You'd Better Get It While You Can...

I headed off this evening (okay, techically, last night) to Dante's with Risa, the Irishman and the Architect, along with the Architect's new chick and her friend, to see the best band to come out of Detroit since the MC5: the Dirtbombs. Don't know 'em? Well, I'm not surprised... But you should.

Mick Collins has been kickin' around the Detroit music world since the early 1980s, when he played in the U-Boats and the Floor Tasters, and then fronted the Gories, a band which, it could be strongly argued, set the stage for the emergence of the White Stripes, and for that matter, the rest of the Detroit garage rock scene of recent years. After the demise of the Gories, Collins went on to host a WDET radio show, become a UNIX programmer, produce a record for Andre Williams, collaborate with acts as varied as Alex Chilton and Rocket From the Crypt, and ultimately form the band that rocked Dante's on this fourteenth of May.

Mick and company (and I just have to interject here to say that Ko Shih is the sexiest bass player on Earth - yes, even more so than both Kim Gordon and Kim Deal) came out swingin' this evening. They opened with Leopardman at C&A, off the new record, and settled into a set which favored the old material as much as the new, including a few favorites of mine: Ode to a Black Man, Underdog, Start the Party and Motor City Baby... For their encore, they didn't disappoint, busting out the perennial crowd favorite I Can't Stop Thinking About It. I was expecting them to play their version of Dead Moon's Fire in the Western World at some point (this being Portland and all), but I guess it just wasn't to be. I also would've loved to hear their excellent hispanocentric cover of Stevie Wonder's Livin' for the City... Ah well, next time perhaps. At any rate, it was still a fantastic performance. I'll leave you with some footage from a show they played in Brisbane last week: