White Light/White Heat

White Denim
Rock and Roll Hotel
November 14, 2009

What the fuck is happening to the Rock and Roll Hotel? You can no longer stand to the right of the stage. You also cannot partake of the lovely men's room with the trough down the hall from the stage. No admission, plebs. I enjoy the trough because it requires no lateral aim. If someone speaks to me, I can turn a full 30-40 degrees to either side to respond to them and still be hitting the target. Not that I do that, but I could.

Trough

Now that the trough is off-limits, if you want to go to the bathroom, you have to fight your way upstairs through whatever Goriuchi/Maharishi/Ignatowski disco or drunken jenga is going on , and use that bathroom. When you're on the plane this Thanksgiving, traveling back to whatever shit-ass place you came from before you moved here, when you get up to go to the bathroom, make sure you invite three other dudes to join you in there, and you'll have successfully re-created the Rock and Roll Hotel second floor men's room experience. Excuse me sir, your sack is resting on my wrist. Would you please move it? Thanks.

None of this, of course, is the fault of White Denim. Jumbo Slice loves this band and none of us can figure out why. Not that White Denim suck. They don't. It's just that they play music that I believe used to be called "Acid Rock", and Jumbo Slice is the world's leading pussy, and I guess we all assumed that listening to White Denim would cause him to tremble and break into tears. I guess we don't know Jumbo as well as we thought. I only knew one White Denim song coming into this (the excellent "Let's Talk About It") and I only knew one White Denim song coming out of this (the excellent "Let's Talk About It"). But who cares? No one remembers anything by Blue Cheer. There were no breaks between songs and I think they played two slow numbers to break things up. Otherwise it was GO-GO-GO for 90 minutes. They also kind of sounded like one of those pilled-up English rock bands like the Yardbirds, or Cream when Clapton had that cool afro. Good music to put a sweaty sheen on your face and cause your eyeballs to roll back into your head. So high marks to White Denim.

I couldn't decide who the bass player looked like more, Brandon Teena, or the gay kid from Glee:



On the cab ride to the show we were trying to remember who co-starred with Bill Murray in Stripes and someone said "Kurt Rambis" and we all laughed. It was, of course, Harold Ramis, but Ramis was the Rambis of SCTV, in that he was surrounded by superior talent (John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, etc.) and he fucking sucked and wasn't funny/skilled at basketball.