Shooter Jennings, June 25th Snoqualmie Casino
After a torturous weekend of listening to a gawdawful Seattle mainstream country radio station I won tickets to Shooter Jenning’s June 25th show at Snoqualmie Casino. (The station giving away the tickets made a big deal about the give away but never played a single Shooter Jennings song all weekend.)
Apparently Shooter’s no longer a solo artist but is the front for a band called Hydropump or Heffalump or something like that. They played a lot of new material from Heffalump. It’s essentially not-quite-southern-rock and was at best forgettable, at worst unintentionally stupid (”Don’t Feed the Animals”).
As musicians the band was tight, as performers they were goofy. A lot of ROCKING-OUT!!! behavior and jumping about which seemed particularly dorky when the music was lacking any genuine energy. It kind of felt like watching a group of guys who’ve played a lot of the video game Rock Band and finally got a chance to play around in front of a live audience. But it was hilarious to see the keyboardist attempt to climb up on his organ, fail, and continue rocking as if he meant to do that.
The crowd was also pretty funny. I had no idea there were people who actually screamed “WOOOOOOOO!!!” while holding up both hands in the horned rock salute. (Or in another variation two bottles of beer. AWESOME!)
I never went to hard rock shows when I was younger and except for a lack of pot smoke in the air and explosions on the stage I imagine the Shooter show is what those shows were like. But it also felt like a Hollywood explosion film: Loud, flashy, and strangely boring.
When the band played “4th of July” pert near the whole audience go up to ROCK (my friends and myself excluded) but the band just stood still while tossing off a purposely lackluster performance of the song, Shooter was almost singing in a monotone.
There was no way after all their jumping about and flashing lights and fog machines and attempted keyboard climbing that this was just the way they happened to do the song. I’ve never seen such a “screw you” attitude from a band. Even a friend who doesn’t know Shooter’s music noticed the band was obviously making a show of how much they hated doing the song.
If you have an almost hit but you hate the song and have an attitude about people liking it then just don’t play the damned song. Or be a friggin artist and do something different with the song.
In Shooter’s case I wish the band had been good sports and gave the people what they wanted for a few minutes, especially after they had patiently sat through his rambling, almost tuneless Hydropump material.