• Bre, winner of this year’s official Stranger Worst Tattoo Contest, sent Kelly O this photo over the weekend. Looks like the terrifying/erotically confusing “Zophar” is disappearing after just one treatment!
- Zophar, zogood.
• In other exciting style news, Kelly O has the scoop on ladies with colorful armpit hair! The trend was started by Seattle’s Keri Scherbring at Bang Salon. It costs $50, and the sky’s the limit on color choices!
- Will pit perms be next?
- cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com
- The future looks tan.
• I wore my best glitter space pants to see Interstallar at the IMAX on Saturday. After attempting to get As Stoned As Possible before buying tickets, we were told that the movie we thought started in 5 minutes actually started in two and a half hours. Navigating this kind of situation after doing a bunch of weed is my least favorite activity (besides automatic check-out), and ended in the world’s most complicated refund, incessant giggling, and a lecture on the inaccuracies of movie apps and the virtues of checking the OFFICIAL WEBSITE, IDIOT. We then decided the only option was to speed-walk to the Cheesecake Factory GameWorks Theater (or whatever it’s called) to make it to an earlier showing. ALL THIS just to find out I really don’t care for Matthew McConaughey playing the good-ol’-boy-great-dad-distractingly-tan-genius-pilot-and-also-engineer-plus-future-of-humanity role. And I’m not a Hathahater, but three hours of Anne Hathaway is also not ideal. Trippy effects, though, man. We probably should have just killed some time at the psychic-readings hut next to the Denny 7-Eleven (have you seen that thing?) and seen it on the big screen like Paul Constant said.
- Derek Erdman
- The Meat Puppets (probably).
• Sporadic Stranger contributor and notable Sagittarius Derek Erdman went to the Meat Puppets at Neumos on Friday. I interviewed him about it on his birthday, which was Saturday.
Hi Derek, happy birthday and thanks for doing this interview. I only have one question: How were the Meat Puppets in 2014 at Neumos on Friday?
To be honest, I went to the show to see Cass McCombs. I was baffled when I first saw the flyer for this pairing, and stupidly assumed that McCombs would be headlining, as I hardly even knew that the Meat Puppets still existed. I’ll admit that the first Meat Puppets 7″ and first two LPs contain some of the finest music ever recorded, and their early output from there was spotty but interesting, but eventually they fell into that punk-band-going-for-the-alternative-dollars syndrome that happened in the 1990s. Their major-label hit was garbage, and I considered everything else after to be garbage as well. I arrived at Neumos pretty late, and a person smoking outside informed me that McCombs had already played (!?) and the Meat Puppets had been playing for 10 minutes, to what he referred to as “a large group of hairy old people with long ponytails.”
I reluctantly entered, as I was already there, toward the recognizable notes of “Plateau,” made famous by its inclusion on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. At first I was a grump—the vocals didn’t sound the same and I wasn’t ready to witness a watered-down reunion rehash. But then halfway through an added extended jam toward the end, it just fucking hit me. This band was incredibly tight. This wasn’t at all a scraggly batch of sun-bleached Arizona wasteoids, but a punk-country/modern-day-Grateful-Dead hybrid. They reinterpreted their old songs, sometimes 50 percent faster than before, into wild guitar almost-jam-band freak-outs, but in the very best way. By the time they absolutely fucking destroyed “Up on the Sun,” I beelined for the beer line because I was obviously staying for a while. I saw a friend on the way and we both gave each other “holy shit, what are we watching?” faces. They played a bunch of songs that I didn’t recognize, as they were probably from the era that I’d abandoned them, but eventually they wound back to “Lake of Fire.” It was then that I felt like I was in the company of old friends who, after a long time apart from, a short adjustment period might be necessary. Note to Derek Erdman: Live and learn, you fucking idiot.
