ufo live

Sonja M TANNER (smtanner@uci.edu)
Fri, 16 Jun 1995 03:05:02 -0700 (PDT)


just got home from seeing raphael from u.f.o. spin at luna park in l.a.
pardon my reckless use of bandwidth but i really gotta vent. the evening
started out perfect: beautiful weather, an exquisite din-din, rad company
(andy, cami, sam from socal-raves list & some other folks)... then
dorfmeister went on, followed by kruder. both of them spun impeccable
sets but the crowd mostly just stood around facing the stage as if
expecting a live performance. when kruder went on he addressed this,
saying that folks might as well start dancing because there wasn't gonna
ba any live performance but the enthusiasm level from the audience
remained about the same. a couple of numbskulls in front shouted "UFO"
at k & d.

even when raphael did go on, the crowd's energy level stayed slim to
nil. a couple of us were really groovin but it's really hard if not
impossible to avoid getting your energy sapped by such an indifferent
audience. granted, raphael's segues weren't geared as well as they might
have been for the dance floor (for that matter neither are jason
bentley's, for example, but that doesn't seem to affect his audiences)
but the music raphael was spinning was brilliant and any crowd with half
a collective brain would have gone hog-wild over it.

what happened? did kcrw do lots of giveaways to lots of burnt people?
was it an industry-schmooze fest/show? anybody see 'em in san diego last
nite or in san francisco this coming weekend? was the audience as weak
anywhere else? it's amazing how much an audience can effect your enjoyment
of an otherwise stupendous show.

for a while there i was starting to think that l.a. showed some signs of
life but after tonight, maybe i was wrong. i hate to pull a joe babylon
here but maybe the l.a. crowd is burnt. i mean... most of those people at
the show didn't even DESERVE to hear such awesome music. (the old
college-radio musical-elitism resurfaces :))

anyways, i've vented aplenty. but if anyone might know why this happened
please fill me in. (til then, i'll just keep looking forward to moving to
nyc in august.)

by the by, takemura is playing at luna park on the 22nd (that's next thursday.)

okey dokey, that's it.
bye bye

sonja