Album: Famous Graves.
Year: 2014.
There are quite a few scenarios for opening acts:
1) Someone you love. When someone you love opens for someone else you love is the best case scenario, of course. . Last year, when The Hold Steady opened for The Replacements in MInneapolis, it was my favorite pairing since The Clash opening for The Who.
Other notable parings I’ve seen: Van Halen opening for Black Sabbath; the dBs opening for R.E.M.; Robyn Hitchcock opening for R.E.M.; Sonic Youth opening for Neil Young; Sonic Youth opening for R.E.M; Sonic Youth opening for Wilco. Oh, I almost forgot, Sonic Youth opening for Pavement.
2) An Artist you like but don’t know all that well. A couple of years ago, I saw Deerhunter open for The Breeders and it crystallized just how much I liked the Deerhunter albums I’d heard and how I needed to find all of their material. That also happened to me when I saw Spiritualized open for Radiohead.
However, this can go in the other direction. I liked the AC/DC songs I’d heard on the radio, but when I saw them open for Aerosmith back in 1978, I couldn’t stand them, and it soured me on them for years.
3) An Artist you hate. You skip them.
4) An artist you’ve never heard: Ah yes, the dreaded “who the fuck is that?” opening act. Nowadays, no one is truly anonymous – information via YouTube or Spotify is nearly always available – but it wasn’t always thus. So while the most common response is – of course – skipping the opening act, sometimes circumstances require you to listen to an artist you’ve never heard before.
Of course I’m in favor of this, and have enjoyed just about every possible outcome when confronted with an artist I’ve never heard before: from utter and complete hatred– like when I saw Third Eye Blind open for Oasis a short while before “Semi-Charmed Life” was released – to just last year when I saw Cheap Girls open for The Hold Steady and went and bought their album the very next day.
Yes, of course I could have done the research, but I didn’t, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I really enjoyed their set, and in fact, the moment that I knew I was going to buy their album was the moment they did “Knock Me Over.”
You don’t always get to remember the exact moment you fall in love with a song, but in the case of “Knock Me Over” it was about halfway through the song, and I’m pretty sure that I even told Kirk at that moment how much I liked it.
A song about how weak and in pain singer Ian Graham felt after a knee surgery, it has the simplest and catchiest of choruses:
And I let the world just knock me over
I let the world just knock me over
I let the world just knock me over
I let the world just knock me over
Which, of course, derives its power from being both literal and metaphorical. And therefore universal. Like the problem of dealing with the opening act.
Fan-made video for “Knock Me Over”