Monday Night Is Friday Night (with the Old '97s)

Our favorite band was in town this week: the Old 97’s are touring, as the folks at KEXP kept saying, “in support of their new album” (which somehow makes it sound as though The Grand Theatre Volume One is some sort of obscure political cause, instead of an awesome alt country record). Regular readers will be familiar with our devotion to this particular musical ensemble, and will infer (correctly) that if the Old 97's were at the Showbox on Monday, we were there too.

As always, the boys delivered a terrific show. We slipped into the back of the crowd in time to hear the end of Langhorne Slim's beautiful opening set, then moved in close during the changeover to stake out a spot in what we hoped would be the dance zone (a concept that seems to have lost some traction since our youth, unfortunately).

We last saw these guys in June, before Grand Theatre hit the streets, and there were a couple of moments on Monday night when I wondered if they'd been on the road nonstop ever since. Rhett in particular appeared to have reached the point in the tour where the same old night club follows him around from town to town: he kept addressing us as “Seattle, Washington!” as if he'd forgotten where he was for a second and then suddenly remembered.

But the thing about Rhett is, he goes all out, every time, all night long, no matter what. I remember a story Ken wrote once about the night they’d had some questionable sushi for dinner, and Rhett ran offstage after the last song, threw up into a trash can, grimaced, spat, and headed back out for the encore. It’s not just Rhett, either; Murry, Ken, and Philip always give it their all too, song after song. (Here’s hoping they have a nice long stretch of quality downtime coming soon!) They're having fun up there, for sure -- and the stage banter makes it clear that they still enjoy each other's company after all this time -- but they are also working hard, moving relentlessly from one number into the next, drawing on fifteen-plus years of material, from Hitchhike to Rhome to this latest record.

We've been fans for a decade or so, and we've had plenty of time, through road trips and bus rides and rainy afternoons at home, to absorb most of this extensive repertoire, song by song. And we can sing it word for word, at top volume – along with most of the rest of the crowd. I have always thought it must be an amazing rush to stand on a stage in front of a couple thousand sweaty, bouncing people, and hear them bellowing your lyrics back at you. (I especially love it when the performer arrives at a key line and doesn’t bother to sing it himself, just steps back from the mike and lets the audience deliver it.) More than a few Old ‘97s songs have the kind of pithy, climactic lines that lend themselves to this treatment, and Rhett knows how to work them.

It turns out, however, that if you haven’t steeped yourself in all the old records for a week before the concert (as I often do, but didn’t this time), you may discover that the lyrics are flowing seamlessly up from your deep-storage memory files and straight out your mouth, without your conscious brain ever being sure what’s coming next. And then all of a sudden you (and everyone else around you) are shouting something up at the ceiling: “I believe in love!” say, or possibly “Please get out! Of my car!” Or -- even though there's nothing Lone Star about you but your boots, your aunts, and a handful of cousins -- "Texas lives in me!"

And then you open your eyes and see the disco ball glittering above you, and feel a wave of tribal catharsis break across the dance floor... But before you can really register the meaning of it all, the band is on to the next song -- and maybe you can't quite place it yet, but you know it’s your favorite.

One song I didn't know too well was a Rhett solo, “Singular Girl,” which contains the immortal line, “Talking to you, girl, is like long division.” The next day we dug it up and played it for Simon, who has recently developed a penchant for this particular algorithm. About half-way through the second chorus he turned to me, perplexed. “Wait, is long division supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing in this song?”

I pondered the various ways a person could interpret "long division" as a metaphor for conversation with a love interest. "Talking with you, babe, is like entering a tedious, finicky labyrinth from which I'm unlikely to emerge without making at least one minor error that screws me completely."  "Talking with you, dear, is an archaic, time-consuming endeavor, which I would gladly bypass by pulling up my iPhone calculator." My cousin Josh had a more positive take: "Talking with you makes sense; I can work it out; there are right answers; the process is logical; the more I do it, the easier it gets. What more could a guy want?"

Simon has so far steered clear of grade school romance (a world ruled more by Machiavellian principles than mathematical metaphors, if memory serves). But it's not hard to imagine our boy, five or ten years hence, gazing besottedly into someone’s eyes and murmuring, “Talking to you, girl, is like long division.” If she’s the right girl, of course, she’ll know what he's trying to say: "There's nothing on earth I'd rather do."

This isn't the first time our household has grappled with equivocal Old 97's lyrics: Josie still can't decide whether "Every Night Is Friday Night (Without You)" is meant to convey something like, "Whoo hoo! I'm havin' some fun now that you're gone, baby!" or if it's more along the lines of, "I should be going out dancing, but what the hell's the point anymore?" I personally think it's the former, but in a self-delusional way that's trying to conceal the latter.

Y'all are welcome to weigh in, if you like! (This video may or may not clear things up for you.)





I had expected them to open with this one on Monday, but instead it came near the end -- after a lovely rendition of "Valentine" (how Rhett found the voice for those soaring, haunting harmonies after all that howling is beyond me -- but thank you, Rhett) and right before the final number, "Time Bomb."

When it was all over we staggered home, throats raw and ears buzzing, thoroughly rocked and utterly rolled. These tireless alchemists had turned Monday night into Friday night, all right. And somehow -- maybe just by showing up and giving it their all, digging deep the way they always do -- they had performed the even more impressive miracle of making me feel like I might survive the rest of January after all.