Fountains of Wayne live acoustic show at Milwaukee's Turner Hall – July 11th, 2009Jul 14 '09 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line The night may have started off with Please Don't Rock Me Tonight, but Fountains of Wayne had no intention of following up on that request. Fountains of Wayne have always seemed to be victims of mistaken assumptions from the mainstream media. Back in 2004, the New England based power popsters received a "best new artist" Grammy nomination for their album Welcome Interstate Managers, despite the fact that they already had a loyal fan base built up from their 1996 and 1999 albums (Fountains of Wayne and Utopia Parkway, respectively). This past week, in the lead-up to their Milwaukee concert at Turner Hall, the local newspapers have been touting the show as part of a tour in support of their album Traffic and Weather, despite that album being released more than two years ago and news starting to circulate that the band has a new album in the works for either this year or next. Let the masses have their misconceptions, though. Fans who've been following the band for years know that Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood write some of the finest high energy pop hooks out there. They carry the torch of the power pop and new wave masters of the seventies and eighties, and their shows are always worth seeing. The band may have thrown some of those longtime fans for a loop, though, with the announcement that this current tour would be a series of acoustic performances. After all, this is band whose biggest hits are celebrations of brash electric guitar power chords and flowery synthesizer fills. When we consider, though, that the show was being staged at Turner Hall, one of Milwaukee's newer concert venues and one that's often set up with candle lit tables and chairs rather than the open dance floor that many other local music venues opt for, and when we dig past the well known singles to some of the band's more introspective tunes, an acoustic show doesn't seem like such and out-of-place idea. Of course, all concerts these days need an opening act, and the half-hour opening set from Jon Auer started things off just right. As a founding member of 90's power pop band The Posies, Auer style overlaps greatly with the Fountains of Wayne sound, although his one-man acoustic guitar set leaned more towards his recent solo work. The songs were definitely on the darker, brooding side, but the energy, the sing-along melodies, and the solid power-chord arrangements to the songs kept things firmly grounded in old-school pop territory. Auer played through some of his recent songs, sharing brief stories about their inspiration and even unplugging to jump down into the audience and stroll through the crown for a truly unplugged experience before wrapping things up with a cover of Big Star's Thirteen and The Posies' Burn and Shine, which segued into a brief medley of brooding pop gems All along the Watchtower, Don't Fear the Reaper, California Dreaming, and Stairway to Heaven. Just under thirty minutes after Auer's set, Collingwood and Schlesinger took the stage, along with the rest of the band, Jody Porter and Brian Young on guitar and drums, respectively. Considering that they were indeed playing an acoustic show (well, mostly... Schlesinger had an electric bass, but everything else was acoustic), their opener, Please Don't Rock Me Tonight from their first album, seemed especially fitting. Rock they did, though, squeezing every ounce of energy out of the warm, soft sound of their acoustic guitars. It was a little odd at first to hear the band without their usual snappy synth fills and crunchy feedback, but within moments the whole crowd was rocking out along with them. For an acoustic show, the biggest surprise was the songs that weren't part of the hour long set and twenty minute encore. Hat and Feet, Senator's Daughter, All Kinds of Time, Sick Day - each songs that were mainly acoustic on the original albums and would have fit into the evening's instrumentation, but they were all passed over in favor of the many of the band's faster and louder tunes. Granted, some of the bands gentler songs did make their way into the set list - Hey Julie with a few audience volunteers joining the band to play tambourine and shakers, Hackensack with Jon Auer joining the band to sing and sit in on guitar, Valley Winter Song and Fire Island with Schlesinger moving over to cover piano duties on a baby grand. The most striking songs of the evening, though, were the more brash rock numbers recreated with acoustic guitars. Someone to Love, Bright Future in Sales, Leave the Biker, Survival Car, to name a few, sounded great with their acoustic guitar arrangements. Only Red Dragon Tattoo felt a little flat without the original electric instrumentation. Radiation Vibe stood out as one of the show's highlights, wrapping up the show's main set as it segued into a medley of belovedly chiched retro rock hits including Kansas's Carry on My Wayward Sun, Steve Miller's Jet Airliner, Foreigner's Double Vision, Peaches and Herb's Reunited, and the Cars's Let's Go. Later on in the encore, the band's biggest hit, Stacy's Mom, stood as another of the show's highlights, not because it's such a recognizable hit, but because they band recast the song as a cheesy, downtempo adult contemporary hit. Odd? Yes, but the band was clearly having fun with it, and the audience couldn't help but be sucked in. As a longtime fan of the band, this was a fantastic show to see. While they didn't play absolutely everything I would have wanted to hear, they spread the set list out through all of their albums evenly, pulling out both big hits and deeper cuts. Musically, the band was spot on, but they also kept up plenty of offbeat banter between songs joking about the band's over-abundance of road songs and their big ultra-rockin' television commercial break as part of an L.L. Bean ad, as well as going off on non-sequiter tangents as Ernest Borgnine and the inane lyrics of America's Horse with No Name. We even got to hear A Road Song and The Summer Place off of the band's forthcoming album, which should be out by 2050 if Schlesinger's self-deprecating quip about the band's recording pace is to be believed. Milwaukee was one of the last stops on this leg of the band's tour, but they'll be picking things up again in September. Whether it's an acoustic show or a full electric performance, check them out if the come anywhere near you. The infectious vibe of energy that made melodic pop music from the seventies and eighties so great is alive and well, and nowhere is it better displayed than Fountains of Wayne's live shows. Setlist Please Don't Rock Me Tonight Little Red Light Someone to Love The Summer Place Fire Island Hey Julie A Road Song Red Dragon Tattoo Valley Winter Song I-95 Fire in the Canyon Hackensack Bright Future in Sales Radiation Vibe encore: Leave the Biker Half-a-Woman Cemetery Guns Stacy's Mom Survival Car  |
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