to go back in. The crowd was getting louder and many people were shouting “Bela”. They then turned the house lights back off and the band came back on and did play the song everyone was waiting for.

We saw the She Wants Revenge show at the Troubadour on Tuesday night. The show was very good with Monsters in Waiting and Viva K as openers.

Indie 103.1 has been playing “Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge recently and I really like this song. Their album was supposed to be released that day, so I went to a few record stores to buy the CD, but no one had it. It turns out the album was not released for some reason.

Before the show we went and had dinner at Flavour of India down the street from the Troubadour. It was delicious as usual. We also saw the guys from the band walk by us on the sidewalk as we were going into the restaurant.

When we walked in the door and were showing our IDs someone walking out of the club said something like “ask about VIP badges”. We weren’t really sure what he was talking about, but the bouncer gave us VIP stickers and told us to go up the stairs when we got into the club. We went upstairs, showed our stickers to the bouncer and managed to sit in “The Loft”. It was great being able to sit and watch the show from up above instead of being stuck downstairs with the big crowd.

The opening bands were both good. We liked Monsters in Waiting a lot, and Viva K were good too. We found it interesting that both bands had female lead singers with black hair.

The place was pretty crowded by the time SWR came on. They started with a drum machine beat and then the four members of the band walked on. I was surprised to see four band members, because all the press always talked about SWR having just two members - Justin and Adam 12. I guess they added a guitarist and drummer for this tour.

The show they put on was really good. The lead singer seems to have a real good stage presence. He engaged the crowd and seemed pretty friendly and relaxed up there, although he seemed a little overwhelmed that they were playing a sold out show at the Troubadour. At one point a girl screamed “Take your shirt off!”, and he just said “Never”. He also gave a little rant against their record company, encouraging people to phone them and ask for the record to be released.

They sounded good too. The songs I was familiar with sounded much like the recorded versions. I think they played for about 45 minutes to an hour, but I really wasn’t keeping track of time. As many of the reviewers have said, they are very reminiscent of Joy Division. I think what reminds me of them is the very “kinetic” sound they have, dark yet danceable at the same time.

After the show we went to the front room to see if we could buy a t-shirt but they were sold out. I regret not buying an EP.

I can’t wait for the CD to come out. In the meantime I can enjoy some of their songs at their MySpace site.

Playlist:
red flags long nights
sister
out of control
monologue
these things
broken promisses for- broken hearts
spend the night
someone must get hurt
disconnect ( adam solo)
she loves me she loves - me not
tear you apart

I noticed that my favorite radio station, Indie 103.1, has a blog, but there is no RSS feed link anywhere on the site!

Since I’m a geek, I noticed that they were using WordPress, so I knew that http://www.indie1031.fm/wordpress/wp-rss.php would be the link I need to use. I wrote the webmaster about this, so hopefully they’ll put a nice shiny orange RSS button on the site soon.