Vampire Weeknight: As If I Never Left

In the time since my last post, a woman could have conceived and given birth (albeit about four weeks early). But in the last few weeks I keep finding myself saying, “you know, that would be a fun blog topic.” As a result, I’ve decided to give this thing another go. Hopefully it will take this time.

As some of you might know, during my eight-plus month hiatus I turned 29 years old. So did Tracy McGrady. I bring this up because I remember when he was drafted in 1997, my thought at the time was, “holy shit, he’s my age.” Up until that moment, every athlete I had every watched was definitively older than me. And even though McGrady is technically a few months older than I am, he is, for all intents and purposes, my age.

It took a few years, but I finally got used to the fact that a lot of athletes were going to be younger than me, and I have know spent a good portion of my career interviewing and writing about such athletes. It’s no longer a big deal. When it comes to musicians, however, it’s a different story.

This hit me last night when I went with a few friends to go see Vampire Weekend. They are one of those bands that are really popular in certain circles, but totally anonymous in others. For example, among 20-year-old white preppy types in NYC, they’re huge. But I’m guessing no one in Omaha knows who the fuck they are. Incidentally, and this goes back to an earlier post, I just wrote that last sentence before I saw on their Wikipedia page that the founder of “Stuff White People Like” named Vampire Weekend the whitest band ever.

Anyway, as I watched them on stage, I simply could not get over the fact that they are only about 22 or 23 years old. Rock stars are supposed to be people you can kind of worship, and I can’t bring myself to get that worked up about a bunch of semi-hipster Columbia grads six years younger than me. I’ve always been into musicians that are older than me, so this was never really an issue before. Don’t get me wrong, they sounded really good and put on a solid show. But I can’t go nuts for them they way I would at a Springsteen show.

Vampire Weekend still only has one album, so they had 12 songs to play, and that is all they played (plus one cover, which I’ll get to in a minute). At one point the lead singer said, “yeah, we don’t really have any more songs to play. Hopefully the next time we come to New York we’ll have another album and we can give you a real show.” Real show? What the fuck did I just pay $35 for?

Another thing that struck me most about their performance is that they sounded almost exactly like they do on their record. In some ways this is good because I like the way they sound on their record. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have paid $35 to see them. On the flip side, it makes it seem almost pointless if they are just going to sound like the record. In many ways they reminded me of the early Beatles in that they have floppy haircuts, and they play really short pop-sounding guitar songs. It’s like that footage you see of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when they came out and rocked out “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” just like it sounded on 45. The biggest difference—other than The Beatles being legends—is that I’m pretty sure The Beatles didn’t have a string section. And if they did, I’m pretty sure one of them wouldn't have worn a Kevin Dyson Tennessee Titans jersey. That was weird.

The highlight of the show was the encore, when Vampire Weekend covered “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac. What was so great about it is that I have always loved that song, but never knew the freaking title until the lead singer, who sounded remarkably like Stevie Nicks, said it. Who needs Shazam?