This weekend has been all about the hipster urban living!
Friday afternoon, the chickie babe and I drove up to the city and picked up the keys to the new place. We unloaded the first bus load of stuff, amidst the typical fumbling of keys and exploring of a new space. Measurements were made of the floorplan so we could start plotting what would go where. I officially switched from fretting about packing up the old place to fretting about where we would find room for all of our stuff in the new place. I fret; it is what I do.
After sufficient fretting for one evening, we drove into the Mission and met up with some friends at the Phoenix for a couple of hours of drinks and laughter and too much noise.
Then we walked up to Market to the Cafe Du Nord for dinner and to see Mike Doughty perform! Lemme say a word about Mike Doughty, since no one I mentioned this show to seemed to have any clue who he was.
Mike was the lead singer and song writer for the band Soul Coughing. Okay, so it seems most people have not heard of Soul Coughing either. What can I tell you about Soul Coughing? They were a band from about 1992 to 1998, Their music was, well it is hard to quantify; I have a hard time slapping a genre tag onto their music. It tended to be a little fast, a little loud, a bastard child of techno, industrial and gregorian chant, in a fashion that would make the fans of any of those genres cringe and complain about the comparison. The iTunes Music Store says their “top song” is Super Bon Bon. If I had to guess the one song of theirs you might have heard on the radio would be Bus to Beelzebub.
Sometime in 2000, I heard Mike Doughty had started touring and performing solo, introducing a lot of new material as well as playing a bunch of Soul Coughing songs. To my surprise, I found out he was performing solo, with an acoustic guitar. I could not imagine what that would sound like. Soul Coughing’s music was so heavily produced and syncopated to the point of being mechanical, I had a very hard time wrapping my head around how that would translate to a live, solo, acoustic set. Then I heard some concert bootlegs and I was amazed. The roots of where he had been with his previous band were still plainly evident, but he had somehow taken his style and performance into a direction that just completely worked.
I am plainly not cut out to be a music critic. 🙂 Suffice it to say, I really liked Mike’s work with SC, couldn’t imagine how his style would work as a live solo act, and then heard some of it and liked it even more than I did his work with SC.
And last night I got to hear him live. And it rocked! Cafe Du Nord is a smallish place, a nice intimate space for seeing a band, where you’re able to get as close to the performers as Squeaky Fromme got to Gerald Ford.
Mike wasn’t quite solo; sharing the stage was a keyboardist, “Handsome” Dan Chen. I bought Mike’s latest album, Haughty Melodic at the show, in a hope that buying it there might mean he gets a bigger cut of the sale than buying it from Amazon.
Far too late, I finally went to bed with ears ringing and eyes bleary, so that I could face a Physics test and lecture the next day.
21 thoughts on “City Livin’”