Clientele: Live in Philly 8/2/06

Remember that time when you were a 7th grader in Catholic School and you decided to "invade" your rival school by going to their "dance" and stealing all their women? And remember how you sat in a corner, talked to no one, drank a coke, and eventually snuck over to the snack table and wrote "Holy Family Sucks" on the white tablecloth?

I do.

These memories were in full force when I walked into the basement of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia last night to see Clientele. The room reeked of Middle School dance, from the folded-up cafeteria tables in the other room, to the small wooden stage, to the tables in the back of the room where merchandise and cds took the place of the expected pretzels and coke.

There were a couple more factors that distinguished this outing from your standard Middle School dance:

1) Records on sale. Everything from a mint Highway 61 Revisited ($15.00) to a virtually unplayable Chris de Burgh's Greatest Hits that didn't even have "Lady in Red" on it ($1.00).

2) No Air Conditioning. It's 100 degrees outside and I'm in a basement with no AC and no natural ventilation. To illustrate my point I'm going to ask you to try something right now: breathe in through your nose, exhale, and then breathe in through your mouth. You'll notice that when you breathe through your mouth, the air is both colder and drier than when you breathe through your nose. This is because the nose warms and moisturizes air to prepare it for the lungs. Last night, there was NO DIFFERENCE between the a nose inhale and a mouth inhale. The air was as warm and moist as the inside of my body.

3) Mature, adult, copious, I-haven't-showered-in-three-weeks body odor. Not even the middle schooler that already had armpit hair in 7th grade could have competed with this crew.

Oh yeah, there was also the band. Clientele was fair. Maybe the heat put me in a mood to be overly critical but the bass and guitar were clearly NOT in tune with one another, which frustrated the shit out of me on the songs that I didn't know. On the songs I did know, I could just shut my eyes and remember what the song sounded like on the CD.

There was a gorgeous blonde thing who was in charge of 1) standing in the middle of the stage, 2) looking hot, and 3) playing a violin that no one could hear. I swear she looked at me like twice.

Sampling older and newer material, Clientele saved my two favorite Clientele songs, "Since K Got Over Me" and "My Own Face Inside the Trees", for the end, which proves to me that my two favorite Clientele songs are everybody's two favorite Clientele songs and they save them for the end of shows to make sure that people like me stay the whole time. Mission Accomplished.

The sound man for the FUC (an inherently funny human: black, balding, his remaining hair in dreads) was called "the hardest working man in show business" by frontman Alasdair MacLean after a series of incidents in which the hot violinist asked for "more violin" and didn't get any because our inherently funny sound man was out having a cigarette.

Advice to Clientele for producing a better show:

1) Tune your instruments
2) Pick a better venue
3) Convince the hot blonde violinist to put down the violin and take off her clothes (it was hot enough that no one would have judged).

I'm out.