By Han Q Duong
Another day, yet another Sleater-Kinney concert. OK, it’s my last one, for a long, long time. I wasn’t planning on going to the third show, but the first two were so good I figured it’d be worth a shot. Even if it was in Pomona. I don’t want to dog Pomona too much, but it’s a bit different than Los Angeles proper. Let’s leave it at that.
After an hour plus to get from Santa Monica to Pomona, we staked ground in front of the Glass House and waited. While we waited, the ladies of Sleater-Kinney probably walked past seemingly twenty times. First they went shopping, they went to shop some more, they hit the taco stand… whatever the case, it seemed like I was seeing them every ten or twenty minutes. Sarah Utter from the Bangs was also popping in and out of line talking to a friend of hers as well.
Shannon Wright opened the night first and put together the best set of the three shows I saw. The Bangs came up next and were pretty much the perfect opening act. That “opening act” comment sells them short though, as I’m sure they’d be a fine headliner as well. Their metal tinged pop punk was instantly infectious, and it was easy to start bouncing along to the tunes even on the first listen. I think Sarah was a bit under the weather, as she kept referring to her scratchy voice, and it seemed like they cut their set short by a song or two.
I don’t know when it happened exactly, but some guy peed on the floor a few rows of people behind me. There was a huge gap in the crowd, and apparently somebody just whipped it out and peed on the floor.
Sleater-Kinney came on and delivered a pretty hot set, with song selection similar to the Hollywood shows. The main difference would be the extended version of Dig Me Out that they closed the show with. It wasn’t as charged as the previous L.A. shows but it was still really fun and a great time… well, for most of us.
Towards the end of the set, the night really started to fall apart for Carrie Brownstein. First, her shoelaces came untied during a song so she had to take a quick break to retie them. Janet played some shoe tying music and Carrie joked that “Janet shows up every morning at my house to play that while I get dressed.” A little bit later someone tossed up a dirty sock on stage. This were all little incidentals, not anything major. Then it got worse.
During the main set finale of Step Aside, Carrie ran into some technical problems when she stomped her blues driver pedal for her little solo section. Instead of adding a little distortion, her guitar just hit dead air. Nothing. While Corin fought for time, Carrie tried to fix her equipment. Now, anybody that’s hooked up a chain of guitar pedals knows that when there’s a short in your wiring, it’s the most agonizing thing because there’s no way to know where the short is among the five or six cables. Carrie finally decided to plug directly into the amp… except when she yanked the cable she found out that the roadie had tied a knot with the cable to secure it to the pedal board. It’s one of those stage nightmares that you never wish on anyone, and it was heartbreaking to see it happen. They finally hooked everything up and they finished out Step Aside and Carrie worked with the guitar tech to get everything up and running again.
When they got back for the encore, Carrie got on the mike and said “Will whoever is throwing nickels up here please stop? If anything you should be throwing hundred dollar bills, and not fucking nickels.” Now… who the hell throws nickels at a band you paid to see? I mean, it’s not like Carrie half-asses it out there… what did she do to deserve change getting tossed at her? First there are people peeing on the floor and now there’s someone using Carrie as target practice. What is wrong with people these days?
They knocked out a short encore of two songs and left. I think they were planning on playing Private Idaho (they were practicing it during soundcheck) but it never got played. They had never played Pomona before, and I’m not sure they’ll be all that eager to go back.
Hopefully Carrie used up all her bad luck tonight and has flawless shows the rest of the tour.
Filed under: Reviews