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Pinion
Love Is Not Enough
Know What You Are
Terrible Lie
Line Begins To Blur
March Of The Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
The Frail
The Wretched
Closer (neat little inclusion of The Only Time during the breakdown)
Burn
Gave Up
Eraser (with some really strong anti-war imagery)
Right Where It Belongs (also with imagery)
Beside You In Time
The Collector
Wish
Only
Reptile
Suck
Hurt
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like A Hole
No encore. They didn’t need one.
Ithaca Festival, 1996. A young unsuspecting fiften year old boy walks into the horribly-named “Sounds Fine” on the Commons and, on the recommendation of a close online friend, purchases The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. He takes it home and listens to it.
This was the point in his life that his musical tastes would change forever, swinging from – well, let’s be honest here, mostly crap, to industrial rock and a wide range of electronic music. He would obsessively collect every album by Nine Inch Nails, even the obscure (both halves of the Closer single) and the mundane (the Down In It single with a whopping three tracks, all repeated on the Head Like A Hole single). T-shirts were purchased and worn proudly. Bumper stickers were put on cars. Lyrics were memorized.
You get the picture.
Tonight, after nearly ten years of on-again off-again fan-worship and countless money spent, this slightly older, much more cynical twenty-five year old man will walk into Madison Square Garden to finally see the band he’s been obsessing about for all this time.
Excited? You bet your goddamn life I’m excited.
So, tonight was the first of two nights of taping for the next CD from the very funny Eugene Mirman. Here’s the notable bits:
Leo Allen opened with about 15 minutes of material, including a good bit about trying not to eat babies, even when they’re smothered in delicious baby sauce.
Eugene ran through a lot of his recent bits – the Edinburough hand-washing, the Planned Parenthood, a few others – as well as plenty I hadn’t heard before, which is always a bonus. Seeing the same comedians a lot in NYC can lead to recycling of material, so getting fresh material during tapings is always good – my laughs are a little more spontaneous, anyhow.
The thing I’ve grown to really enjoy about Eugene is his ability to stay aware of what’s going on. He chuckles as he goes, obviously enjoying himself. He’s aware when jokes aren’t working, and is able to cut himself off and playfully note that he’ll “fix THAT one for tomorrow night” or taunt “for those of you listening on the CD, you won’t hear this, as I’m cutting it out”. When technical difficulties abound, he can bounce back with some grace.
And boy, did he have to bounce back tonight – when he started one of his closing bits, which involved audio being played from the soundboard, he first managed to get the microphone stand wedged, unable to move with even the mightiest of forces. Then, while the bit was playing, it mysteriously crapped out, with the audio equipment breaking horribly. The solution? To have someone run downstairs and grab his bag from the coat room, bring up his iPod, and play the bit from there, which he had loaded on “just in case”. It ended up being smart thinking, and even with a low battery charge, he was able to get through the bit the second time.
It was a very good time, and hopefully the jokes that fizzled (and there were, sadly, a fair number) will be repaired tomorrow night for a nice full CD of material. Also making things enjoyable was the never-resting Kathryn Yu, who I do not actually disapprove of.
Eugene’s previous CD is, inexplicably, available twice from the iTunes Music Store, and highly recommended. The new CD will be available on SubPop sometime in the near future.