“Ladies and Gentlemen. We are Red Elvises. Your favorite band!”
Oh man. Just like last time, these guys blew me away. They are without a moment’s hesitation, the Best Live Act I have ever seen. They just rule. They put on an amazing show, and they own the crowd by the end of it.
“Now we will play for you Classic Russian Gypsy Song. Only our drummer does not speak Russian. He also does not speak German. He does not speak French. He does not speak Italian. The list goes on. So now the song is in English. Now it is Classic American Gypsy Song.”
The opening acts were the most horrendous pieces of human waste I have ever seen play, with the possible exception of Red Kross, who opened for several bands I saw back in the day. One was called Electric Glitter, or some pretentious crap like that, and the other was some Russian Portland-based band that got a big writeup in Willamette Week. The first band was worse, because they sounded like a bunch of high school kids playing Austin Powers type music. The second band was butt rock. As one guy with otter-pop blue hair so nicely put it: “Those are the kind of guys who used to beat me up in high school.”
While the opening acts were inflicted upon us, but before Steve and Miles figured out how to make earplugs from torn-up napkins (a couple of MacGyvers, they are), we were all staring intently at the “band” and trying to will them into falling off stage (we concluded later that the reason we were unsuccessful was due to the massive amount of positive energy the crowd was unconsciously putting out, which canceled out our energy. This all made a great deal of sense at the time). Due to this, the loud drunk chick sitting next to us decided that we weren’t being social. So she leans over, bracing herself on my leg and yells (she had to yell, the butt rock band was on) the following:
“You guys are never gonna get laid if you don’t loosen up!”
I swear to god, that’s exactly what she said. She continued talking, of course, but none of it really registered. Steve and Miles couldn’t really hear her, and I was still laughing at the first thing she said. But the gist of it was that she had been trying politely to smile at us and either flirt with us or allow us to flirt with her, and she felt badly that we hadn’t done anything about it. We had been ignoring her.
Steve asked her to repeat herself, and she yelled something about “ebb and flow… there’s and ebb and a flow between a guy and a girl when they talk…” I lost track of the exact flow of the conversation here, because I was laughing too hard, but Steve’s response was something along the lines of “We don’t like you. We don’t want to talk to you. Why are you talking to us?”
But she took my laughing and Steve’s insults as a positive sign anyway, and revealed that she was a drama teacher in a public high school, and this was her thirtieth birthday, at which point all of our respect levels for her went up. Public School teacher is a hard job. So we talked politely to her, and smiled when she smiled and eventually she went back to her drunk friends and we went back to whatever we were doing.
“You guys are never gonna get laid if you don’t loosen up.”
Oh my god. I’m still laughing about it. What a thing to say.
I just realized that I’ve spent much more time talking about this drunk chick than about the show, but there’s no way to express how wonderful a Red Elvises show is. You’re just going to have to trust me. Go see them as soon as you can. You won’t regret it. And if you’re a woman, get as close to the stage as possible. As we told the (other) drunk chick (from Nevada), this is a band that likes women.