Beta Band
By CRYSTAL K. WIEBE
Updated with photos by Scott Spychalski.
Although packed shows at the Record Bar tend to be uncomfortable, I was super glad that a big crowd turned out for VHS or Beta. I’ve been into the Louisville, Kentucky, hipsters since 2004, when I interviewed them in Omaha for CreemMagazine.com. The profile seems to have disappeared from Creem’s Web site, but I’ll never forget dining with the ultra cool, black-clad VoB crew in a kitschy Bohemian restaurant in Omaha where the waitresses wore traditional Czech-ish costumes and just about every menu item consisted of meat ‘n’ gravy.
I could barely get through any of the ambiguous animal substance on my plate, but the rail-thin rocker boys dug into their dumplings and stuff. Singer Craig Pfunder was thrilled to find out that the diner carried an obscure kind of European liqueur. He ordered us all a round of shots and bought a bottle for the road.
The good time made me feel OK about not having asked very insightful questions. The sizzling set of dance rock that followed made me feel even better.
Singer Craig Pfunder and I reminisced briefly about the bohunk diner last Friday. He and his band were looking skinnier than ever. And their performance was extra fierce.
Unfortunately, it was also short. Some kind of technical hang-up seemed to keep the band from going on at 12:30, prompting the overwhelmingly male crowd to hoot, holler and stomp quite a bit in the interim between VoB and Lights and Siren. Some guy had brought a bus full of his obnoxious friends to the bar for his birthday. Most of them were dressed in '70s leisure suits, and some sported fake mustaches. Clearly their night had been going on for a while. While VoB was setting up, one guy dropped to the floor right next to me, spilling beer on my shoe. Others were drunk and lecherous. By the bar, I had my hand grabbed once by a guy who slurred twice, “What’s your name?”
Once VoB finally started, another dude tried to grind on me from behind. I shoved him as hard as I could into his buddies, and at least one of them kept grinding up on his own date. At least she seemed to want that kind of attention. All of the sexual tension was annoying – it reminded me of the strangers in college who’d rub up against me in a clubby club, as if my being a female dancing made it OK to touch me in a way they wouldn’t in other circumstances. But a certain amount of sex in the air is unavoidable with a synthy band like VHS or Beta, which used to specialize in instrumental French disco. So, I tried to cut the Leisure Suit Patrol a little slack.
During the 35-minute or so set, the band broke out some of that old stuff. At one point, Pfunder addressed the crowd and called up one of the seven or eight people who he said were in the audience the first time VoB played Kansas City. One of them was Ricardo, the Record Bar’s cross-dressing bus boy. Wearing an all-white Santa hat, Ricardo shook it better than the blond chicks who kept finding their way onto the stage all night and rubbing up against the band members.
The rest of the set was an even mix of thumping tracks with vocals from the band’s last two albums. Around 1:15 a.m., Pfunder seemed ready to cool things down. He grabbed an acoustic guitar and was probably about to go into “The Stars Where We Came From” off this year’s stellar Bring on the Comets. But he got the last-song signal from the sound booth and so the band cranked things back up with a song folks had been calling for all evening, “Night On Fire,” the title track off VoB’s 2004 album.
And then we all got rushed out into a night that was most definitely not on fire.
Visit ScottSpy's Flickr for more eye-popping photos.
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