Beady Eye Music, Mate

Going to the rock show! Time to put on my rock clothes. I look in my closet and ask my wife, “Where’s my skinny jeans? Where’s my belt chain? Where’s my poly cotton blend Spoon t-shirt? Where’s me fit trainers?”

I swear I had cool rock clothes, where’d they all go?  I find my skinny jeans (which used to be my fat jeans) and squeeze into them. My god these are tight. “Did you leave them in the dryer too long?” I accuse my wife. She looks at me sadly and goes back to concentrating on finding her own cool rock wardrobe.

Instead of cool rock clothes, I settle on my suburban-dad-attending-a-barbecue-after-hitting-a-bucket-of-balls-at-the driving-range-clothes. Only driving in the car to the venue do I realize that the shirt has some sort of baby-related stain on it (Vomitus? Mac & Cheese residue?).  Damn it, I’m dropping coolness points left and right! Was I ever cool? Maybe not if we’re using sabermetric (CPAR? Cool Points Above Replacement?) to judge my entire career, but I swear I had a few hot weeks back when I was around 23 or 24-years-old. But those days are apparently in the rearview mirror.

We have tickets to Beady Eye’s first show in the US and we’re meeting up with my friend and frequent collaborator Jeffrey (who is a drummer in a couple bands and still has rock clothes) and his wife. Beady Eye is the band that Oasis lead singer Liam Gallagher formed with the rest of Oasis after one final row with his brother guitarist and main songwriter Noel that finally broke up the band after twenty years.

Though I believe that it is in every long-running band's financial interest to at some point break-up, just to enable them to cash in on a reunion tour sometime in the future.

The brothers have been famously fighting for the entire history of the band, but apparently Liam attacked Noel backstage with both a plum and a guitar and Noel said he’d finally had enough and left the band.

You DO NOT attack the man that wrote “Wonderwall” and “Supersonic” with any pitted fruit. There are some things you just don’t do.

With Noel Gallagher packing up his songbook and going home, we’re left with Oasis without any of the songs that they’re famous for. No matter how much the crowd pleaded, there would be no “Wonderwall”, no “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, no “Champagne Supernova”, no “Cigarettes & Alcohol”, no “Shakermaker”, not even “Little by Little”. I’d even settle for “Hindu Times”.

What was on our prix fixe menu for the evening was a steady diet of the most dreaded words in rock concert history, the words that no concertgoer ever wants to hear. That’s right, I’m talking about the dreaded “new material”. Egads.

Now, to be fair, Beady Eye’s debut album, “Different Gear, Still Speeding” is surprisingly solid. It’s a fun little straight-ahead throwback rock n’ roll album. The band was tight and I thought that Liam’s voice sounded more engaged than it had in years. But it’s not even definitely maybe on par with “Definitely Maybe”.

Why the excitement over a band that really isn’t all that exciting? The reason is seeing Liam Gallagher in a small venue (the Metro, basically an oversized bar), the type of which he probably hasn’t played since the band hit it big. Liam Gallagher, one of the last great cock on the walk, petulant, bratty, obnoxious, bigger-than-life lead singers in rock n’ roll without his big brother, without those great songs to sing, with a fraction of the audience and armed only with new material and the other members of Oasis, of which only hardcore fans can name (Andy Bell & Gem Archer for the record). What would Liam do? Was there a chance this would be a debacle and we’d all end up on YouTube?

My father still talks about the disaster of a Kinks show he saw back in the day. Would this be my disaster story?

Alas, as much as it would have made a better story for the show to have ended in riots and/or pitted fruits hurled at the band while security beat the crowd back with pool cues, the show was pretty good and the band played well. Liam strutted out in a ridiculous Union Jack waistcoat that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds causing the hair dye in his trademark Beatles moptop/mullet to run down his neck (Okay, maybe that didn’t really happen, but in my mind it did).

In between verses during guitar solos, he did his trademark move of standing in front the stage to survey the crowd and folded his arms as if to say, “I conquered the world in 1995 and even if you don’t believe it anymore, the truth is I still own you. Worship me and receive nothing but my cool indifference in return.”

While Liam was doing his Liam thing of sneering, preening, and mumbling incomprehensible words to the audience in his thick Manchester accent, the bassist (who wasn’t an official member of the band and probably just a session guy) stood next to him looking absolutely coked out his mind, his eyes wide, ringing slot machine cherries, his hands independent from his brain haphazardly strumming his instrument. It looked like Liam gave the newbie a bump of rock star coke a minute before they went on stage. “Here, mate. Try this.” The good stuff, the stuff reserved for only the most decadent rock stars, the medical-grade-Merck- puffy-cloud-type coke that Keith Richards went on and on about in his autobiography and attributed his superhuman stamina to in the 70’s.

And while the musicians were on stage, what where the nostalgic aging Gen X-ers in the audience doing? Well, the music really didn’t necessitate any real dancing or deep shoegazing or moshing, so I kinda lightly tapped my hand on my thigh to the beat.

To my left, a guy lifted a girl on his shoulders. “Show us your tits!” a skinny fellow in a Pulp t-shirt shouted then looked away pretending that someone else had said it. The girl bowed to pressure and lifted her shirt and flashed her… bra. Those around her made it clear that they were of the opinion that she should perhaps show a tab more skin, and the poor girl who had no intention of showing any more quickly realized that she gotten in over her head and wanted out the situation and motioned for the guy to let her down. At that exact moment a meaty security guy wearing a black shirt appeared flashing a penlight telling them to break up this spontaneous display of rock clichés.  The girl yelled at the guy on whose shoulder’s she sat to let her down, but he was too busy texting on his cell phone.

Standing in front of me was a couple in their mid-to-late- fifties. The guy looked like he owned an independent record store specializing in vintage vinyl and the woman was probably an adjunct professor of Victorian literature at DePaul.

While Beady Eye played, the guy accompanied them by playing a mean air guitar, and the woman was so admiring of her man’s invisible ax-work that she was helpless when he dropped his “instrument” and dove in for a serious make-out session.  They were going for it. Their eyes were closed, their tongues were slipping and sliding, and their hands were everywhere.

And I was about three inches away from the whole thing.

Usually in floor seating-only shows, the crowd condenses itself into a tight pack and everyone tries to get just a little closer to the stage, so I was pretty pinned in my spot. All I could do was watch the action like I was Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange”. Is that what kissing really looks like up close? Are they doing it right? Am I doing it right?

It was the final song of the night, the guitars swirled, the crowd cheered, the couple kissed like they were the only two people in the world as a movie camera tracked 360 degrees around them like at the end of a romantic comedy.

Then I realized that this show, this moment was not about my nostalgia for a time when I went to tons of shows and wore rock clothes, or the audience’s nostalgia for the mid-90’s when Britpop ruled the music world for a few minutes (Blur versus Oasis!) and people actually purchased music (Sam Goody! Tower Records!), or even for the band itself trying to reestablish themselves with a new name and new songs. It was about Jane Eyre and Air Guitar, nostalgic for each other.

And I couldn’t look away… even if I really wanted to.