Hooray! The Fleshtones Are Coming to Philly!

Rock-n-roll, super rock, youtube September 21st, 2006

The Fleshtones, one of my two favorite bands of all time are coming to Philadelphia this Saturday September 23rd. They’ll be at the TLA on South Street as part of the Little Steven’s Underground Garage Tour.

Until youtube ran out of video, I was featuring The Fleshtones every Friday here at brendancalling. Simply put, they are one of the best live acts around. Their guitars have those fancy wireless set-ups, so the band usually gravitates from the stage to dancing on the bar to leading the entire crowd out of the venue on a parade down the street. When I saw them at the Trocadero in July, they played to a nearly empty house, and still managed to blow everyone else off the stage.

Like the Ramones, the Fleshtones don’t waste time between songs, and in the space of 10 minutes, they must have plowed through at leat a half-dozen tunes. Most of the songs were from the new album, except for “Do You Swing” and a fantastic take on “Vindicators”, featuring Ken and Keith fretting each other’s instruments while dancing in circles. That was about when Tim showed up and said, “This is the Fleshtones? These guys are great! I’d drive a few hours to see this!” By this point, Zaremba had climbed onto the stack of mains, stage right, and made his way onto the mezzanine as the band kept chugging away at whatever they were playing. After he returned to the stage, the entire band (except for Bill on the drums) dropped their instruments, leaped over the barricades onto the floor, and began doing pushups under a wall of feedback and the blugidda-blugidda of Milhizer’s trap kit. Then they grabbed their three fans and made US do pushups as well, as they jumped back onstage and closed the evening with i don’t even know what.

I cannot recommend this show more highly. The Fleshtones have been going at it now since 1976, and while being big in Europe helps pay the bills, this is a quintessentially American band, playing quintessentially American music.

As a musician, their dedication to performance has informed my own approach to live music: making eye-contact with the crowd, going over-the-top as a performer with karate kicks, devil signs, down-on-my-knees-bass-guitar-played-behind-my-head, that kind of thing. Making myself available after the show is over to talk with the crowd. Putting myself all the way into the performance. It’s exhausting really: when I was in Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops tour, I would get to a point where I regularly fell into a depression after getting off stage because I had given that much of my psychic energy to the crowd. And this is what the Fleshtones do every. single. performance.

Put more directly, if you DON’T see The Fleshtones, you’re probably not right in the head.

And this is one of their best songs: Take a Walk with the Fleshtones.

See you on Saturday!

3 Responses to “Hooray! The Fleshtones Are Coming to Philly!”

  1. Phillybits Says:
    September 21st, 2006 at 7:42 pm

    Visitors, Brendan took me to *two* Fleshtones concerts. The first was in Baltimore, and the second in NYC, where the band members actually remembered me.

    Ask Brendan how, after seeing them the first time, I reacted when he asked me if I wanted to see them a second time in NYC.

    If you have the opportunity, go see them. You will NOT be disappointed!

  2. ryan Says:
    September 21st, 2006 at 7:57 pm

    I might be able to get out to this…what time are you heading down there?

  3. brendan Says:
    September 22nd, 2006 at 3:26 am

    not sure what time, probably around 6:30 or 7:00?

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