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Saturday, November 26, 2005

Mallman photos from Chuck


Photo by Chuck Olson

I was out of town for a couple days, so I missed Mallman's Triple Rock show Friday night. Fortunately, Mr. Chuck U. Mentary was onhand and captured some excellent photos with his new camera.

See them in Chuck's Flickr gallery.

If anyone was at the Mallman show and would care to tell me about it, kindly leave a message in the comments. We've got a couple spotters on the east coast who we're sending to see him while he's on tour, and we promise we'll catch up with Mr. Serious ourselves when he returns.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This was my first time seeing the “Mall Man” as he refers to himself… repeatedly i.e. “They call me Mall Man, I’m tall and I’m thin.” This lyric was stuck in my head along with, “I hunt like a man, I grunt like a man” after the show. It was kind of surreal.

Mallman opened the show playing his “ace of crazy” card out of a seemingly less than full deck. “I think it’s about F-ing time we F-ing brought it!” he exclaimed before launching into a song that featured his spooky hyena laugh throughout.

Within the first few songs, Mallman ran offstage mid-song and returned with a chair for guitarist Ryan Smith (Melismatics) to stand on during his guitar solo. Within these first songs Mallman probably stood atop his keyboard 15 times. As the show went on, the antics got sillier and goofier until by the end it was very apparent that Mallman isn’t crazy, he’s just an energetic entertainer. Near the end of the set he referred to himself and the drummer as, “A couple of uncles and dads” and mentioned that entertaining the crowd was “his job.”

The middle of the set featured a slow song with just Mallman and the keyboard. A little ways in, the guitarist did a seamless switch, taking over playing piano. A little later the bass player took over rather clumsily, yet the keyboard playing remained perfect. Then the violins came in and by this time people were laughing or very confused. The drummer “took over” on keys after about a 15 second period where no one was attending to the keyboard (music playing on). I found this very amusing, but during some of the other songs, I was confused as to what was a sample and what was live instrumentation. This bothers me when it gets to the point that you start feeling like the band is singing to a tape, but obviously the Mallman band is no Milli Vanilli.

David said...

Hi Jesse, thanks for this. I've never seen Mallman do that keyboard bit. I didn't even know that clunky thing was programmable. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe the keyboard part was just piped in through the soundboard as part of the gag.

Inquiring minds want to know.