I went to a rock & roll show Saturday night and since I didn't do much else this weekend except lay in the sun and complain here is what I thought of it.

Tom Gorman used to be in Belly and he was all like "I was in an alt-rock band and we had one hit and now I'm taking my acoustic singer-songwriter act on the road" and I didn't even want to dignify that with a response so I sat at the bar and drank.

The Mooney Suzuki were a "rock band" in that they "stole" all their "riffs" from "better" "songs" and I really didn't think you could make the idea of the Make-Up even worse but YEAH! The singer was wearing sunglasses because he couldn't stop winking at the audience and it's a shame they don't have a keyboard player as I'm sure they're missing out on a lot of very lucrative mall and specialty restaurant openings in Bergen County.

I coined a new term for the guys I always see at shows: "turtles." You know what I'm talking about, the skinny, watery guys with the shag hair going down their neck in the perfect bowl, they always have their head tilted back and their mouths open. There were a lot of turtles there.

As I was waiting I also coined another phrase: "lonely neck." That's when you crane your neck around looking for people you know so much that it hurts at the end of the evening. I used this phrase to make new friends.

Then this asian cowgirl woman came on and sang some songs but I didn't catch her name because she had a very weird way of enunciating. She had a really pretty voice but her songs were way too long and her guitar playing was way too remedial and she was drowned out by the crowd's hubbub. She only played three songs.

Then the Beachwood Sparks played and it was pretty great except the vocals were all distorted and when you're singing the pretty-boy high-voice it doesn't do you any good to have a soundman who just wants to get home to heroin and Judge Judy. They played all their songs and then they played "Wake Up, Little Suzy" and for a brief moment I wasn't a fat kid wearing a nice shirt in a room full of people who didn't care whether I lived or died, I had been magically transported back in time to the invention of rock & roll and to the invention of beer, two events which I believe occured concomittantly. But a moment's just a moment, and then they stopped playing and I went home.