I heart Stephen Malkmus.
I'd been looking forward to this show for ages and maybe because my expectations were unreasonably high I didn't exactly get what I had expected. The show was loose, messy, noisy, funny, surprising, and pretty great. First of all I was very disappointed that the show wasn't sold out. But on the upside I seemed to know every fucker in the joint. I must have talked to twenty people while The Microphones did their best to warm up the crowd, so I guess that's pretty good for a Tuesday night.

When The Jicks finally came on stage it was fairly obvious they'd been hitting the bottle pretty hard and during the show I was informed that they'd been drinking tequila for the better part of the evening. They opened with a B-side track, which is pretty indie, but then went into an hour long show, which consisted of a lot of songs of Pig Lib, quite a few tracks from the first record, and two more B-sides (including one insanely catchy one, which had a riff that sounded like All Apologies, but faster. Anyone?). Surprisingly, the songs of the new album worked a lot better live than the old ones. They played a lot tighter on the new tracks, whereas they got pretty sloppy on several tracks of the first record (and for some reason they didn't play Jo-Jo's Jacket or Hook).

Because of the state they were in there was quite a bit of stage antics, tomfoolery, shenanigans, and bizarre references to Cat Power, The Minnesota Vikings, handball, and Romans going on. And in between songs the keyboard guy would segway into Our House or something like that. It was actually pretty obvious early on what kind of a show it would be, when Malkmus took a sip of water and said:"Hmmm, Carlsberg makes water? After about six Carlsbergs I can make water" and after a few songs he actually had to leave the stage presumably to "make water". But when the band got around to playing they were really good. The sound was kinda thin and they had problems with both mics and amps, but they still managed to kill with several songs.

When they came back for the encores Malkmus announced that we had had our fun and now it was playtime for the band. This led to the most disorganized set of covers (or pocket hits as Malkmus called them) I've ever witnessed. I think they started out with a track I didn't recognize and then Malkmus and the drummer traded places for a rendition of the Gram Parsons classic One Hundred Years from Now. After that followed a punk cover, a failed attempt at a Hole song followed by Miss World, and then arguments over if they should play Sympathy for the Devil or not (everybody but Malkmus played bits of it).
So how do you get out of a mess like that? You pull out a thundering rendition of Unfair. That's right baby! They made with the Pavement tracks, because that's what the kids want. You know it, I know it, and Stevie knows it! So what better way to end the show than with a classic track.

Arguably, the show was a mess, but I still enjoyed it a lot. I thought they were funny onstage and I really like the new record, so it was cool hearing a lot of those songs live. And if they come back this summer for Roskilde you can be sure I'll go check them out again.

Originally, I was going to post something earlier today under the title Sometimes It Snows In April, because we got some honest-to-God snow here today. And I was going to add something about a handyman at work, who had so much b.o. he funked up an entire office wing, which made me think of an old Infectious Grooves record. But I didn't have time and it was hardly that interesting anyway. It's just that the Prince song was appropriate, so I wanted to use it. Maybe next year.