I’m working, sporadically, on a post about an offensive bumpersticker I saw the other day. In the meantime, though, here’s an account of one of the great disappointments of my concert-going life: a 1998 Liz Phair show at La Luna. I’m still convinced it may have been an imposter, a clever joke, but mostly that just makes it easier to still enjoy Exile in Guyville and Whip-Smart on occasion.
Doors opened at eight; we got there around 8:30. The show was a sellout, and the intersection outside the club was busy with ticket-seekers. By the time we got to the door a half-dozen people had asked us if we had an extra ticket.
La Luna is a classic example of modern grime. The floor is ancient, boot-scuffed hardwood, like a poor school’s gymnasium. No idea of the building’s history, but it obviously has one. The architecture is early-century, ornate: tall double doors to enter, dark wooden structures. As you enter the main hall, the stage is against the left wall, small but respectable. Room enough, but just barely, for a keyboardist, guitarist, drummer, bassist, and backup singer, with Liz herself out front. In front of the stage is maybe a 50×50 foot square of standing room. Behind that is a narrow entrance to a slightly smaller bar. A security guard sits on a stool and checks IDs, applying an iridescent hand stamp to everyone admitted. Above his head glares a black light, which makes these stamps appear, and bathes everyone in that end of the bar with an eerie purple sheen. Plain white clothing looks particularly cool.
Above the bar is some balcony seating fronted with chainlink fence. The effect upon looking up from the main floor — masses of people jostling in an elevated cage, fingers grasping the mesh — is of a futuristic penal colony, or a Klingon social event. The punk/indie circuit has always been fond of this sort of brutal imagery: cultivated ugliness. It goes with the industrial boots that so many people at the show were wearing. Joseph says the balcony is flat seating and it’s impossible to see unless you’re in the front. Which doesn’t stop dozens of people from climbing up anyway.
The early arrivals staked out patches of the wooden floor, the very first sitting with their backs against the stage, ensuring the equivalent of a front-row seat. There were 30-40 people on the floor when we got there, and spaced liberally enough to allow us to claim a spot front and center, one person from the stage and only a foot or three off the main microphone stand. The best seats of my life, bar none. The downside, we would learn later, was absolutely terrible sound. The main PA speakers where on the sides of the stage, far from us, and we caught only their reflection off the back walls. On the first song, a relatively quiet one, I could hear the unelectrified clacking of Liz’s pick against her strings as well as its amplified result.
The crowd was typical La Luna except heavier on the short-haired 20-year-old girls and lighter on the new-metal grunge boys. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts, or remodeled fifties-housewife dresses (yellow florals, blue-and-white checks), or all black — black tank, black skirt, black boots. A pair of sandals here or there, but otherwise mostly well-worn industrial footwear (the trend’s been around a while); I particularly remember a pair of women’s Doc Martens with a pink and blue flower pattern that had faded to tan leather around the toes; they looked like worn-out linoleum. Three people asked us for a light, two for cigarettes. Several asked for drinks of the ice water we’d gotten from the bar.
Initially we had these two women sitting right behind us, in one of the half-dozen spotlights illuminating a cone of smoky haze and creating an orange circle on the floor. Both women were around 20, thin, dressed like they spent a lot of time at places like La Luna. The one on the left had short bobbed black hair, pale skin, a sharp-looking face, wore a black tank top, a short black skirt, and banged-up black knee-high boots, and carried a hefty black bag. Her companion was slightly rounder, unattractive, wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt, tight enough for the fabric to pull slightly around the buttons when she sat, and dark blue gas station pants, and shorter (but not short) black boots, and had blondish dyed-orange hair, fairly short and heavily moussed but with two heavy strands hanging down like daggers on the sides of her face. They talked the whole time, louder than they needed to, the way people do when they want to be overheard, about themselves. Whether or not they looked trashy or whorish, mostly, and whether or not they cared. (They didn’t.) How little they were interested in looking glamorous. How proudly they guarded their individuality. “Somebody’s going to take them home tonight,” I overheard some guy saying, “and really regret it for a couple of weeks.” At least three other women in our field of view were dressed in pretty much the same black & black & black outfit as the one declaring her fierce individuality.
At 9:30 they started a slide show, shining pictures of Liz and presumably her friends and pets on the white drapes behind the stage. Everyone stood up and got excited, not having seen (as we did coming in) the schedule taped up in the mixing booth that showed this going on for half an hour. Some of the slides looked like the sort you get at a Woolworth’s photo booth: Liz grinning, Liz grimacing, Liz wearing a backwards baseball cap and scowling, Liz and several band members jostling for camera space. Others were publicity shots, album covers, snapshots of Liz and other people wearing silly costumes, bikinis, big Russian fur hats. In several stills Liz appeared to be topless, or at least exposing a nipple, and one showed her full-length and nude, although Joseph laughingly insisted it was a body double. The soundtrack during the slide show played “Lust for Life,” a Violent Femmes song that may have been called “Two of a Kind,” “Little Red Corvette,” that Lyle Lovett song that goes, “It was a private conversation…” The crowd sang along with almost all of this, especially the Prince song. After fifteen minutes or so the slides started to repeat, and a loud, intoxicated young woman behind us started in on a loud, intoxicated explanation of how pissed she was becoming. Another girl kept bellowing, “Hi, Portland!” as if Liz were ready to go and just couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say to start the show. A group of guys behind us passed the time by passing a pipe. In front of Joseph a pleasant-looking, energetic frat boy with a cowlicky blond buzz cut and a light cotton Gap sweater, navy with a lime green stripe around the middle, bobbed and shook his head and sang every word of every song on the soundtrack, just as he would throughout the concert itself.
Liz herself was disappointing, I thought. Having known her only from her records and a few publicity stills, I had an entirely misconceived notion of what she was. What did I expect? A certain amount of guardedness, unpolished, a bit uncomfortable, like “I wrote these really personal songs in my bedroom, with no expectations, and now I’m supposed to perform them in public.” A little coyness, sort of enjoying the interaction but standoffish, too. I don’t know, the stage equivalent of David Foster Wallace maybe?
Anyway, what I didn’t expect was what we got. Liz looked like a society wife: freakishly gleaming white teeth, bony buff physique, her semiexposed stomach rippled with muscle, her blond hair pulled up on one side by a flowered hair clip. Onstage she was polished, and her band was good. But her performance seemed vapid, remarkable only for its frequent, impersonal, unengaging sort of flirtation, the sort of packaged fake sex appeal you expect from a Spice Girl. She wore a shiny sagegreen sleeveless top with spaghetti straps, designed it seemed to show off the outline of her tiny breasts. The shirt was a bit short, showing off a minimum of three inches or so of rigorously toned abdomen. Below she wore a floor-length dark brown skirt, tightly tubular but with a slit up one side to mid-hamstring, and ridiculous platform sandals.
The effect of all this, to me, was a coquettish prettiness as charmless and vacant and unsexy, really, as Barbie’s, or Miss America’s. I had expected more, I don’t know, innuendo? The sexual frankness of Liz’s records always struck me as half-pretend, admitting fantasies, striking poses in a bedroom mirror. But this was charmless and crass, like the topless model turned pop singer Samantha Fox back in the ’80s: sex for sale, but not really.
And making matters worse, Liz totally played into this fantasy role. On the songs she sang without a guitar, she was prone to gratuitous aerobic stretching, slowly bending over, in half, for no reason. The crowd went along, joining her in relishing her body, I suppose, but it all just seemed to stupid. I kept thinking, “This twinkie wrote ‘The Divorce Song’?” And when she, inevitably, sang “Flower,” her famously explicit fantasy from Guyville (“I want to fuck you like a dog/I’ll take you home and make you like it…I’ll fuck you till your dick is blue…I want to be your blow-job queen”), the crowd erupted in by far the loudest cheers of the night. Liz laughed a bit, but made it through like a pro. The real calls all night, though, were for “Fuck and Run,” which along with “The Divorce Song” and “Mesmerizing” is one of my favorites. She finally played it for the encore, and it was good but not great. Not really the house-rocker you’d expect at the end of a show. But then again, this show wasn’t really about kicking out the jams, just moving merchandise.
