There are some people
Who just don’t have time for music. They don’t have time to explore all sorts of artists and listen to entire albums then find similar artists and even more artists and just have this giant library of music with every song memorized and know where every band is from and even the names of all their members. I’m saying this because having a conversation with Landon Tom of The Jump Offs will make you feel very, very non-versed in band knowledge. At first it’s like, hello, I studied music my whole life; I can keep up with some 24-year-old rock star. OK, no I can’t. Even if I’m feeling all confident about a new band I’m in to, as soon as I bring it up to him, he names like four more bands that are better or similar in a total non-one-up-manship kind of way that makes me love him and feel stupid at the same time. I’m thinking this is part of the reason Brian Aubert, lead singer of the Silversun Pickups, took a minute to mention Tom’s band by name at their concert on Saturday night and tell the crowd how good they were. I mean, they did have a conversation the night before. Who knows, Aubert could have given Tom a passing compliment about The Jump Offs performance (which was so killer, by the way) then had Tom go into detail about their influences, painting an exact picture of the sound Aubert was trying to piece together in his own brain, increasing the positive experience of seeing them play and compelling him to mention it on stage.
My Friday night would have been better if I wasn’t doing my best to show the Silversun Pickups the night of their life, by the way. Just kidding, that’s what made it amazing. Still, as much as I can prep the security guys and the club owners that some famous band coming through would like their own area to cruise, there still might be some snags here and there. Yes, security bouncer, this is the famous band on tour coming through, and can we please get these eight people inside the place ahead of those 36 people waiting in line? Yes, mister club owner, they do want the already-booked VIP room upstairs to have for themselves, so just tell those people who bought six bottles they are sharing their paid space with rock stars. Oh, and can I have a bottle of something to give them? All that running around to make them comfortable wasn’t even necessary. The band was super nice and way hyped on the club and the two very different rooms of music and the 500 people in the place. It all came together fine in the end, and to be honest not one person probably had any clue who they were anyway. It was First Friday. Everyone looks like rock stars.
And if everyone was a rock star Friday, then everyone was a chilled-out mo-fo on Saturday. The concert was good, but I was more hyped on listening to the leaked Kid Cudi’s “Man on the Moon” and reading everyone’s bite-sized reviews about it on Twitter all night. The breather was good because I knew Sunday was going to be crazy. Which it was. It’s a lot to deal with three-day weekends. Payday three-day weekends even. I think I saw more HPD than any of you.
