When: Fri Sept 10
It's always a good sign when you can judge a party by the booze people are swilling. Last Friday, this particular party house in the C.D. was populated by thrifty drunks who spent as little as possible on the stiffest ghetto liquor around. That included the random panhandler who wandered in off the street just before midnight and started hitting up all the other drunks for cash and/or drinks. Cute young rocker types were packing a blend of Black Label (cans, of course, which ended up crushed into many a shoe at the end of the night) and its sister bottom-shelf brew, Pabst; Country Club malt liquor (a brand name so ironic it should come with a line of T-shirts at Urban Outfitters); and bottles of "Two-Buck Chuck"--AKA the discount Charles Shaw wine hawked by the new Trader Joe's at 17th and Madison. Watching people chugging bottles of Merlot like they were 40s was as appetizing as the thought of spending the next morning with a headache like a nail gun rapid-firing in my eye sockets, by the way, but maybe that's just me. The other choice in community party bottles was Popov--a vodka about which one of my companions commented, "People with roofs over their heads don't drink that shit." But he was dead wrong--the young'uns passed the brown-bagged plastic bottle like champagne on New Years. These people clearly weren't opposed to a little post-party damage. The resident of a house party I'd hit the weekend before was jokingly complaining that after her last party, her hot tub looked like a pool of "sex, hair dye, and alcohol. I just saw it and hit drain," she relayed.
The night was tailor-made for recklessness, though. Not only was the giant gray dome of fall slowly capping Seattle (which means we'll all be really depressed really soon, so all the more reason not to drink alone), but the Popular Shapes were about to play their last show ever. One month before the band's singer Nick moves to San Francisco, the beating heart of the Popular Shapes was coming to a sloppy, irregular stop in this Union Street home.
It was still relatively early when the Popular Shapes took the spotlight (the "spotlight" being a single blue-tinted bulb that cast an eerie glow around the carpet-padded walls and egg-crate-foamed ceiling. It took five drunk musicians, by the way, to change that bulb to white when the band needed more light). First the Charming Snakes played a rocket-fueled set of post punk and the propulsive Pulses turned the basement into a sweat lodge despite the desperate hum of a dehumidifier. So it may have been 11:00 p.m. by the time the Popular Shapes stepped up--after their drummer Andrew had successfully crowd-surfed under low ceilings--but the band members were as loaded as basement headliners on the eve of their apocalypse should be.
Nick announced their start by yelling, "How do you make this shit loud?" But as the band started to play, it became clear volume wasn't really the issue. Plugs were. Every time the band members paused, the wall plugs would come out, leading to a half-dozen truncated songs, one (possible) electric shock for the booker who attempted to hold the plugs in place, and the following defiant parting words from the band: "That's it, fuckers. Get out of here."
Luckily those orders were ignored. After all, the house offered plenty of activity. There was the kitchen Scrabble game (which, after the bands finished, had returned to actual words--a change of pace from the previous games that included triple word score gibberish and slang like "sckgrv" and "beeotch"). There was the giant, half-empty jar of mayonnaise. There was getting drunk, of course, and jumping on the sunken couch with the Popular Shapes, the Pulses, and the Intelligence as they pile-drove the space together; there was chanting "USA/free beer," with the bands; and there was the precarious mission of leaving the bathroom. In pure basement-show/party-house style, navigating the bathroom became a sloppy challenge by the end of the night, as the door handle fell off every second or third use. The situation forged friendships between strangers, though, who agreed to look out for one another should someone get locked inside--at which point one of the house's inhabitants would walk by and shrug, "Yeah, well, it happens all the time."
Want The Stranger to crash your house party? E-mail partycrasher@thestranger.com.
