Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing here. Then I leave my living room and go see Ted Leo + Pharmacists play El Rey, and I remember, “Oh, yeah. Right.”
Think I’ll run off and be a Pharmacists groupie. Chris and Dave are totally hot. Picture Pete Townsend, very still, on drums and Harry Shearer in Spinal Tap on bass (’cept without the faux leather and with THE MOST incredible helmet of curly hair. And even stiller! I mean, the guy barely moved the whole show. How did he DO that? He is a god. I worship him.)
Thanks to my mentor in all things Ted Leo, I was very familiar with the music and immensely enjoyed the live renditions of “Me and Mia,” “Counting Down the Hours,” “Biomusicology,” “Shake the Sheets,” “High Party,” and “Ballad of the Sin Eater” (and a bunch of others with titles that escape me).
Preshow entertainment– studying a raunchy make-out session in the doorway to the balcony, speculating on what lies beneath the opening act’s acronym, U.S.E., and critiquing their mess of a presentation, and otherwise yucking it up with some great guys from Burbank.
Then at one point during the show someone yelled out that Hunter S. Thompson was dead…