Bettie Serveert at Local 506

Went to the show last night. It was good to see them live after all these years, in a room filled quite reasonably with other 40-somethings trying to get their groove back on.

But my god were they loud.  Were all the bands like that back in the dis-ay?  Between being up late and how loud it was, I felt almost like I had been drinking this morning. And how does Carolyn van Dijk or whatever her name is keep her voice when singing over volume like that after all these years?  In fact, it was difficult to determine if she actually had kept her voice, or at least the nuances of it, as they were not on display.

Just as importantly, why were they so loud?  It seems like a young man's game, a phallic need to project narcissistically into space, and certainly the lead guitarist fit the phallic bill, and van Dijk, sadly, played the Narcissus role.  You might have thought they had gotten over it.  We were all there on a weeknight, admittedly, to pretend that we were young. But it certainly was not lost on me that I was pretending.