The Forty-Fives, the Ruby Doe, The Valley @ The Sunset Tavern, Seattle 4/2/05
It had been awhile since I’d been to the Sunset Tavern. Maybe a year or two, I couldn’t tell you for sure. The décor was the still the same as I recall – vaguely Asian, lots of reds and blacks. The “over 21” stamp for the night was the yin/yang symbol. The place used to be an absolute shithole. The first time I ever went there, it was concrete flooring with a big drain in the center of the room. The better to hose the place down after an evening’s drinking, one supposes. What this has to do with anything, I’m not really sure, but I pass it along in the spirit of setting the mood, I guess.
I arrived obscenely early, partially due to my confusing door time with starting time, and partially due to my chronic need to be prompt. If I have an appointment for 10, I usually show up at 9:30 at the latest. It’s a sickness, I know, and I do the best I can with it.
So it was that I showed up for what turned out to be a 10:00 show at 8:45. This gave me plenty of time to soak up ambiance, and a pint or two to boot. How did I pass the time? Well, as the room filled with various stripes of hipsters and flipsters, I spent a fair amount of time imaging how Pete Bagge or Daniel Clowes would have rendered the scene. Pointless, yet somewhat amusing. This is how my mind works.
Seattle has something of a reputation as being a city of dead audiences. I’ve heard this from more than one source. Frankly, it puzzles me a little. For most of the shows I’ve attended, the house has been pretty enthusiastic. Folks are usually generous to both headliners and openers. Unless, y’know, they outright suck, in which case people will finish their drinks and politely leave. However, I’d have to say that the crowd at the Sunset Saturday night was fairly lackluster. Too busy bein' hip, maybe.
Local band The Valley took the stage first. They were really loud. Umm, sort of a less-sludgey Mudhoney vibe goin’ on. Lotsa volume, lotsa distortion, and I have no idea what the dude was singing about. (I should point out that their vocals didn’t really cut through the high volume noise they were cranking out. This may have been a fault of the guy at the mixing board or it might have been the band themselves. I don’t know. I’m thinking it was the guy at the board, since The Forty-Fives had the same problem.) Guitarist/vocalist Dan Beloit is a big guy, along the lines of, say, Vigilante Carlstroem of The Hives. One of the quirks of the stage at The Sunset is the load-bearing beam that runs directly down stage left, which is where he was set up. Consequently, the tip-top of his brush-cut was continually brushing against a very solid I-beam, a sensation that I personally would find quite constricting, if not in fact unnerving. So perhaps I didn’t see them under the best of circumstances.
Article comments