Published Sunday, May 29, 2011 By amanda_caines. Under Editor : Amanda Caines, Festival Coverage, Show Review, Uncategorized, Writer: Amanda Caines Tags: Amanda Caines, charlotte, Everclear, rock, Speed Street
I admittedly don’t give a racing rat’s ass about NASCAR or the Coca-Cola 600, but I always go out to the Food Lion Speed Street festival and walk past the racing mumbo-jumbo on my way to the free concerts. Over the last three years, the rock stage headliners have gone from disappointing to just downright sad, and this year takes the cake. As a former fan of Everclear’s from my glory days as an angsty teen, I thought I might recognize some songs and enjoy some nostalgia from their three-chord, angry-at-my-dad brand of alternative rock, but I had no idea how tough it would be to recognize my old favorites.
Everclear was meant to headline Speed Street last year, but the rain caused the festival coordinators to call off their set. This year, another substance made many of us wish they’d been rained out again—alcohol. At least that’s all I hope it was. Art Alexakis belted out what should have been familiar tunes with all the articulation of a drunken hobo with Tourette’s. His pitches stumbled all around the notes they aimed at, with his vocal quality akin to a dying pit bull. As I chatted with the members and friends of the previous band, Fusebox Poet, we all wondered during the first couple of songs what the hell was wrong with the guy—was he sick? Drunk? Old and out of practice? Either way, he sounded awful.
Luckily after a couple of train wreck-esque songs, the sound engineer behind the knobs and dials had enough mercy to dial back the volume on the lead vocals and add some serious reverb, making the vocals ambiguously murky instead of, “Wow, that singer’s wasted!” I guess from a band named after pure grain alcohol, I shouldn’t be too surprised. Apparently Art Alexakis fell off the wagon.
Mingling with the other rubberneckers (fans, that is), I started asking some people for their reactions to this sad spectacle. “As a fan of this band, this is just sad,” and, “If I’d paid for tickets to this concert, this is when I’d be asking for my money back,” were pretty much the consensus. Standing there chatting with people about how embarrassed for Art and the band we were, I was amused at the “A-Ha” moment when one fan realized that the murky, unfamiliar song we’d been listening to for at least a minute was “Everything to Everyone.” Yes, it was that bad. People were leaving in disgust.
A similar realization of my own during “Wonderful” gave me a new, ironic picture of the sad-but-peppy tune that has forever ruined that song for me. This is what we should expect from last call at a karaoke bar—not from the man with a major label record contract who wrote the music. I was disappointed, sickened, even. Not only did I leave the show without the normal afterglow of a great, free concert, I left with a knot in my stomach, feeling like I’d just witnessed a bus crash. I hope that next year the festival booking agents will choose a more stable headliner for the rock stage—and I really hope Art Alexakis goes back to rehab before he ruins the legacy of a very popular band.
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