a quick supper at Wendy's next door, and we were off to try to find a working payphone. we were on the way to wegman's to use a phone there, but my other friend's mommy saved us and dropped us off at milestones. i refuse to mention my other friend's name because she is, let me say, an anti-fru. but her mom is cool.
sarah slean was absolutely *incredible*. although there were quite a few annoying loud-mouth jerks who wouldn't stop talking at all about anything. for a tiny girl she's got a marvelous voice. go buy her cd right now. i will as soon as i have some $.
fruvous took the stage a little after 10. *yawn* it took all my energy to not fall asleep, so bear with me now pleeze. :) they opened with Downsizing, went into Half as Much [LoL just had a funny typo... half as mush... my brain perhaps?] and then Horseshoes. let me tell you, they pulled out *all* the stops for this show. bytor returned and there was a terrifically funny improv about bytor. bytor rocks my world. when bytor first arrived onstage, Jian was looking at it between bytor's legs (he might have said, "his hide" or something), and Mike gave him a funny look. Jian laughed and said, "i'll play with bytor later!" then bytor found his home on a cymbal and Jian eventually didn't want to try to knock bytor off because he said he did not want to hurt his "child" or something like that... strange man. talented, but strange. ;) let me see...... WoW. i *finally* heard disco bargainville. Murray was *rockin* on his bass. all i can say is WoW.
an unprecedented thing (i think) occurred. they brought up F'loom, well, 66.66666666% of F'loom onstage to perform. f'loom is three guys, but only two made it to the show. www.floom.com is their website. i haven't been there yet but these guys are just amazing!!! LoL they were doing their thing (which is just as difficult to describe as describing fruvous to a newbie) and the guys started to jam along with them... and the the f'loom guys were done, but fruvous kept going, and the look on the one f'loom guy's face was priceless. 8-) craziness, i tell ya! then they took the f'loom jam into tureen, which was *very* cool. but f'loom is very cool too.
when they broke into On Her Doorstep my jaw hit the floor. i was so incredibly psyched. they also did Fly, which was the first time (i think) Melissa and i had heard them live. disco bargainville, too. terrific.
for quite a few songs, the 300 or so people in the room had a big sing-along. horseshoes, saucep'n, fly, your new boyfriend, michy, authors, get in the car. speaking of authors... Murray did the "short works of fiction," he didn't change it. also, "who needs a grave." and for bargainville, it was great! the first two (yes TWO) times Jian tried to start the song, everybody was singing, and he got a bit distracted. then on the third try, he got to ". . . one price for two" and paused, and then a little kid, maybe 8 years old or so, sang out loudly "AT" and the entire band, and the majority of the audience, suffered from a case of the giggles. it was great. :) btw, what's a kid doing up that late anyways? j/k.
what else what else... Mike had a great line tonite. Dave was in the back of the stage getting ready for something and Jian started singing something that i don't know, and he thought Dave was gonna play the keyboard, but he didn't. Mike says, "Mozart could do it, what the f*ck is *your* problem?" Jian chimed in, "Yeah, Mozart was even deaf" or something to that affect. Murray was exceptionally quiet during the banter. and there was lots of banter tonite. they were very fun!
okay people, almost to a close here, and i will take this time to apologize for the length. authors was the first encore, followed by michy. they closed with My Poor Generation, which was strange because, frankly, i'm not used to it. and neither were lots of other people because for about five minutes after the band left the stage for the third time, a large group was chanting "drinking song drinking song" but of course, they realized they just had to shut up and go home.
OH YEAH! Jian mentioned that a group of 18 fruheads on the newsgroup took a survey of their favorite and least-favorite songs on the new album (". . . that we just released today. so i guess we're judged on our live performances.") and he said he was dedicating the next song to all the people who chose When She Talks as their least-favorite song. he was all smiles, so i'm assuming he's not too pissed off. also, since this was a benefit concert for WBER, a check was presented. Jian gave Joey Guisto did i spell that right? -- sportin' a new shaved head) a check for $4000 (*not* in Canadian money, so it was worth more than the paper it was printed on :) ), which happened to be the largest single donation made to the WBER fund-drive.
lemme see..... i'm tired and most of this is out of order. i'm gonna wrack my mushy brains for a minute or two and try to think of more stuff... um.... they did the in-store show mostly sitting down because Dave's back was hurting him. ~sniffle~ poor guy. then why, pray tell, was he carrying around speakers and stuff at milestones when he was somewhat cranky at the sound, etc.? huh Dave? 'splain yerself! um... there was a big record archive sign hanging over the stage, and it was more or less in Jian's way. he said that he was really close to just tearing it down, but he didn't want to start anything. then he noticed that the colors of the sign (black background with yellow lettering) matched his highlights pretty well. how fashionably conscious we are! :)
well, that's all i can think of. thank you to the nice girl in the milestones parking lot who let me use her cell phone. and Hi to Angie who i finally met. i'll have to meet the rest of you, hopefully, at harbourfest. thank you to all of you who actually took the time to read this incredibly long, somewhat boring, rambling, redundant review. i hope i did a decent job. :) Maggie
From Nancy:
Wow.
Maggie pretty much told you what they played so since I'm so terribly bad with that I'll just add a couple of things.
I helped Lorraine bring Jack's Fruvous balloons to the Archive and that was lots of fun. I think the Lads were amused by them and Lorraine did eventually get a picture of them with their balloons after the signing line so it will eventually get to FDC. The Record Archive was PACKED!
Maggie said: >>speaking of authors... Murray did the "short works of fiction," he didn't change it. <<
I remember "Pulp Fiction", but I may be insane...
I agree with Maggie completely about Sara Slean - she played a really nice set and everyone should get one of her CDs. The new one will be out in a couple of weeks. It was less than optimal to see her in Milestones with that many EXCITED people, though, because it really required a little quiet and for people to *Listen* and there was much laughter and talking while she was singing. In general the crowd was respectful, but there were pockets of loud annoying people (which I guess you need to expect with a crowd that size) including the burping-in-tune guy behind me...
The wait till Fruvous seemed to take forever and I was just starting to think, "I'm not an undergraduate anymore...I have to work tomorrow, I have meetings, my feet are killing me...what am I doing?" when they came on and it was magic. Such a great show it goes down as one of my favorites. The set list was varied enough that "Bargainville" people could stay happy while being exposed to Thornhill material and letting it quietly take them over. I don't know if that makes sense, but you know how there are those people who will just yell for KOS and the set last night seemed to adroitly hop from old to new to keep those people hearing familiar tunes frequently enough that they were willing to pay attention to the new tunes.
I was also wondering what on earth Dave was doing hauling speakers around when they said at the Archive that he hurt his back so they had to sit down to perform. He was having tons of trouble with the monitor at his end of the stage.
This is from the F'loom website. They have sound samples, you have to listen because there's no real way to describe them properly. They're opening for The Bobs at Dartmouth in September. ************************************ What is F'loom? An all-male vocal trio that draws freely from the highest/lowest in music and literature to produce an intensely seriocomic audiovisual experience. Here are some descriptors that hint at what we do: language music post-Firesign vocalise sound-text compositions polyrhythmic mouth percussion three-headed performance poetry a cappella linguistic polyphony extended vocal techniques Mummenschanz rap **************************************
I guess I don't have anything more to add right now other than I know the
"Greater Rochester Area" Fruheads are really appreciative that Fruvous chose
Rochester for Thornhill release day- what an honor!
Some other tidbits from the performance include:
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