Josh Rouse, World Cafe Live, 4.6.06

I don't want to take up too much of this review bitching about World Cafe Live, but the truth must be told. Friends, this isn't a great venue. Coming into the thing, I had pretty high expectations about great sound, unobstructed sight lines throughout the place, good food and drink, etc. Turns out it's all a 'Yes, but...'

I walk in, grab my ticket, and sit down at the bar. "Is your ticket for floor seating or bar?" some lady asks. "Uh, floor." "Well then you can't sit at the bar; it's full." I thought that was probably the dumbest thing I'd ever heard (I almost cried; I thought I couldn't order drinks at all), but then I snagged a beer and walked down to the floor. "No alcohol on the floor." "No alcohol on the floor? Ha!" I hated World Cafe Live, and I'd only been there 10 minutes. I downed my beer, went down and parked myself directly in front of the stage, waiting for the bouncer to scold me for sitting on one of the tables up front. People began filing in and I noticed about five floor patrons with beers, so I went back to the bouncer and said, "Didn't you just tell me 'No alcohol on the floor?'" "Yeah, but now it's okay. They come and tell me when it's okay. They could come back any minute and say 'No alcohol' again." Do you see what I'm getting at? World Cafe Live is a bunch of fucking Nazis. Don't ever patronize that place. Stupid rules aside, the sound completely sucked. Josh couldn't hear himself, and the audience (at least in the front) couldn't hear him. Based on the speaker set-up in there, it looked as if no one expected there to be a concert tonight. So fucking lame.

Anyway, shitty venue aside ($24 and I couldn't sit at the bar, or take booze onto the floor [sometimes], and the sound sucked, and the micro brews still cost $4.50), the show was pretty good, I guess, for something I couldn't hear. Opening act Strays Don't Sleep played absurdly simple, unoffensive adult contempo. That sounds much harsher than I mean it to; they weren't bad and they weren't annoying, they were very white bread.








Not The Edge.



The singer hopped down into the crowd to dance with middle-aged chicks. I thought it was funny seeing the crowd struggle to stay away from him, where tomorrow night when Eddie Argos works the crowd he'll nearly get groped to death.






Occasionally I get pissed off at my fellow concert-goers for being too tall or smoking or making dumb non sequiturs about Jack White, and sometimes I feel really happy to be next to some idiot who throws up all over the place, or makes a drunken ass of himself. Tonight was the latter. I was next to this obnoxious drunk frat boy, his insanely hot girlfriend (I'm pretty sure I saw Josh checking her out a couple times), and his friends. It was great. They ended up giving me one of their Miller Lites and we kinda bonded. He kept requesting "Rise" and "Come Back," and I was like, "A Simple Thing!"
"Rise and Come Back!"
"No, no, 'Simple Thing.'"
"God loves ya, dude."
It was really pretty funny. We all shook hands at the end.














This gorgeous, mysterious young lady came onstage for one of the encore songs, and it as so nice until someone threw a fucking beer bottle at her while she walked off. Seriously, what the fuck. I turned around ready to kick someone's skull in, but the culprit never materialized. I fear it was one of my new friends.




Anyway, love fests aside, Josh appeared with a bassist and drummer/back-up vocalist. He played a good mix of songs from Nebraska, 1972, Nashville, and Subtitulo, but (I think) little from Under Cold Blue Stars. Being so close made the venue feel particularly intimate, but Josh mostly avoided audience interaction. "A Simple Thing" would've been nice, but he played a bunch of other older stuff, so I reckon his performance met expectations. World Cafe Live, for all its bells and whistles and proclamations about being the future of music seriously let me down.