Grace Potter & The Nocturnals – House of Blues – Dallas, TX – February 18th
I get to Will Call and let me tell you something – I’ve been in this business for awhile now – and I have never received the kind of hospitality that welcomed me when I got there. Most people know the process but I will walk you through it:
If you are fortunate enough to have been invited by the artist either as a guest or press or radio/retail or just a contest winner what you can expect is:
(2) tickets to the show
Sometimes but rarely will you also get after-show passes
and even rarer would be more than two of anything.
What was waiting for me at Will Call was not to be believed – I get there and there are:
(2) tickets to the show
and a freaking All Access laminate that is good for the entire tour – that is only given to band/crew
The phone number to the Manager and Tour Managers and insisting that I call when I arrived.
Then someone came out from the Box Office to escort me in!!
It was like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America where were my rose-bearers?
A brief history: For the past year with Ween doing festivals almost exclusively – we keep running into this crew or just missing them by a day or two. It seems like every festival we are on Sat and they are on Sun. I forget where we were, but I remember Claude and I seeing Grace walking around (not knowing who she was or anything about her) and she is like ridiculously sexy just sitting on a golf cart (let alone how she performs) and then we see her later walking off the stage that Ween is about to perform on, and we both looked at each other like “Sorry I missed that”.
I had spoken to some of the guys in the Nocturnals before and they are all super cool so when they invited me to the show I jumped at the chance to go.
I make my way up to the dressing room as the band is now on stage and I have a great talk with their manager and we have a few laughs, before I head down and check out the show parked behind the soundboard –
The show was amazing – Grace is a ball of feverish energy – a voice like Janis Joplin and crazy stage swagger that rivals even Tina Turner with the moves and body to match. I was freaking mesmerized by her (and her bass player wasn’t too shabby either).
And chops to spare, the encore was a cover of Heart‘s Crazy on You if that tells you anything.
After the show I meet up with them in their dressing room and I’m finally formally introduced to Grace and for all her femininity and good looks, she was totally one of the guys. A hardened road dog that’s put in the miles – I know that voice well, so when I heard I can recognize it immediately and she had it.
I shot the shit with the rest of the guys in the band who were all totally cool and huge Ween fans. Thankfully it wasn’t that forced after-show talk, we really got on great and had a good time.
They invited me to a party they were having in the Foundation Room which is another part of House of Blues. I mean again the hospitality was off the charts.
We are ushered into this roped off section of the club (which I’m embarrassed by and the band seemed to be too) and they are treating us to all these drinks etc.
Ben (Tour Manager) is a really cool and fun guy and we have a great rapport so he pulls me to the side for a second to say goodbye to me. Great dude & good times.
I was coming right back here tomorrow for another rawkin’ show!
The Pretty Reckless – House of Blues (Cambridge Room) – Dallas, TX – February 19th
(Editor’s Note: A portion of the following post originally appeared in my article for Jam Magazine – you can read the entire article here – )
After meeting Celeste the previous night I now had two meetings, and thought it would be a fun chance to indulge in a guilty pleasure and see Taylor Momsen strut her stuff afterwords. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a huge Gossip Girl fan and have written about Taylor more than once in this blog.
I grab our tickets and we head inside for the show. Now, though I’ve been to this venue dozens of times now, their is yet another smaller club inside called the Cambridge Room where tonight’s show was going down. A very small space that only holds a couple hundred people, and I was happy about that. It added to the intimacy and made it feel more like a dirty rawk show.
When the show starts and the band starts to take the stage, it is literally almost pitch black in there, and they came out into a sea of dry ice – just the band, not Taylor – in that dramatic-singer comes out last-thing. There was more than enough time for the tension to build so that finally getting a glimpse of her was becoming mythical, so when she finally slowly slithered onstage, the whole crowd just kinda gasped (myself included).
Keep in mind, I hadn’t heard one note of this band yet and was just being a total poseur/creeper there just to gawk at her for a few songs and then take off. Celeste even had another event to attend (hence the expensive dress) so I hadn’t planned to stay that long.
Besides the above photo – believe it or not – the music made me an easy convert.
At one point, she asked the crowd, “Have you guys ever heard of Oasis and Muse?” as her band jumped right into a Supersonic/Time is Running Out mash-up and Taylor even went so far as to accurately mimic Liam Gallagher’s mannerisms.
The next cover, Audioslave‘s Like a Stone, didn’t seem to go over as well. It just didn’t fit the momentum, and let’s just say the guitarist probably should have sat out the Tom Morello guitar solo.
What solidified my fandom was the song Going Down – which is not about fellatio (per say) but no less twisted – that had me singing the chorus all the way home.
One point of interest was that the crowd kept chanting “Little J” (the nickname of her character on Gossip Girl) in between almost every song. This is interesting because the whole production of the Pretty Reckless seemed to be a rebellion to not only that character specifically but to the entire culture that it represents, fictional or otherwise. Having said that , I don’t believe they were taunting her in the least, in fact I think they were chanting it as you would the name of your favorite song in support of Taylor, but for the life of me I can’t understand how they wouldn’t get that this would completely irritate her (you could tell she was as dumbfounded as me, and took it as complimentary but her silence proved she was aghast at the cluelessness).
By this point everyone was rawking and getting into the show as well, and by the end of it Taylor was just down to her bra (and I down to my last fingernail haha).
Since You’re Gone
Light Me Up
Miss Nothing
Zombie
Just Tonight
Goin’ Down
Supersonic (Oasis cover)
Time is Running Out (Muse cover)
Like a Stone (Audioslave cover)
My Medicine
Factory Girl
ENCORE:
Nothing Left to Lose
Make Me Wanna Die
So after the show it was still somewhat early and Celeste and I still hadn’t had a chance to discuss her participation in our upcoming SXSW showcase, but she had another event to get to that was just a few blocks away and she invited me to come along.
We discussed details for the showcase and then I called it a night, eager to get home to download the Pretty Reckless record.
The Genitorturers – Trees – Dallas, TX – February 21st
Back in the 90’s when the band was first garnering attention, and my friends and I were seeing some of their first tours, they had two advantages: bondage gear, PVC, tattoos and piercings were still quite out there, and Marilyn Manson hadn’t yet saturated mainstream culture. Now, the Genitorturers seem to be just another band with a few tricks up their sleeve that will hopefully bring in paying customers.
While the band’s performance was tight and passably energetic, the exposition side of the engagement was sorely lacking. Seeing a few gimp masks, rubber dolls dressed up as if they’ve been ripped out of the uterus and some nipple pasties on a burlesque dancer lacks the impact it may have had a decade ago.
Audience desensitization or not, this night felt particularly no-frills. A band that once boasted a stage-encompassing set of toys such as spinning wheels, massive crosses and an onslaught of potential sexual casualties was pared down to a shadow of its former self with costumes and props pulled from what could easily have been big-box store shelves, as opposed to custom-crafted den of iniquity gear. It was deflating after not seeing the band for so long and having such high expectations.
That’s not to say that their wasn’t some craaazy shit going on cause there totally was:
After the show, I go outside to find my buddy Patrick and he’s talking to this crazy gal Jacqueline, who was telling us about an upcoming event she was gonna be participating in – something insane called the North American Bodypainting Championship – (that ironically I get a call the very next day from the producers of, asking me if I would be interested in being one of the judges – I detail this experience in Part III). I love people watching and at a show like this, you couldn’t ask for a better parade of wild shit, and we hung out and met and talked with a bunch of really interesting people.
Photos –
Roy Turner
Barry Brecheisen
Robert Easley
