Live: Baby Baby Baby Do You Like It?
The 88, Derby Saturday at the Roxy
The 88 are one of my very favorite bands: sun-drenched pogo-pop around a sweet core of evil, a bon-bon injected with cyanide. Their Saturday show at the Roxy, as part of the Sunset Strip Music Fest, was their first in a year, which is cruel and unusual and evil. Like them.
Crueler? We had to stand through Derby first.
The Portland band started promisingly, all sensitive and adorable and looking all of 25. The singer was tall and slender and broody and doe-eyed and could have used a haircut, and he seemed to like him a lot; he’d mastered the long stare into nowhere so each girl there could think he was eye-fucking her Sting-style, tantra baby all night long. Derby was sort of whispery and Garden Statey, but with a drivinger beat at least a few times before they’d revert back to another shoegaze ballad. I dunno; they’re no Prenup. After the first song, the girls on the floor whooed. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for the music.
It must have been 15 o’clock (or at least 11:30) before the 88 came on, because I and my girlfriend are a thousand years old. But missing my soothing cup of Matlock was entirely worth it once the driving notes of “Hide Another Mistake” sounded out, the crowd instantly bopping along. From there they slid into “All Cause of You,” a song whose evil isn’t as manifestly apparent as some of their others, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere and I just never noted it (at least, that’s what I’m hoping; I do like my sunshine with a bit of bite), like all those sighing tweens who never figured out that “Every Breath You Take” is about a stalker.
The band slid into a powerful little funk number I hadn’t heard before (off the coming album, perhaps, but the goodly portion of new stuff the 88 played was usually preceded by the admonition that it was indeed new). The white girls at the front of the stage tried valiantly, but honestly they had no idea what to do with The Funk. The pogo for “Nobody Cares” worked out a lot better. Which is maybe why New Wave caught on with all those ’80s white kids in the first place?
With the new material, singer Keith Slettedahl was really sounding like Davy Jones – which was odd, because every other sunshine pop band I love (George Fryer, etc.) has always sounded to me just like the Monkees, and yet I’d never put it together with the 88 before, and all I could think about was The Brady Bunch, which is not only sort of insultingly stupid but also made me feel more middle-aged than usual (though not as middle-aged as the Hawaiian shirt dude next to me who was singing along to every song, just like I was, and I hoped nobody thought we, age-appropriate as we sort of were in the fresh-faced crowd, were together), and then the singer pretended for a moment he was going to smash what we think was a 335 F-hole Gibson, but he was just kidding, and then they encored with some boring Wingsy-sounding song, and I knew they would end with “Coming Home,” because duh it was an actual hit (Sears, etc., etc., and I have absolutely no problem with a young band selling their music for what they can; it’s Sting shilling for Jaguar when presumably he doesn’t need the money that really gives me the squicks), and once I’d gotten a little bit of it out of my system, we could leave, except they hidden-tracked us at the very end with a mean-fucking Zeppelin, for serious, that was so good – so fucking good, these skinny white pop boys in their grown-up shoes (no tennies, they, and I appreciate it) – and baby baby baby do you like it?
Yes.
Published: 07/02/2008
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