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Concert Report: Cake, The Flaming Lips, De La Soul, Modest Mouse, The Hackensaw Boys, Kinky

OK, we got their too late to see Kinky, which was a little disappointing to me. I expected more opening bands, I guess, but things seemed to start up right away. We got their in the middle of the Modest Mouse set. It was certainly not the best show I've seen them play - Isaac didn't seem to be getting the guitar parts down too well, although he also seemed to be having some equipment difficulties, so who knows. Maybe I have seen them enough times now that it isn't very exciting. Maybe it was because they still haven't figured out how to play larger venues and make it as entertaining. But they did play neverending math equation, so it couldn't be too bad.

I scampered my way down closer to stage in time to see The Hackensaw Boys, who were playing in between some of the sets. They played a bluegrass kind of music, which was actually pretty fun to listen to even though it isn't my favorite kind of music. They may have had some of the best musicians out of any of the bands, I think - their percussionist was doing some crazy stuff on the weird one-man-band setup he had.

Next up was De La Soul, who were really funny, since I think the primarily white college-aged kids from Berkeley are not their usual audience. They had a lot of fun instructing the audience what to do, though, and it seems like it would be really fun to be on stage telling thousands of people what to do and have them actually do it. Their music wasn't the most exciting thing on the planet - how many songs about themselves and parties and "party people" can they have? - but they kept the crowd involved and did a good job. They also had a guest rapper, Black Sheep, that livened things up for a while.

Next up was a lot of stage hands setting up the Flaming Lips stage show, which was easily the craziest of the evening. They had a large screen, four disco balls on stage with light reflecting up onto the screen, smoke machines, and four guys in mascot-like costumes (a frog, a bear, some weird pink thing? who knows what they were) dancing around with flashlights. They also kicked large balloons filled with confetti out into the crowd, and the lead singer would toss confetti out by the handful. All of this served extremely well to keep me entertained since their music alone isn't really my thing. How a band that sings about robots can not be my thing I still do not understand. During one of the robot songs they played clips from some Japanese TV show (I would guess) with schoolgirls poisoning someone and then getting into a bloody gun battle. Very interesting!

Finally it was time for Cake. No crazy stage show here, just the music to keep the crowd entertained. And it worked! Lots of singing along parts but not much crowd banter overall. They played just about all of their classic songs, along with some obscure ones I didn't know ("Jesus wrote a blank check", although looking back I see it is on their early album, which I thought I had listened to once or twice...). But they played "Stickshifts and Safetybelts", so it was ok. They didn't play "I will survive" but they did cover Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", which I recognized but couldn't place at the time. Crazy!

Overall, it was a nice show, and the Greek Theater in Berkeley is a nice place to see a show. I would have built it turned around so the sun didn't set behind the stage, but they did a great job making it layered so lots of people could see the stage. The cement stuff it is made of also does a good job retaining the heat from the sun, which I did appreciate when I went back up to the seats for Cake's set. I'm still not a huge fan of the big venues like that, though, since it feels like you are so separated from the performers, even if you move close to the stage. It is a little too much like watching something on TV, only slightly more interactive. And with crazier people running around, I guess, which is pretty good to encounter once in a while.