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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Reminiscing at the Moon
So you’re partying, either at someone’s house or a nightclub, and you and your bros are all talking and laughing. The place is packed. Maybe some music’s going on in the background. And then, all of the sudden, it gets eerily quiet. Like, the music and all the conversations stop — at the same time. Well, occasionally at a rock ’n’ roll show, something similar happens. But instead of quietude blanketing the scene, the performers’ music becomes the center of the universe; since everyone in the club has simultaneously stopped talking, the stage naturally attracts the misplaced attention. Sometimes, the crowd gets sucked into the music. Sometimes not. HearSay has neither the time nor the brain cells to explain all this and what it means. All your trustworthy wordsmith knows is that when its happening results in a bond between performer and audience, there’s nothing cooler. Conversely, there are a lot of experiences I’d rather suffer than watching patrons turn their collective attention to a band for a few seconds only to resume yapping heartbeats later. At the Goodwin/Sunday Drive show at the Moon last week, HearSay witnessed both phenomena. Neither was what I would call righteous. Moment No. 1 occurred during Sunday Drive’s set. In between songs, the Dallas-based band’s frontman told the audience about how he and his bandmates had earlier played Taste of Addison, on a bill with ’70s-era soft-rock giants, the Little River Band. The crowd had quieted down to hear him out. So don’t you know, as soon as Sunday Drive began busting out its very honest rendition of LRB’s 1978 chart, “Reminiscing,” the Moon floor filled with dancers. Nothing against the tune, but Sunday Drive’s original alt-country-ish rock material is just as good — and dance-worthy — as anything LRB ever crapped out. So that pissed me off a little but not as much as what happened when Goodwin took the stage. At one point — in the middle of an ass-kicking set of the band’s unique brand of poppy hard rock, when the crowd fell a little silent — Goodwin pounced, ripping off one of its catchiest, most attention-grabbing tracks, “Airport.” But most of the patrons, like the ones within HearSay’s line of vision, just kinda shrugged and then returned to their drinks, as if a bum had tapped them on the shoulder and asked for directions to the nearest dry cardboard box. WTF, people?!? This is rock and flippin’ roll! How does “Reminiscing” stoke your fire and “Airport” not?!? The crowd itself, IMHO, had nothing to do with the weirdness. The Moon is and has pretty much always been a comfy, clean, cool joint, and even though it is within spit-ball-spitting distance of a university whose student body is world-renowned for consuming mass amounts of alcohol in brief sittings, the place maintains a friendly, hip clientele (present company excluded). Maybe Sagittarius was in Virgo’s moon or whatever. I dunno. All I do know is that of all the vagaries of musicmaking, knowing how to consistently connect with potentially sympathetic ears will always — always — remain one of the most elusive to figure out. Whoever does and bottles it likely has the next recipe for beer on his hands.
Contact HearSay at hearsay@fwweekly.com.
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