So last night I went with Aaron over to Amoeba in The Haight to catch the free show by The New Pornos. I’ve actually never been that far down Haight, but it seems rather cool and I’d like to spend a Saturday strolling it. Fortunately for me the 7 and 71 buses go straight from Montgomery BART (2nd/Market) to literally across the street from Amoeba.
We arrived a little early and perused their music. That’s the first time in awhile that I’ve spent any significant time in a music store looking at CDs. Mostly, the only CDs that I buy nowadays are ones that I can’t get exclusively in MP3 format — ie, foreign pop music that isn’t available on the P2Ps or iTunes. Before the show started I’d bought four items:
– Twin Cinema by The New Pornographers (because I wanted to get it signed for my cousin, Martin, who missed their show on the East Coast that he had tickets for.)
– Great Orchestral Music from “The Ring” (Richard Wagner) – conducted by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. ($2.99!)
– Works for Chamber Ensemble (Percy Grainger) – Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble ($7.99)
– Sebha . . Tehebbak by Hisham Abbas (Egyptian pop music that I hope is good. I haven’t listened to it yet.)
The New Pornos played for about 40 minutes, minus Neko Case. Aaron and I were standing about three feet from the stage the whole time and we had a great view of Carl Newman and Dan Bejar. As I commented to Aaron, Dan just seems like the coolest guy ever. During the the set he was sipping a Corona, wearing torn jean shorts and was constantly flipping his drumsticks while playing. And half the time he wouldn’t catch them again, and he’d just reach for some spares that he kept near the center of the drumset. Also his face just contorts and gets all crazy while they play. It’s pretty sweet.
Also toward the end of the set, right before their last song, he and Carl and a few guys in the audience had this mini-debate about where the best burritos in San Francisco were. The audience seemed to think that it was Taqueria Cancún on 19th/Mission. I can swing with that. 🙂
I can’t wait for their full show in a month. Rock on, fellas.
