Apologies to Rent Money Big for missing their show last night at O’Leaver’s. I fully intended to come, but figured it might not look too cool to be sitting at the bar with wads of toilet paper sticking out my nose. My allergies are slowly, surely killing me. That said, I soldier on as the weekend approaches, but judging by the looks of things, all the very hot shows will involve a trip to the Star City for a three-day line-up that could rival their annual Lincoln Calling fest next month.

Starting with tonight: Of Montreal takes the stage at Knickerbockers with The Minders. $10, 9 p.m. But waitaminit, that’s not the only hot show of the night. Neva Dinova frontman Jake Bellows is playing at O’Leaver’s with Madison Wisconsin superstar Charlemagne. If you like Neva, you’ll love this band. This will be a big show (look for the guy with toilet paper sticking out of his nose and say hello).

Tomorrow night at Knickerbockers, the return of Ladyhawk with Coke Dares and Spring Gun. Ladyhawk just played at Sokol July 25 and I missed it (out of town). Wish I hadn’t. Their new disc on Jagjaguwar has been burning up my i-Pod for the past few weeks. $8, 9 p.m. Cross town (or more like, across a few streets) in Lincoln Eagle*Seagull is playing at Duffy’s with The Choral Sea and Jumbling Towers. What else? Blood Cow is tearing it up over in CB at a place called Goofy’s (807 S. 21st St.). $5, 9 p.m.

Finally, Sunday night, again in Lincoln at Duffy’s, The Willowz take the stage with Rent Money Big and Wires on Fire. Make the trip down to Husker town this weekend and catch a show. It’s only 50 miles away.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Clicking around the ol’ Internet, found a couple interesting things this morning. Nothing ground-shaking, but noteworthy:

— Here’s one of the first reviews of Cursive’s new Happy Hollow record (at least that I’ve seen) from thespacelab.tv. The writer clearly doesn’t like the CD — saying the songs sound bland, that the horns don’t work, that Kasher has nothing to say — then goes on to give it 3.3 out of 5 stars. Gretta certainly has her fans. We’re all just waiting for that Pitchfork review. What are they waiting for? (And didn’t it seem strange that Pitchfork ran this piece on Film Streams yesterday?).

— Speaking of Cursive, they seemed to be mentioned in a good share of the Lollapalooza coverage, including this piece from Chart Attack that comes with a pic from the show and the line, “Happy Hollow is shaping up to be one of the better albums of 2006.” From everything I read and heard on the tele, Lolla was a huge success. They should just host it in Chicago every year.

— Here’s a long profile of Andy Lemaster that talks about his connection to R.E.M. and reviews the new record and the live show, from The Independent Florida. Now It’s Overhead is a band that’s ready for a live album with lots of “special guests.” This, of course, will never happen, but as I’ve said before, the band is 10 times better live than on their most recent recording.

Tonight at O’Leaver’s, the return of Lincoln’s Rent Money Big. Asked on the Webboard if they changed their name again, “Drew” replied. “Yes, we are R$B. We have a fifth member now. Jim Schroeder, from Mr. 1986, The Show is the Rainbow, Stratosfear, and other such nonsense is playing guitar and synth with us. We are writing new songs with him. He also learned some of our old songs. www.rentmoneyhuge.com has mp3s w/o Jim. He is too lazy to record.” Also on the bill tonight is San Francisco’s Tenebre and A Passing Feeling from Huntington, New York. $5, 10 p.m.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Column 88: The Porn of Indie
On useless terminology

We’re living in the heart of the indie rock world, right? Right? But exactly what does “indie” mean?

From a music standpoint, the term “indie” has become a catch-all phrase, like “alternative” was in the ’90s after Nirvana changed the pop-music landscape. Suddenly bands that weren’t part of the previous era’s music hierarchy (i.e., arena and hair bands) were quickly classified as “alternative.” Even bands with a distinctly traditional rock style, like Counting Crows and Stone Temple Pilots, were considered “alt” though there was nothing alt about them other than their record labels’ marketing wizards understanding that alt was considered cool by the record-buying public.

“Indie” emerged from that alt era as a term that was short-hand for “independent,” as in independent record labels. You were indie if your band wasn’t signed to a major. Didn’t matter what you sounded like. Simple, right?

But lazy critics (myself included) commonly began to use the term “indie” to describe “college” music — stuff played on college radio stations whose play lists are dominated by bands on the College Music Journal (CMJ) charts. Bands tend to get dumped into the classification based on their music’s reference points. For example, if a band sounds like it was influenced by Pavement or The Replacements or Cursive or any band popular on campus not played on commercial radio, it’s likely to be classified as an indie band. If a band sounds like it was influenced by music heard on your local corporate radio station, it’s probably not going to considered indie. The lines became blurred when traditional indie bands, like Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse, got signed to majors and began to be heard on commercial radio yet managed to keep their “indie” status.

It’s not as confusing as it sounds. Like “pornography,” what classifies as “indie” is purely in the ears of the beholder. As our old friend Justice Stewart said about porn: “I know it when I see it.” Same holds true for indie. You know it when you hear it, and everyone’s point of view is different.

But recently indie has started to become a dirty word to bands in the same way “emo” was a few years ago. Other than maybe Jimmy Eat World and The Get Up Kids, no band I’ve ever interviewed embraced the term emo. It meant a lot of things to a lot of people, mostly bad things. Emo quickly became an easy way to throw a back-handed insult. “You like those guys? They’re emo, aren’t they?” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people who don’t like Bright Eyes describe them as “emo” when Oberst’s music in no way resembles emo as I’ve always known it.

Now “indie” is beginning to be treated the same way. Used to be if you were “indie” it meant you were flying outside the common circles. Your music was unique and you weren’t afraid to let your personal voice or point of view be heard. Now the term is just as closely associated with sickly thin guys with bad haircuts wearing youth-medium-sized T-shirts and their girlfriend’s jeans to accentuate their bony frames.

Is indie the new emo? I dropped by O’Leaver’s Sunday night and asked a few bands what they thought. At the bar was Drummer Devon Shirley and vocalist/guitarist Alan Andrews of Denver band The Photo Atlas, a dance punk band in the vein of The Rapture or Radio 4.

Shirley said he’s noticed a tide-shift when it comes to indie among bands he’s encountered on the road. “What’s getting popular now is a revamp of ’70s rock,” he said. “Those bands will tell you they’re not indie, they’re rock ‘n’ roll.”

“I don’t find (the word) insulting at all,” Andrews said. “I like it better than emo. I think it also describes the work ethic needed to make it on your own.”

“Majors are pushing ‘indie’ these days,” Shirley said. “It’s the new pop-punk.”

Steve Micek, frontman of Omaha punk trio The Stay Awake, said that’s the problem. “Indie was stolen by bands on major labels to sell records,” he said. “Now it’s used to describe a brand of shitty pop music. Are The Killers an indie band? No, they’re on a major label, but they’re sold as an indie band.”

“I never liked the term and still don’t know what it means,” added Little Brazil’s Landon Hedges. “The genre was made up by the media. It’s not a genre at all, it’s a lazy term used by people who don’t have a good way to describe a band’s music. I try not to use the term, but I don’t really give a fuck what people call us, even though we’re actually on an indie label (Seattle’s Mt. Fuji Records).”

Ironically, the least “indie” musician I spoke with — Sarah Benck of Sarah Benck and The Robbers — fessed up to the indie moniker. “I guess you could consider my band an indie band since we’re not on a major label,” she said from behind the bar. “We’re an independent band, but you wouldn’t call what I do indie music.” If she had to be categorized as anything, Benck said it would be as a singer/songwriter.

And that’s what it really comes down to with bands — they don’t want to be classified. They want their music to stand on its own, unaffiliated with any style or trend. No band wants to be put in a box, and once you’re in the indie box, it quickly closes in around you and doesn’t let go.

This show actually happened Sunday night down at O’Leaver’s, where I stopped in not only to see the band but to get comments for this week’s column which tries to define what “indie” is and how it’s perceived these days. Look for that column on Thursday (or maybe tomorrow if I don’t have anything else going on).

I showed up just before opener The High IQ’s took the stage. They sounded like a British ’80s pop band fronted by a guy with a mean swagger reminiscent of Psyche Furs’ Richard Butler. The guy standing next to me said they reminded him of Taco. They were fun, though generic, and quite a contrast to The Stay Awake, a punk trio fronted by Steve Micek on guitar and vocals/screams/yells. I’ve talked about The Stay Awake here before, but that was over a year ago. They’ve honed their sound to a razor-sharp point since then. For me, it boils down to bassist Robert Little’s roving bass lines acting as a foundation for Mario Alderfer’s precision drumming and Micek’s guitar shard-riffs, distortion and noise, along with his occasional barked vocal. When they’re at their peak, the sound roars with a hypnotic frenzy and confusion. For my money, they’re one of Omaha’s front-running punk acts.

Tonight at Sokol Underground: The Black Heart Procession with Devics and Castanets. I just listened to “Not Just Words” from their new Touch & Go release The Spell. I figured it would be dark and brooding, but it’s not nearly as grim as I was led to believe by various media accounts. There’s no question that this is a late-night recording, but the chugging rhythms and keyboards are hardly depressing. $12, 9 p.m.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

It was hot, it was smoky, it was sweaty, it was loud. O’Leaver’s looked, sounded and smelt like a rock club last night circa 1995. Appropriate considering the line-up that drew one of the largest crowds I’ve seen down there in a long time. No idea as to who was the main draw, maybe all the bands equally, considering that the crowd was large from the start and stayed even through a fourth, unbilled band.

Now Archimedes! is Bob Thornton‘s trio that includes former members of Fischer, Solid Jackson and Raymond Nothing. As heavy as they were the last time I saw them, they were even heavier and more confident last night. What they do is what I love, which is play a searing brand of ’90s Omaha punk that takes me back to an era of bands like Mousetrap, Culture Fire, Ritual Device, all the usual suspects. And they do it unbelievably well, probably because these are the guys that were part of the group that invented that sound in the first place. I can’t get enough of the extreme distortion, the screeching guitar, the throaty, thick-limbed rhythms, a sound that is brash and painful, raucous, dirty fun.

Their take on punk is so wonderfully dated, that I don’t know how it’ll go over to anyone other than those of us there last night who absolutely thirst for this style and continue to wonder why it never exploded during its original era. I always thought that it was only a matter of time until Mousetrap and Ritual Device and all the others would be featured on the cover of national magazines, but it never happened, probably because people didn’t “get it” back then, and the bands themselves could only do so much with their limited resources. Now I have to scratch my head and wonder if that time is long past, except for the fact that, other than a small circle beyond those at the show last night, few have heard this style of music, and to a new, young generation, it could very well be viewed as being as fresh and new as it was when it first was heard on the stages of The Howard St. Tavern and The Capitol Bar & Grill and The Cog Factory and the various hall shows back in the mid-90s. In this era of prefabricated, overproduced, supersweet pop-punk that the mall youth consider to be daring and rebellious, imagine how a gritty act like Now Archimedes! would go over… Maybe huge, or maybe not at all. Will we get a chance to find out?

Next was the new version of The Bombardment Society, featuring The Monroes’ Lincoln Dickison on bass. How different did they sound? It’s impossible for me to compare the two line-ups as the band was playing all-new material and I haven’t seen Bombardment in over a year at least. That said, Dickison doesn’t just play an incidental rhythm line — he makes his bass as prominent as any guitar in carrying the counters and energy of the songs. It seemed to overpower (in a good way) everything, including the drums which needed to be brought up in the mix in a show of punk one-upmanship. Guitarist Jason Ludwick’s vocals are just as intense as I remember. Providing more of a chopping bark than a melody, it becomes another layer or rhythm in a band that’s already whiplash raw.

The Protoculture continue to get stronger and stronger and tighter and better, playing the same songs every set, but more confidently, more cohesively. Like Now Archimedes! these guys are a throwback to an Omaha sound that thrived in the late ’90s, but taken to another level thanks to blending new (at the time) influences from bands like Lawrence, Kansas’ Zoom (one of my all-time faves). Can they make a run with a modern audience? Time will tell, but wouldn’t it be great? The highlight for me: a flawless version of “My New Laugh” where nothing got broken or lost.

Finally, added to the night’s lineup at the last minute was Sacramento band Brilliant Red Lights, who stayed in town after playing the night before at O’Leaver’s. The trio is centered around their crazy, Animal the Muppet-style drummer — a tall blond guy who thrashes his kit with absolute gusto, a blur of hair, arms and drumsticks. Their sound was all about those drums along with the frenetic bass lines, while the frontman/guitarist/vocalist added mathy guitar lines and punk vocals. The post-hardcore sound was complex and calculated but always willing to jar with a quick u-turn or break-down. Thornton, still in the lovely dress he wore on stage at the beginning of the evening, said they reminded him of long-forgotten Chicago band Trenchmouth, yet another band whose heyday was in the mid-’90s, and whose style hasn’t been heard since — a fitting capper to an evening devoted to making the old new again.

I talked to more people last night who are going to see The Stay Awake along with The Photo Atlas and Hot IQ’s at O’Leaver’s than people going to X, Rollins Band and Riverboat Gamblers at Sokol Auditorium, which isn’t surprising considering the low-rent clientele that O’Leaver’s draws. Both shows are worth their respective ticket prices ($24 for X, $5 for The Stay Awake). You can’t go wrong either way. Me, I’ll probably just stay home and recover from last night…

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

The first time you see a band (or in this case, the first time the band has ever performed in front of an audience) you naturally try to make comparisons to bands you think influenced their sound. Such was the case last night at O’Leaver’s when Coyote Bones celebrated its stage debut in front of a packed house of notorious Omaha music scene Glitterati. Talk about pressure. Are comparisons straight-out-of-the-box fair? No, probably not. So I won’t go into detail about the conversation I had with the guy leaning along the rail next to me about how the lead singer’s pained (in a good way) howl reminded me of a certain blond lead singer of a seminal
’90s grunge band (my cohort thought his howl reminded him of Greg Dulli, and that was right on as well) or how their songs had an essence of ’90s alt-pop rock a la Buffalo Tom and, for me anyway, laid-back Nirvana as in their classic MTV Unplugged album (and a band out of Kansas called Vitreous Humor, who my cohort knew all too well but didn’t recognize in their sound).

No, making a list of comparisons wouldn’t be fair. Instead, let me describe them this way: Coyote Bones had a distinctive Midwestern ’90s indie rock sound that comes from growing up around here, whether the band members did or not. The line-up included a shaggy front man on acoustic guitar, an electric guitar player who also added keyboards to a couple songs, a bass player and drummer. That acoustic guitar, however, was the essence of the ensemble, along with the singer’s tweedy, earthy rasp. Favorite song of the night was a tune titled “39 Forever,” which epitomized a style that mixes that acoustic guitar with a strong, central bass line (again, I’m reminded of that famous acoustic Nirvana set).

One other characteristic that I think was absolutely central and essential: Their songs were all short, only two to three minutes long. No drawn-out solos, no repetitious rhythm orgies, just well-crafted tunes played long enough to get the point across. I can’t tell you how much I dug the fact that their songs were so well-contained and complete.

For the final number, our frontman put down the acoustic and strapped on a bass, while the bass player picked up another electric guitar for a rock song that was tough and sweaty like something right out of the ’70s.

I stayed long enough to see Someday Stories’ take on angular indie rock. Their first two songs had that same 1-2-THREE, da-da-WOMP da-da-WUMP sound that Criteria is known for, in fact the frontman even sort of sounded like Stephen Petersen. The Criteria comparison waned as they continued with a set of very heavy, very indie-sounding rock clearly influenced by bands like Cursive, Fugazi and Archers of Loaf. They were at their best when they strayed from the usual convention and allowed themselves to stretch out, like on their set closer.

I headed home before the touring band took the stage (some of us had to work in the morning). By then, half the crowd had left, too. I guess you could say The Living Blue had been Omaha’d.

So what’s in store for the weekend? The highlight is Saturday night, again at O’Leaver’s, where the lineup includes Now Archimedes!, The Protoculture and Bombardment Society, who are unveiling their sound with new bassist Lincoln Dickison — yes, that Lincoln Dickison, the one in The Monroes. For $5 (and starting at 9:30) this will be SRO.

Sunday night at O’Leaver’s is almost as good, with The Photo Atlas, Hot IQ’s and The Stay Awake. The draw could be hampered by X and Henry Rollins down at Sokol Auditorium.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Column 87: The Kids Aren’t All Right
Omaha’s impotent indie music scene.

I was leaning against the rail at O’Leaver’s as the evening’s show promoter, Joe Vavak a.k.a. Joe Someday a.k.a. Joe Disco, told me about Bob Latham, the talented, clever, story-telling local folkie who had just performed as an opener for touring band Fishboy. Then Joe says to me, “It’s getting harder and harder for me to find bands to open shows here.”

Joe explained his strange, unbelievable predicament. Unbelievable because just a few years ago Omaha had been ordained by the national press as ground zero for the under-the-radar indie music world. Not only were there dozens of local bands scratching to get attention, but bands from beyond our borders were beginning to move here “to exploit the booming music scene.”

And now, here was Joe Vavak/Someday/Disco telling me there were no bands left to play his opening slots at O’Leaver’s. Joe ticked off the reasons and it began to make sense.

The old reliables from just a few years ago were gone. He pointed to Fizzle Like a Flood — Doug Kabourek’s band. Doug quit playing live, having officially retired like so many before him. People get old, people give up. Then there’s all the talent that’s moved away. Denver Dalley a.k.a. Statistics now calls California home, along with film maker/budding rocker Nik Fackler of The Family Radio, Nick White of Tilly and the Wall and Austin Britton of Kite Pilot. They’ve joined all the others who managed to escape Omaha’s comfortable vortex. What about Lincoln bands? Joe says he can’t pay them enough to make it worth their time, what with gas going for more than $3 a gallon.

Finally, there are the success stories. Ladyfinger — now known as Ladyfinger (ne) — has outgrown O’Leaver’s tiny room even if their lead singer still tends bar there. So have Little Brazil, Tilly and the Wall, Neva Dinova, and the rest of the Saddle Creek stable whose shoes have been resized to walk the festival circuit.

Moving on, moving away, moving up — all are inevitable and accepted, until you glance at the empty bench and realize there’s no one waiting to take their place.

Was this just a Joe thing? Nope. Marc Leibowitz, who runs One Percent Productions with Jim Johnson, acknowledged the problem, but said that most medium-sized touring bands that he books at Sokol Underground come to town with their own support. “So there’s not that many shows we can add locals to anyway,” he said. “But in the end, we have the same problem as Joe. Bands are either too big to support all these shows or too small to help the attendance.”

Unlike Joe, Leibowitz said the next generation is out there, somewhere. “We’re getting old and out-of-touch,” he said. “When’s the last time Joe went to any show other than his own? Does he expect to find new bands while in the basement of his house? The same applies to Jim and I. We’re too busy to go scout new bands.”

Scout new bands? Where? That, Joe says, is the crux of the problem.

His simple explanation for the current talent deficit: Omaha is feeling the impact of the void left after The Cog Factory closed its battered doors. For those too young to remember, The Cog Factory was a beloved shit-hole located on the scary side of Leavenworth that acted as an all-purpose incubator for Omaha’s indie rock scene. Back in its ’90s heyday, every Omaha band of merit — including the entire Saddle Creek stable — played at The Cog Factory, usually to crowds that counted in the dozens. It was an all-ages proving ground for bands that had nothing to prove. Cog owner, DIY punk guy Robb Rathe, wasn’t in it for the money. He just wanted a place to see the bands he loved and for his friends’ bands to fall flat on their faces in front of a crowd.

When Rathe moved to Portland in ’98, he took the spirit of the Cog Factory with him. Sure, it hung on for a while, run by those who loved it. But eventually it slid into insolvency, closing its doors five year ago and leaving the kids with no place to play… literally.

So where will the next generation of Omaha indie bands come from? Joe hesitates to say that this could be the end of the line, but pointed out that “there is no all-ages venue that supports young, unknown bands. The Cog Factory took those bands under its wing. I don’t know where they could play today. There’s no place to put on a show that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and where you don’t need connections to get booked. Sokol is too big and O’Leaver’s is over-21.”

But the funny thing is, as Leibowitz pointed out, the building that housed The Cog Factory is vacant and available right now, along with dozens of other vacant shit-holes more than adequate to host the next Cog Factory. Too bad no one’s willing step up.

So don’t bemoan the loss of The Cog Factory — it was only a building. Bemoan the loss of the Robb Rathes of the world, the ones who epitomized the DIY lifestyle, the ones willing to give a kid a hand. And ask yourself what will happen to our scene without them.

There have been — I don’t know — 1.1 million stories written and broadcast within the last 24 hours about the 25th anniversary of MTV, and of those 1.09999 million complained that the channel, which (lest we forget) was created to air television commercials for record companies, was no longer a “music station.” Most of the reports devoted a lot of time to MTV’s current reality-show programming — like the sickening My Super Sweet 16 — and then pondered if it was “the right thing for our kids to be watching.” Even the OWH‘s former music reporter, Christine Laue, did sort of an “overview” story about MTV (here).

In every thing I’ve seen, heard and read, the reporters completely missed what I consider to be MTV’s biggest impact not only on today’s national music scene, but on the Omaha music scene as well. Since there’s nothing else going on today — no music feature to post this week (X ain’t doing interviews, at least not with me), no shows tonight worth pimping — let me explain…

Growing up in Omaha, the only music I heard was whatever records my parents owned (the usual collection of Broadway soundtracks and lounge music, plus my dad’s copy of the Original motion picture soundtrack to the movie Grand Prix (blared as loud as possible on his then-cutting-edge Telefunken stereo system) along with whatever was on Z-92. When we moved to Fort Calhoun and I was in high school, the music of choice came in two flavors — Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd… And, of course, whatever was played on The Z (Van Halen, Journey, REO Speedwagon, you know the drill).

Just like today, Omaha didn’t have a college radio station that played real college (i.e. “underground”) music. You had The Z, Rock 100, Sweet 98 and a boatload of country stations. You could not hear what was going on in the then-infant world of alternative music. The raciest thing I remember hearing on the radio was The Z’s Slats Gannon playing a track or two off U2’s War album, which seemed bold and experimental.

Then along came MTV. It’d been around for years, but no one I knew had cable TV until I was in college. Suddenly all the lousy music you heard on the radio now had pictures to go with it. That awful Jefferson Starship song or the ubiquitous ZZ Top song off Eliminator that Z-92 played into the ground could now be both seen and heard. Who remembers Gina Tomasina? Sure, MTV played videos by a few bands that we (thankfully) hadn’t heard of, like Men Without Hats or The Thompson Twins or Duran Duran, which eventually would cross over to the radio, but that was about it for any breakthroughs. MTV was there for those brain-dead moments, it was something you had on before you went out that night or when you were sitting around your friends’ house drinking beer after class. Completely inconsequential, except for one single program, and I think everyone who reads this blog knows what program I’m thinking of (and no, it wasn’t Yo! MTV Raps).

For two hours every Sunday night, MTV aired a show called 120 Minutes, a program dedicated solely to college music in the early days of indie. For the first time, many of us who had been shielded from that weird alternative music were hearing bands like The Smiths, Joy Division, The Cure, Husker Du, Echo & The Bunnymen, Public Image Ltd, The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Depeche Mode, Aztec Camera, World Party, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, The Alarm, The Connells, Syd Straw, The dB’s, Buffalo Tom, Chapterhouse, The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Galaxie 500, Cocteau Twins, The Sundays, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, Mazzy Star, Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails… the list goes on and on throughout the early ’90s until the Grunge bands brought alternative to the surface.

120 Minutes was the only place to hear this kind of music broadcast in Omaha other than the short-lived cable-only KRCK. Sure, the show skipped over entire genres of underground music (There was no hardcore on 120 Minutes, for example — bands like The Butthole Surfers, Black Flag and other SST acts were too harsh for television or didn’t make videos), but at least it was something. I can say without hesitation that the program had an impact on my current taste in music.

And I can tell you from interviews with a number of local bands that 120 Minutes impacted their taste in music, too. Yes, most of the ’90s-era Omaha musicians became aware of the music that influenced their sound from places like The Antiquarium, Drastic Plastic, The Cog Factory (see tomorrow’s column) and their network of friends, but most of them also watched 120 Minutes every Sunday night. It was a cool show, chock full of cool music and the occasional cool interview by Dave Kendall — I still remember seeing Johnny Rotten complain about The Cure was (“It’s all done in minor key. It’s boring!”).

I have to believe that Omaha wasn’t the only city or town inwhich 120 Minutes was the only avenue for college music. Think about all the indie bands out there now and ask yourself how many of them watched that show. It’s probably more than you think.

Anyway, in its ongoing evolution to become an electonic pile of shit, MTV cancelled 120 Minutes in 2003, but the show still lives on in a different format on MTV2 — the 60-minute-long Subterranean, which I Tivo every week. The sad truth is that, to this day, Subterranean is still the only place to hear real college music in the Omaha area other than Dave Leibowitz’s two hours on The River, which is also broadcast on Sunday nights. It’s sad that we still don’t have a college radio station that plays college music in this town and ironic that Subterranean played Saddle Creek videos years before any radio station in Omaha played them. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

You can read more about 120 Minutes here on the altmusictv.com site.

Post ’em here.>

So the guy next to me turns around during The Go! Team‘s final song last night — while the 300 or so on hand were jumping up and down to the beat with their hands in the air — and he says “I’m proud of Omaha tonight.” Yeah, people actually danced at last night’s show. But really, how could they not? Not only does the Go! Team’s flavor of trip-hop meets indie meets School House Rock good-time music produce involuntary “bounce” spasms, there also was Spice Girl-style front woman Ninja yelling for people to “show their best moves” while she waved her arms like a hip-hop aerobics instructor. The crowd wanted her to like them, and judging by her comment — “Best American crowd evah!” (which I’m sure she says to all the guys) — she did.

Lots of surprised last night:

The turnout, for example. Says Ninja, “We were afraid no one here would know who we were and that we’d be playing to an empty room.”

The music, for another example. While I knew it was going to be different than the records, I didn’t expect it to be as hip-hop heavy (and at times just plain heavy) as it was. Six people constantly changing instruments, including two drum sets, glockenspiel, keyboards, recorder, guitar and bass. I have no idea how the samples — a Go! Team staple — were handled. Some horn samples were programmed into one of the keyboards. But for the most part the sample effects from the recordings were reinterpreted by the instruments.

And finally, the dancing. I warned them that they could be playing in front of a crowd of arm-crossed zombies. That wasn’t the case. The last time I saw that kind of pogo-ing was at a 311 show.

It wasn’t all dance music, though. The band played at least four unreleased songs, and two or three of them were somber instrumentals. The first one sounded like an Arcade Fire offshoot. Another sounded like it came from the motion picture soundtrack to ’70s thriller The Parallax View (the part where Warren Beatty is brain washed — you remember don’t you?). The instrumentals brought the crowd down. But each was followed by another roaring dance number that usually involved Ninja prompting the crowd to yell-spell GO! TEAM or scream “OH Yeah!” which the crowd was more than happy to do.

Tonight, a first for One Percent Production — the As I Lay Dying show that was slated for Sokol Auditorium has been moved downstairs to Sokol Underground due to poor ticket sales. Also on the bill are Black Dahlia Murder, Terror, Evergreen Terrace, Through the Eyes of the Dead and Cellador. The show still starts at 6:30 (it would have to considering the number of bands) and still costs $15. I’m guessing this will now sell out…

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