As it is at any concert featuring a band that has recently been on Total Request Live, the average age of those attending the Simple Plan show couldn't have been over 16, and that's including the small upstairs 21-and-over bar area.
For their third visit to Philadelphia, Broken Social Scene invited their brass section (members of Stars, the night's opening act) on stage for a sultry night of indie rock.
Tami Fertig:
The Magnetic Fields
Get Lost
Lest we forget, Magnetic Fields mastermind Stephin Merritt was making records long before 69 Love Songs. That one was okay, but c'mon.
Dave Scher wishes people would dance at shows like they used to. One half of the duo that makes up California-based All Night Radio, Scher remembers his upbringing in Long Beach, California as a time when people danced at shows.
Lou Reed
Animal Serenade
Warner Brothers
Lou Reed's 5,000th live album, Animal Serenade, shows that the 62-year-old legend can still put on a great show.
Tami Fertig
Q Lazzarus
"Goodbye Horses"
Y'know that scene in The Silence of the Lambs when serial killer Buffalo Bill tucks his crotch between his legs and dances naked to an obscure '80s synth-pop song before sewing a suit made of human skin?
Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of The Walkmen, isn't buying into any of the buzz. To him, the New York rock revival is nothing more than a press creation.
"I don't buy any of that shit," he explains.
Leithauser and bassist Peter Bauer left The Recoys in order to join The Walkmen, a group founded by three former members of Jonathan Fire*Eater -- Walter Martin, Paul Maroon and Matt Barrick.
Fire*Eater was a critical success, and one of many "next big things" to never actually make it in the mainstream.
Michael Franti is 6'6" and thin -- wiry, some might say. Long dreadlocks peek out the front and back of the hat he customarily wears onstage, but they never seem to stay contained.
Various Artists
50 First Dates
Soundtrack
This soundtrack to Adam Sandler's latest movie recruits a number of today's pop, rap and reggae artists in an attempt to put a modern spin on 13 '80s love song classics, but succeeds only in destroying the music of a decade.
Tami Fertig:
Smokey Robinson
Smokey is Motown. Listening to him sing those timeless love songs in that easy-on-the'-ears voice of his, I almost consider paying the $5 billion dollars to see him play live at Trump Plaza --the Atlantic City venue that caters to the octogenarians of New Jersey.
Incubus
A Crow Left of the Murder
At any given Incubus show, a concertgoer could run into a vicious teenage headbanger, a 30-year-old, beer-drinking male and an 11-year-old girl enamored with Brandon Boyd's exposed abs.
Backstage at the Electric Factory, the quintet known as O.A.R., all clad in blue jeans and assorted rock 'n' roll t-shirts, could easily be mistaken for a group of college kids -- the same crowd that makes up the majority of the band's fanbase.
Tami Fertig
East River Pipe
"Times Square Go-Go Boy"
The man behind East River Pipe, F.M. Cornog, has suffered from alcoholism, an emotional breakdown and homelessness -- in New Jersey.
Name: Eric T. Miller
Position: Editor & Publisher of MAGNET Magazine
Recent Cover Stories: B.R.M.C., Interpol, Tom Petty, Wilco, Stephen Malkmus
More information: www.magnetmagazine.com
What Eric Says:
What is MAGNET Magazine?
I always like to describe it to my parents, for instance, as a magazine about a bunch of bands you've never heard of.