Briefly rocking out with The Detroit Cobras

I went to my first show at the 9:30 Club—a longtime DC favorite—last night. The headliner was X, a band in which I, as a person born in the last throes of the Carter administration, have absolutely no interest. However, a sort of retro-style 60s blues riff band called The Detroit Cobras was the opening act. Which is a pretty sweet band name. Pretty sweet band names are currently an obsession of mine as I just finished reading King Dork by Frank Portman. The main character and his stalwart friend in the alphabet have a mostly imaginary band, and they keep changing its name. Some of my favorites are the Chi-mos, Green Sabbath, and Tennis Rackets as Guitars. But nothing beats the author’s band name, the Mr. T Experience.

Anyway, so I’m at the concert, waiting for it to start and drinking my small $6 beer and having deep conversations with my husband about what nerds we were in high school—all in all, a pretty good time. The band finally comes on, and they are pretty fun in a boppy sort of way. Plus, the guitarist looked, as my husband said, “scary, like a girl you could never be sure whether she was going to kiss you or punch you in the face.” She was pretty rough-looking in a super hot kind of way. I was getting in to the music and dancing all around. So were about 5 other people. The rest of the audience? Looked like stone statutes. It was as if when I quickly hit the restroom before the set, Medusa had been the first opening act.

My conclusion? People in D.C. either a) don’t like to have a good time; b) do like to have a good time, but don’t like other people in D.C. to see them having a good time; or c) they really just thought the band sucked. I’m pretty sure it was option b. However, I think the band thought option c was probably it, as they played every song one after another with as little bantering as possible so that they could get their asses off stage and medicate their East Coast induced frostbite with liquor ASAP. So we only got about 30 minutes of music for our $25 tickets. Thanks D.C.!