An evening at The Pitch Music Showcase 2011
Late last Wednesday afternoon, the UMB time-and-temperature sign that’s posted above I-35 downtown read 111 degrees. The next day, temperatures were down around the middle 90s. The insane heat wave of 2011 had briefly, mercifully, relented, just in time for the 2011 Pitch Music Showcase. Between 7 p.m. and 2-something — things started getting hazy around midnight — four Pitch writers bounced around six Westport venues, catching something like 30 local acts. Here’s what we saw:
• At RecordBar, the good old boys in Them Damned Young Livers spit in each other’s eyes, spilled beer, sang think like thank, and disassembled their instruments, all while buzzsawing through a tight set that featured elements of punk, metal, bluegrass and rockabilly. Drummer Bob Lyons’ snare came loose, and he just hoisted it like a giant dinner bell and continued drumming.
• Lawrence’s Deadman Flats kicked things off at McCoy’s by playing a brand of music that it refers to as “mudstomp.” But some real Kansas shit might be just as accurate. Many of the band’s songs were about drinking and doing drugs like meth and mushrooms. There might also have been one about huffing tractor gas. At one point, guitarist Alex Law said, “This is the least amount of girls with beers that we’ve seen in a while.”
• One of the guys in metal act Hammerlord choke-slammed another guy in the band. Then they got up and hugged.
• A handful of recognizable-if-you-hang-out-in-midtown homeless men, drawn in by the rootsy funk sounds of the Columns, wandered over to the Sponsor Lot. They danced throughout the set, yelling at the band and making a bit of a ruckus — the charms of a street festival.
• Onstage inside the Riot Room, the dudes in garage-rock act Bleach Bloodz — all of them in sunglasses — accepted shots of Jägermeister, which may or may not have been purchased by Howard Iceberg.
• Dutch Newman performed with a band he calls the Lonely Hearts Club on the outdoor Riot Room stage. The band played a jam session for about 10 minutes before Newman even showed up. Then he gave shout-outs to just about everybody but the guy who cleans the toilets at the Riot Room before he actually started rapping. Newman was wearing a Bleach Bloodz shirt.
• The Grisly Hand played a fast-paced set of old-school country at the Sponsor Lot, closing with a cover of nearly forgotten Radiohead song “Been Thinking About You.”
• Rapper thePhantom* performed with his new band, the Phantastics. The Riot Room outdoor stage couldn’t accommodate everybody, so the DJ and the keyboardist had to set up down on the concrete with the audience. He draped a big white “thePhantom*” sign behind the stage, over a Pitch advertisement.
• In the Riot Room men’s room, a guy craned his head over the toilet partition and asked an apparent stranger if he’d heard of his band, which wasn’t playing the Showcase. Apparently, they sound like Minus the Bear. “If you like Minus the Bear, you’d like us,” he told the stranger, who nodded and exited quickly without washing his hands.
• Five-piece Root and Stem turned some heads with its set of sturdy, energetic Americana. The shirtless, tattooed lead guitar player sported a 2-inch, Amish-style ginger beard and was wearing cutoff jean shorts held up by suspenders. It was like he had ventured into the big city to deliver some butter, fallen off the back of the truck in midtown and never made it home. Dude was rocking Avia shoes.
• Thee Water MoccaSins set its smoke machine to 11 and turned the Riot Room into a translucent fog den. A woman in the middle of the crowd noodle-danced to the band’s atmospheric rock jams with her eyes closed.
• Dutch Humphrey led his band, Cherokee Rock Rifle, through a set of blasting cock rock. He was wearing thick-framed glasses, a fedora and cutoff sleeves, and he looked like a gutter-punk Elvis Costello. He banged a tambourine at his chest like a wild animal. At the end of one of the songs, he half-sung, half-said: “Even the devil knows the virgin’s cunt.” Then: “We have some stickers for sale.”
