Rawkin' at Randall's Island

I know a lot of Strokes fans. Rabid Strokes fans. Only one of them was at the Little Steven's International Garage Rock Festival on Saturday. Just one. It wasn't a Strokes crowd.

Julian, singer of the city's favorite band not named Interpol, who is looking rather puffy these days, was getting heckled by some people behind me. The first time the guy called him a "fat ass" it was pretty funny. After all, Julian's snug black pants left little to the imagination--though the head Stroke left on his jacket in a possibly attempt to cover up a bloated midsection. But by the fourth "fat ass" and the second "have another donut" the joke was old. Damn repeater. Jules didn't hear, and if he heard he wouldn't have cared. The guy was blitzed. Blotto. Staggering over cables and monitors like an ex-sorority girl struggling to get from the velvet rope to the cab without breaking a heel.

The Strokes were tame compared to the NY Dolls before them and the Stooges after them. Iggy's hyperactive strutting and general mayhem played counterpoint to Puffy Julian's inebriated aloofness. Even Mike Watt, over there on the left, was ten times more lively than any Stroke, and Watt's from mellow San Pedro. You'd expect him to be the calm, flat-footed one. The Strokes were damn near shoegazers...but they rocked. Good tunes always win out over dancing around the stage.

Stooges, oh the Stooges. So timeless. The blueprint for decades of rock and roll. A few generations down the line it's been watered down and a few bad mutations have made their way into rock's gene pool, so it was a treasure to see the Stooges show what dangerous music is all about. Yes, dangerous. They have danger. Gimme danger.

Did I mention that the revolving stage broke a few hours into the show and the audience was subject to the worst MC'ing this side of David Faustino. Kim Fowley, who used to matter to somebody of some importance, manned the mic most often. Brutal, just brutal. When he handed the mic over to the loud-mouthed singer for the Paychecks (sic, hehe) is was even worse. Raspy-voiced garage band singer from D-Town in a sleek black dress, that day was her rock and roll prom, I guess, her big coming out party. But what a Courtney Love wannabe. Not musicially, not professionally. She was copping her annoying personality, the idiotic blurting, the drunken sobriety, the is-it-calculated? bitchiness, the fake Tourette's.

On occasion somebody would pass the mic to a go-go dancer. Did I mention that stage was semi-circled by go-go dancers? Yeah. Anyway, these girls had all the great commentary of wasted sophomores screaming into a "Girls Gone Wild" camera at South Padre Island. How many times did were we asked if we were ready to rock, if we were ready to party, if we were having a fucking good time? Then they'd scream something. "Yeeeeah!" "Paaaarty!" "I'm wasted!" You'd have thought we were at a Warrant concert in 1986 by all the brainless party time blather coming from the stage.

At one point, while a go-go dancer was embarassing herself and her family and probably her circle of friends, a friend turned to me and asked, "Doesn't she realize everybody in this crowd were the kids who hated cheerleaders in high school?"

Exactly. Keep the cheerleading off the main stage. Don't tell us that we're gonna get rocked, gonna get rolled and we're gonna have a good time. Just bring out the bands and shut your cake holes.

Another way to waste time while the stage crew set up equipment was to run down all the bands we were about to see. The Detroit Talking Machine did a lot of that. You're gonna see the Strokes. You're gonna see Big Star. You're gonna see the Stooges. Iggy and the Fucking Stooges, man. Iggy. Yeah, we (I'm speaking on behalf of the crowd, now) know. We know who we're hear to see. We've seen the line-up. We know the important of these bands. That's why we're here. We bought tickets, and we probably know more about these bands than you do.

By the way, who was that douche who walked on stage, took the mic from stickman Fowley and said something like, "How come we've gone all day and nobody has mentioned the Velvet Underground?" Yeah! Instant cred for you, dude! So very instant!

If anybody bootlegged the show, I'd love to get a CD of all the between-sets talking. It would make for the worst comedy record of all time.