Dancing about Architecture

My girlfriend and I went to this last night.

I’m not up to writing a full review, but:

“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”, as performed by Paul was great. (And touching as hell under the circumstances—Laurie was wiping tears from her eyes and clearly she didn’t know ahead of time that Paul would be playing it.)

(Musicals were a recurrent theme of the evening. Besides “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, “Till There Was You” from The Music Man was performed (by John Eller).)

Also great was some song with the lyrics “she’s a goddamn angel” and something about her “husband in Hell”. Is this a new Westerberg song? (A Gram Parsons song??)  The lyrics are kind of like an inverted version of the lyrics of the Tim version of “Can’t Hardly Wait”: “I’ll be sad in Heaven/You won’t follow me there”.

Paul and a bunch of others played an awesome (extremely awesome) version of the Stones’ “Loving Cup”. (Paul’s left hand seems to have recovered from the screwdriver-candle-cleaning incident—he played some decent guitar solos on “Loving Cup”.) Paul was totally getting into this song and John Eller played really good keyboards on it.

The Zuzu’s Petals songs were excellent. Laurie was completely happy performing, Linda is an awesome drummer (she played drums for almost everyone that night), and it was fun watching Coleen bop around.

Other than P.W. and Zuzu’s Petals, the main musical highlight was an amazing vocal performance by Lori Barbero (of Babes in Toyland) on some song that I don’t know the name of. Whatever song it was that she played, it was an amazing minimalist arrangement: just distorted, feedbacking guitar, Lori’s vocals, and Lori’s foot slamming down on the bass drum pedal.

Also great was the closing performance of “Daydream Believer” by everybody.

I had my copy of Petal Pusher signed by Laurie after the show. I didn’t want to reveal myself to her as some kind of “Paul worshipper”, so I didn’t say much to her, which I now regret. I could have at least told her that I loved the book.

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