Weeks before the Eels played on the 24th of June, I knew it was going to be a very unique show. For one, no opening act was announced. For two, the show would be a seated affair, although every ticket had ‘general admission’ etched in black. Images of chair slaughter spun through me as I thought about how the Phoenix concert theatre would pull off a sold out show with a couple hundred seats on the floor of the club. Surely someone would be trampled. Surely all the chairs would be stolen. Surely this would be a disaster.
This concert proved just how neurotic I can be sometimes. Not only did every fan shuffle nicely through the aisles of red, plastic fold-ups, but there wasn’t even a rush for the front. I arrived after at least a hundred people, and while the first aisle had been filled, the second was predominantly vacant. People, I suppose, realized that if everyone was sitting then there really would be no bad seat in the house and just sat wherever. Throughout the show, some people began to stand in the aisles, but only during the encore did a crowd of skirts and slacks penetrate the area between the aisles and stage and finally go crazy.
In leu of an opening band, we were treated to a short children’s film about friendship and connection. What gave it charm was it’s adorable little stop-motion characters and the fact that it was subtitled from it’s original Russian (or was it Polish? I am so uneducated.) Judging from the doughy-eyed audience surrounding me, all of them happier to have seen such innocent, adorable behavior on screen, the unique idea was a hit. Even a shameless trailer, plugging Eels’ upcoming tour DVD didn’t phase the audience out of it’s childlike state of euphoria.
The curtain dropped (only halfway, at first; another cute moment in a long set tonight) and sitting also were six band mates; four violinists, one percussionist and one bass. E arrived during a swell of string arrangements, holding a cane and smoking a thick cigar. Beginning with ‘Dust of Ages’, Eels blew through four songs in less than ten minutes. It became clear then that the set would mostly comprise of work from ‘Blinking Lights and Other Revelations’, the new album, which didn’t appear to bother anyone. The new album is stacked with a range of qualities (good to bad, mostly) but E was able to stick to the good stuff, such as the solo-acoustic ‘Railroad Man’.
When he did finally address the crowd (besides his ‘hello, I’m tired because the border cops took all night cavity searching me’ bit) and asked for a request, he calmly dismissed everything; “Don’t like that song. Hate that song. Don’t remember that song. That’s not my song. Okay, come on, can somebody just yell out the song I’m going to play. Nope, not that one either. Yeah, there it is. SoulJacker, by request!”
The most interesting aspect of the night was not how beautifully the string section took to Eels’ material or even how his cynical songs about the loss of every kind of love come across as even more ethereal live, but how the arrangement handled his previous work. With no electric guitar on stage, and no real set of drums (a trash can and a suitcase were Chet’s instruments of choice) the strings had to pick up all the lost slack, and in doing so created not only prettier versions of ‘Souljacker’ and ‘Dirty Mouth’ but a ten minute long haunting version of ‘Novocaine’ that had only the lyrics in common with the original.
The most fun moment of the show came seconds into the first encore. As Eels broke into a tougher version of ‘Hey Man, (Now You’re Really Living)’, everyone who had been standing on the sides of the seating ran forward and began dancing at the front of the stage. It was a moment that showed that having to sit for an entire show does nothing to diminish the excitement we can have for these performances. We’ll listen and enjoy the hell out of seventy minutes of heartbreaking ballads and medleys, but as soon as we’re given something worth dancing for, no set of chairs will hold us back.
