As a teenager, I didn’t really go to shows. First of all, most of the groups and performers I listened to in high school had either died or broken up before I was even born. Second of all, my mother probably wouldn’t have let me go because she had this weird idea that marauding junkies would tackle me in the parking lot and force large quantities of acid under my tongue, at which point I would metamorphose into an even sulkier version of myself, one that refused to do math homework in favor of rushing dramatically away from the family dinner table and into the arms of my convicted felon boyfriend. Okay, maybe she would have let me, but she would have insisted on accompanying me, and I get along well with my mother now, but at age fifteen, I could not have forced the words “Mom, could you please drive us to the Duran Duran concert” past my lips, even in jest.

At long and torturous last, I got my driver’s license, and my mother grudgingly permitted me more freedom, so I started going to shows, and it didn’t matter if I didn’t like the artists in question. I mean, I went to the Phil Collins show at the Meadowlands. Phil Collins. PHIL COLLINS. I went because I could; I went to a lot of regrettable shows just because I could. I went to Jimmy Buffett two nights in a row so that I could meet up with a boy I liked. I went to Morrissey with Maria José and eighth-graders kept hitting on us until they figured out that we wouldn’t give them any of our beer, at which point one of them threw up all over himself, and then a crazed fan rushed the stage and injured Morrissey only thirty minutes into the concert and we had to turn around and go home and when we got back to the car we found ourselves parked next to the eighth-
graders. I went to Paul McCartney with my brother and his friends and his one friend almost got us killed by taunting the occupants of a neighboring car, the car we ended up RIGHT NEXT TO during an interminable traffic jam, and then we got to our seats and we all promptly got a nosebleed, not because of the height of the seats (although that certainly contributed), but because the balding jackass in front of us insisted on smoking one El Producto after another FOR THREE HOURS, and then when I had the gall to light an innocent little cigarette, a security guard came over and asked me to put it out, but did he say anything to the DEMENTED TOXIC CLOUD IN FRONT OF US? NOOOOOOOOO. I went to a Weezer show, and the Diva and the Disco Biscuit and the Couch Baron and I stood at the entrance to Roseland and stared in horror at the row of minivans dropping off hundreds upon hundreds of baggy-panted smooth-
cheeked skater wannabes and their spindly breastless girlfriends, all of whom stared at us as though we had escaped from a retirement home and forgotten to put in our teeth, and then we revelled in the fact that we could get a beer in about two seconds because we had turned twenty-one before some of these kids finished kindergarten.

But none of these can compare to my concert experiences of last week, when I saw B.B. King and Ween on consecutive nights. Can you say “cognitive dissonance”? (Actually, in Ween’s case, just “dissonance” should cover it, but I’ll get to that later.) I think I may have melted some crucial wiring in my brain during this peculiar doubleheader. First of all, I don’t know any songs at all by B.B. King, and the ones I know by Ween I don’t really like, and I certainly hadn’t planned to pay real American dollars to see either one because I didn’t have enough real American dollars for B.B. and I wouldn’t drop one thin dime on the brothers Ween, but my mother got my brother the B.B. King tickets for Christmas, and my brother very nicely invited me to accompany him, and then the Disco Biscuit wanted me to come with him to Ween because he swore that I would learn to like Ween if I saw them live, and after a year and a half of feigning illness to avoid hearing them, I threw up my hands and gave in. The fact that these events would occur on consecutive nights worried me somewhat, but I vowed to forge ahead.

My odyssey began on the PATH train to Newark with my brother. We had come out of a drenching rain and wedged our steaming selves onto a car, taking care to situate ourselves next to a woman whose head cold had her seething with mucus. A Starbucks pit-
stop on the way had us percolating with caffeine, so we made faces at people and my brother made subtle farting noises with his lips. (No, nobody on the train found it funny either.) At last, we arrived in Newark and trekked to the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts – known as “NJPAC” to the Jerserati – and gawked at the sparkling chandeliers and soft plush seats, and then we wended our way to our very own soft plush seats in the middle of the fifth row. Have I mentioned that my mom rules? Anyhow, we kicked back in the midst of some of the most abject jazz geeks I have ever seen. I mean, who thinks to himself, “Ohhhh yeah – white sweater with aqua stripes and a big old egg stain on it, pimples sticking up out of my sideburns like Alpine peaks through a layer of cloud, glasses repaired with string – I AM HOT TONIGHT”? Then Bobby “Blue” Bland, the opening act, came on just as my brother finished affixing his DAT microphones to the brim of his baseball hat and bribing his seat neighbors with the promise of free copies.

Bland set the tone for the night – unfortunately. Not to say that Bland can’t sing or that his band doesn’t rock, because he can and they do. But the whole routine of introducing each band member, standing back for the band member’s five-minute solo, and asking for applause for said solo (and then asking again if the first round of applause didn’t sound loud enough) got old reeeeeeally fast, especially since it happened on every song. Bland would sing a few bars, make that patented weird croaking noise that probably sounded like a sexy growl forty years ago but now sounds like he has Jabba the Hutt stuck in his throat, and then let the band take over, and the whole process would begin again.

When Bland vacated the stage for B.B. King’s band, we devoutly hoped that King would play proportionately more than Bland had sung. But B.B. King is seventy years old, and he doesn’t play as much as he used to. His bandleader, an excellent trumpet player whom we christened “The Weeble” because of his nearly spherical shape, did most of the work, and like Bland, King would play a few bars and get out of the way of the band. I must say, King’s band rules – especially The Weeble, the piano player, and “Mighty Mike” the shredding bass player, who brought a funk jam to its knees – but we didn’t come to see King’s band. We came to see King.

Anyway, B.B. played for about two hours, during which time Bland and Ruth Brown both joined him onstage. I must say, I got fed up with all the trombone-player intros and encores, but the moment when King stood in front of his brass section, noodling around on Lucille and making faces at the horn players as if to say “look how hard you have to work, and look how easy it is for me,” made it all worthwhile. I have never seen anyone make playing the guitar look so easy. Most so-called alternative guitar guys, like Noel Gallagher or David Gavurin, act as if the guitar weighs two hundred pounds, and they have to pull every note out of it by bracing their bodies against the floor; Jimi Hendrix played as if trying to tame a wild horse, letting the reins out and yanking them in; Junior Brown acts as if he’s running dangerous heavy machinery. B.B. King makes it look like breathing. He can vary the volume and tone effortlessly, and I found it refreshing to watch someone play the guitar who didn’t act like someone had dragged him onstage against his will to share his giant misunderstood talent with the world (Noel again), but someone who knows he can play the hell out of a song and have a great time doing it, especially when most guys his age consider shuffleboard an extreme sport.

Twenty-four hours later, I careened to the opposite end of the musical spectrum to take in a Ween show at Tramps. The show had sold out, so the Biscuit stood out in the freezing cold for about an hour trying to get a decent price for scalped tickets, which he finally got but still ended up paying out the ass because I refused to pay more than $20 for a band I hate in the first place. As we stood outside, I wondered aloud if the entire student body of Hampshire College had come down for the show, or if only some of them had made the trip but some Oberlin and Reed students had joined them. In any case, I have never seen that many skinny, pockmarked, Icelandic-sweater-and-Birks-with-socks wearing, scruffily untrimmed beard-sporting, too-long fingernail-having, shuffling stoned white boys with dreadlocks in one place in my entire life. At least we couldn’t smell their unwashed hippie-ass bodies out there, not something I can say for after we got inside. Tramps oversold the show, and as a result, even drinking a beer became a giant hassle, never mind attempting to purchase one. And the entire crowd knew all the words to every song, which I didn’t, because I don’t like the band, except for the country album, and they only played one song from that record.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Ween phenomenon, Ween basically parodies other genres of popular music. You can spot a Ween song if it sounds like a song by another band but the other band doesn’t play that song. “Don’t Get Too Close To My Fantasy” rips off Queen, for example. At one point during the show, they went off on an extended Peter Gabriel riff that channeled the Passion album. For their last song, they did a Prince cover that consisted of Gene repeating the line “I want to lick your pussy” over and over for twenty minutes. I stood there, earplugs firmly in, trying to edge away from the long-haired girls Dead-dancing next to me and putting their nappy locks all over my arm, and trying to understand what about this band strikes a nerve with people, and then I figured it out. Dean and Gene Ween can imitate any band and any genre from country to punk to grunge to acid jazz to, well, Peter Gabriel. Skinny Dean and lawn-dwarf-twin Gene probably didn’t get over with too many girls in high school, and as revenge upon the world, they decided to turn their air guitar dreams into reality. They never moved past the age of fifteen and all of its wild fantasies and humiliating rejections, and for that reason, fifteen-year-
olds and misfits love this band. They particularly love the misogynist
lyrics to certain songs, like “you fucked up, you ugly whore” and “baby baby baby bitch,” which had some of the males in the crowd yelling along to the words while pumping their upraised middle fingers in the air. Yeah, we get it. You’re a virgin.

Well, even though I understand now why others worship Ween, I still don’t like them. I don’t find sustained feedback and thinly disguised resentment towards all the women that wouldn’t sleep with “the Dean-er” all that entertaining, and if I want to listen to rip-offs of other bands, why wouldn’t I just stay home and play the albums of those bands instead of paying six bucks for a Budweiser and getting my breasts jostled for three hours while Gene polishes off a bottle of Jack Daniels and staggers around the stage ranting? Well, next time, I think I will.

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