by: JENNIFER CHANCELLOR World Scene Writer
8/27/2007
With two live bands and a wide-ranging DJ, the ballroom hums with action and the stage is packed.
Friday's Girl Talk show at Cain's Ballroom will likely keep fans talking for months.From the time the first of two local opening acts, Citizen Mundi, took the stage, the energy in the room surged. Three very different acts with three very different sounds drew fans who danced the night through, with world music to rock to top-40 dance mixes.
Even a foot injury -- including a broken bone and a sprained ankle -- couldn't keep Mundi's trombonist, Michael Drummond, from dancing and leading the crowd in handclaps and rhythmic jumping.
The second act, the Congratulations, played a beer-swilling set of punky, funky rock 'n roll, besetting the audience from both sides with its red-shirted and Afro-ed guitar and bass player on either side of the stage -- the lead singer even hopping around like an ape, pulling fans onstage to do the same, then barreling into the audience. At first, the crowd didn't know what to do -- cheer or get out of the way.
Really, that sense of never knowing what would happen next ruled the evening, as Girl Talk's set broke all the rules, and probably a Cain's Ballroom record or two in the process.
As Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, plunked his decrepit laptop on a table on the stage, a guy next to me, commenting on the sparse setup, said: "What's the big deal about this? How boring."
Oh, how quickly he would learn.
The DJ, infamous for his flaunting of the controversial "fair use excuse," would offer samples of more than 100 songs, of genres from every Top 40 category imaginable, providing more than an hour and a half of music.
"Tonight, there are no rules," Gillis said after he walked onstage, dressed in a slightly geeky, Unabomber-esque gray hoodie, matching sweat pants and huge aviator sunglasses.
With that, he started his set. Three people jumped up on the stage, dancing to the music. Several more followed.
Within a minute, the trickle became a torrent as the crowd on the ballroom floor thinned -- several hundred young fans had rushed onto the stage, pumping their fists and dancing to the music, completely swathing Gillis in human heat as they doused each other with streams of confetti.
It's hard to believe there have ever been as many people crammed onto that historic stage as there were Friday night.
As the set progressed, Gillis' wardrobe thinned to a tank top, then to his bare chest. The slight-statured former biomedical engineer from Pittsburgh, who's trained to know how much environmental stress organisms can take, controlled the set -- and the crowd -- playing hits from the Jackson Five to the Beastie Boys to the Ying Yang Twins, and everything in between.
Well, he controlled almost everything.
As to be expected with shows of this nature, toward the end of the set, the music suddenly stopped. Gillis, restarting his computer, said, "I'm amazed this thing's even made it this long," then laughed, saying that someone had hit something on his keyboard.
"I'm getting into this. We'll just start this thing over," he said.
And he did, as the party rolled past midnight.
Jennifer Chancellor 581-8346
jennifer.chancellor@tulsaworld.com
No comments:
Post a Comment