I tend not to do things halfway with my rock ’n’ roll music. Of the over 200 CDs I own, 75 percent or so are by four bands. Until recently, I had seen three of those four bands, but always managed to miss the fourth — the Eels. I was starting to get nervous. Especially given the Buddy Holly-Big Bopper-Jimi Hendrix-Lynyrd Skynyrd-John Lennon-Paul McCartney (okay so he’s not dead, but tell me with a straight face that you would pay real money to see a concert by the musical catastrophe that Paul has become in the last 30 years) nature of the medium.
Then I heard that the Eels were going to tour in the U.S. after several months in Europe. Joy! Then I heard that they were even coming to Cleveland. Double joy! Then I saw when they were coming: March 28. When I would be on spring break. At an ultimate frisbee tournament. In Greenville, North Carolina. Unjoy.
I scrambled, looking at all the other dates and seeing if there were any that didn’t conflict with my previous engagements hobbling my knees for life, and the only one that came close to working was the March 25 date in Philadelphia. All I would need to do to go to that show would be drive all night from Statesboro, Georgia to my family’s house in Maryland, sleep a couple hours, drive the three hours to Philly, see the show, and drive the three hours back without passing out. Naturally, I booked the tickets without thinking twice.
Arriving on South Street in Philadelphia with a couple of hours to kill, I decided it was imperative I get myself a cheesesteak. Walking up and down the street — most of it designed for tourists, with “Best [Insert Product Here] on South Street” signs in the windows — I found the sub shop that looked most like a hole in a wall and decided they proably had the best cheesesteaks. One bite told me I was right, and later descriptions of the grease dripping from steak and cheese alike, drenching my hands, nearly convinced a vegan friend to give up the game then and there.
Point being: as I was leaving the shop, I noticed a number of familiar faces in the line. A tall guy with a red mohawk, a scruffy guy with glasses…could it be? A tenth of a second later, I realized that yes, the man with the red mohawk was Koool G Murder, and the scruffy guy with glasses was, indeed, E, the man behind the Eels. Below is an approximate transcript of my internal monologue in the ensuing seconds:
“Oh my God, it’s E and the band. Should I ask him for an autograph…no, no, that’s not cool, and I don’t have a pen anyways…shit, I can’t just stand here, um, just keep walking, don’t stare, don’t smile like an idiot, oh my God, E’s looking at me, just nod your head, JKD! (JKD nods head, E nods head in return), WHOOO, he nodded back, just keep walking don’t trip or anything okay good (JKD stumbles into door, exits on second attempt, turns left, walks for 50 feet, turns back right, walks 60 feet, crosses street, stands dumbstruck, walks left 50 feet, stares into space for five minutes).”
So I was pretty impressed with myself for not being the typical obsessed fan, or at least not letting on that I own every CD E has ever been involved in and had driven 14 hours to see the show and structured a week of my life around the show.

The show itself…well, I couldn’t help but be the obviously most nutso fan in the audience, bouncing and dancing by myself almost the whole show, and screaming myself to a nearly voice-less hoarseness. I could go through, song by song, and document the rockingness of the show, but…language is so limiting in these regards.
Nothing could really take away from the sheer joy of the experience for me, but some of the audience did their best to do so. Below are a few excerpts from drummer Butch’s on-line diary describing the problem:

“This is the only night this year where something isn’t quite right in the air. Most of the audience is great and with us, but, unbeknownst to most in the room, there is a gaggle of what E refers to as “dumb ass frat boys” right up in front of Koool’s side of the stage. They throw things on the stage and talk loudly in their dumb ass frat boy voices. During one song E even goes so far as to stand on their hands to shut them up. Eventually one of the D.A.F.B.s jumps up onto the stage. He is led out the stage door to the alley and the air immediately clears, but not enough. E prepares the crowd for me to sing my upcoming hit single ‘I Am A Sad Clown.’ He explains that I am a drummer, not an animal. I am an ARTIST. And I need complete silence when I work. It’s hard to concentrate on emoting when a bunch of dudes are screaming my name (not that I don’t appreciate it).”
This leads me to what I think is a generalized problem of D.A.F.B.s in music, and some D.A.F.B.s at the concert in particular, and that makes me not joyful.
Let me be more specific: for most of my life, I’ve been more than willing to put up with the hubris of rock bands and even rock fans because at heart they’re just like me, and are all huge dorks. Behind the leather jackets, sunglasses and coke-powdered noses of a lot of rock stars is a kid who was a big-time loser growing up, and who spent a lot of time alone, playing the guitar and listening to music. They get really good at it, and boom, they’re rock stars, and overindulge and act cool like the kids who picked on them growing up. Sorta same with fans — they listen to way too much music, and wake up one day and are into the right bands and already wearing all the clothes that everyone wants to wear, and bang, they’re cool, and it’s their revenge on the kids who picked on them and who want to be like them now, and that’s fine if maybe they’re a little pompous now.
But in the last several years the most disturbing trend to my mind hasn’t been the audio diarrhea from the likes of Limp Bizkit, Drowning Pool, P.O.D., Puddle of Mudd and all those other putzes — it’s the fact that these bands, the most popular and successful “rock” bands, are made up of those D.A.F.B.s, those guys who pick on skinny Depeche Mode-listening kids in high school, who do keg stands without even a trace of irony. There’s just some cosmic imbalance at work here, and now that the D.A.F.B.s’ influence of rock fandom has spread like a wheat fungus into the followers of actually good bands, it pisses me the hell off. Metalheads and rock fans are supposed to be pathetic loners with stringy, unkempt hair and too many black concert t-shirts — that’s my kind of people. Buzzed hair, cologne (COLOGNE!?! Truly; I smelled CK One) and Abercrombie have their place, I suppose, but it isn’t anywhere near a real rock ’n’ roll show. I’d even take Strokes sycophants over these people.
Thankfully, it seems like maybe the record companies have decided dork is The Next Big Thing in rock — I even heard the White Stripes on the radio like 10 times over spring break. And as much as I may complain about kids with self-consciously bad fashion sense and really pretentious and arbitrary tastes in music that sounds basically the same, I have to admit that I’m basically one of them at heart.