Fan Reports

Michele reports from TWO L.A. Shows

Woo-Hoo! Thank You Michele for sending in this report and Photo!

LARGO - June 12, 2006

I attend 2-3 shows at Largo every month and I can honestly say that I’ve never seen such a long line to get into the venue. They had to turn people away because the place was so packed. Word has spread about FoTC somehow. Some people said they’d seen the guys on the HBO special and others heard about their opening for Jon Brion recently. The show began with a few great stand-up comics opening for them, then the guys took the stage.

They said that they hadn’t played for a while and they were going to perform some of their older stuff that we probably hadn’t heard. I recognized some of it from the BBC CDs I’d recently purchased from Audible.com. Such as “Bret, You’ve Got It Going On”, “I’m Not Crying”, and a couple others.

My favorite moment of the night was when they played the “I’m the Pretty Prince” song and Bret was doing some percussion on the top part of his guitar but noticed that his strings were giving off a sound whenever he hit the guitar. So to fix it, he swung his leg over the neck of the guitar in order to stop the strings from doing anything. Then he continued his percussion. Jemaine laughed and made a comment about how it would be much easier if he just turned his guitar over and did percussion that way. Bret said that he needed to be able to easily access the strings for the part he has to play during the song. After which Jemaine demonstrated how quick it would be for Bret to turn his guitar over rather than having to awkwardly swing his leg over the guitar. So Bret decided to go with the turned-over guitar and used the same technique the following night.

They did play the new part-time model/most beautiful girl in the room song which is already a classic. My favorite line is the one where they sing It’s only me and you and seven other dudes on the dance floor (Yeah, I’m missing half the words, but if you’re familiar with it, you’ll know which part I’m talking about.)

At the end, they asked for requests and there were all sorts of them such as Jenny, Albi, Frodo, etc., and they went with Jenny and added some new talking bits going into greater detail on Police Academy. And made some very valid and hilarious points.

UCB - June 13, 2006

When we got to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, the line was already all the way down the street and the owners said they had never seen such a crowd. They actually delayed the start of the show by at least half an hour in order to accommodate the massive crowd. Most of the people waiting for the unreserved seats didn’t get in. We were at the end of the reserved seats line, so we thought we would get really bad seats. But by the time we got in, they didn’t have any seats left so they put the two of us on the stage itself! We were so close to each of the seven or so performers that we could have reached out and touched them without much effort. But we didn’t because that would be rude.

The opening comedian accidentally spilled water on the guys seats and on their mic cords, so throughout the evening, he constantly tried to mop it all up sufficiently as not to electrocute the headliners.

There was hardly enough room for one performer on the stage, so with the two of them, it was really tight. They played four songs..essentially a condensed version of the previous nights set, although they always somehow manage to make each show different. At one point, (it was hard to tell for sure because all I could see was Jemaine right in front of me.. not that I’m complaining) it looked like Bret handed a girl in the audience his guitar because he had nowhere to put it when he didn’t need it during one of their songs.

After this past week, I’m sure the number of Jemaniacs and Bretalyzers has increased!