Although we’re avid The Next Great American Band fans, for the last month we haven’t really had a chance to put our votes in. Despite my banal lifestyle, we’ve always had something better to do on Friday night, whether that was rocking out ourselves with Rock Band, or having an actual party to go to.
For instance, last Friday, we put on a white elephant party at Peter’s office. We always have a bunch of regiftable crap that we could never bring ourselves to regift to someone else in our social circle; yet, it’s often too good (i.e. regiftable) that we can’t bring ourselves to just dump it off at the nearest Goodwill. And so, instead of expecting someone else to throw a white elephant party we could bring these things to, we decided to sponsor our own. And this time, instead of a single white elephant to bring, we had three. It turns out we weren’t alone with our excess of white elephantitude: Rags and his girlfriend Christy brought three presents, and Shiaw-Ling brought two. And even so, we ended up with an extra white elephant gift no one admitted to having brought, as well as Mark’s white elephant, which he dumped off for the party, which he didn’t come to. (No worries, Mark, you’ve been regifted with the white elephant no one got stuck with.) There wasn’t a whole lot of stealing going on, since only one item was worth stealing around, but at least we all got new crap to replace the stuff we gave away. Afterwards, everyone rocked out with Rock Band, although I had to leave early so Neil and Kelly could get rested up for the robotics match the next day.
The next day, we watched our recorded episode of The Next Great American Band. It was truly appalling to see Dot Dot Dot go, and Light of Dumb remain. And it was even more insulting to see the child band butcher “We Will Rock You.” C’mon, stadiums full of drunken sports fans can manage to sing that song in unison, and with some passion and emotion, but this band, now on the cusp of getting a major record deal, can’t do it. The rest of the bands: Sixwire, The Clark Brothers, and Denver and the Mile High Orchestra, are certainly tops in musicianship, and depending on their own songwriting (which we finally got a taste off this week), DMHO is a band I might like to see in concert. But the only bands who I can imagine playing at my favorite clubs, like The Fillmore, were Tres Bien and Dot Dot Dot (and–oh, god help me–as an opening act, Rocket). But then, the majority of my fellow concert fans, at most of my favorite concerts, is somewhere in the 20s, and I can think of two or three concerts Peter and I have gone to, which were virtually (or actually) dry, which means the promoters expected mostly teenagers.
But the kinds of people who love concerts are probably out on Friday nights, or at least, like us, partying or rocking out with friends and family. So those who are in to vote in time are those too young to go out, or those who prefer to watch their music on TV. So whichever band wins will probably be a TV-friendly cover band, and frankly, the show was schedule and set up for just such an outcome.