We're a Total Failure, or How Guster Rocked Us

Well, shit. This weekend has been kind of a bust for shows Seattlest was supposed to see. Friday night, we were supposed to go see Hillstomp at Conor Byrne. We thought we had seen them, and we thought they rocked our socks. Apparently, we saw Miss Mamie Lavona the Exotic Mulatta and Her White Boy Band.

Last night, we drove on over to West Seattle to the Skylark to check out Mishka Shubaly. This one we blame on our buddy David Lavin and his band X-Ray Eyes. They were supposed to play at 9 PM, after Shubaly's 8 PM set. We knew something was awry when we got an email from David yesterday saying that they weren't going to do the show after all.

We got to the Skylark at 8 PM and sat there for an hour and a half, reading The Stranger's back-to-school guide even though we're 30. No one played a note and we had to get back downtown to rock out with Guster. Dammit.

Thankfully, Guster actually played, and we're totally sure it really was Guster. It's been a while since we went to a real rock show, with lights and everything. Oddly enough, we're the one person in the world who had never even heard of Guster before. All our friends claim to have been huge fans of the band when they were in college. We had no idea what to expect.

With the lights and everything, we got thinking about how when we were a kid, we went to see pop stars like Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston (don't judge), and they always had four or five costume changes. Guster didn't change costumes, but that's the one thing that would've made the show even more stellar. Instead, they brought out one of the Shins to play banjo on a couple of tunes. They got their incredibly dexterous drummer to sing the theme song from Cheers. And then they closed out the night with an all-acoustic rendition of "Jesus on the Radio," aided by the dead silence of the crowd. We needed that. Thank you, Guster.

Here they are doing "Jesus on the Radio" somewhere else, some other time: