My Life of Brian Moment

Jesse Walker | March 21, 2006

So last night Ray Davies opened his set at the 9:30 Club with "I'm Not Like Everybody Else." He asked the audience to sing along, and suddenly I was surrounded by a choir of fans declaring, in unison, that they aren't like all those other people. I remembered Lou Rollins' description of the libertarian movement: a herd of individualists stampeding towards freedom.

The chorus came around again: I'm not like everybody else... I thought about shouting "I am!," but the joke's been done. Instead I joined in.

Comments

|3.21.06 @ 9:45AM|#

They can call that place the 9:30 Club, but if it doesn't have that 9:30 smell, it's not the 9:30 club.

I could tell where my friends had been from half a block away.

|3.21.06 @ 9:48AM|#

Second time I've seen this irony noted recently. Weird.

Anon

|3.21.06 @ 9:52AM|#

The new 9:30 club used to be the WUST radio hall. WUST had been a gospel station. There used to be a great mural behind the stage showing rural blacks reading the bible and planting crops. The mural made for an interesting juxtaposition to the hardcore punk bands I used to see there (DKs, TSOL and others).
I probably went to 50+ shows at the old 930 club, but I have no nostalgia for the place. It was like seeing a concert in a moldy broom closet.

|3.21.06 @ 9:52AM|#

Sorry, but those joining a crowd of a few hundred seeing Ray Davies are definitely NOT like everybody else.

Warren|3.21.06 @ 10:39AM|#

Cast off the shoe, follow the gourd

|3.21.06 @ 10:43AM|#

I thought the same thing when I saw that commercial during the basketball tournament which uses the song.

|3.21.06 @ 11:13AM|#

What about a crowd singing "One is the loneliest number"?

|3.21.06 @ 11:24AM|#

I saw Smashing Pumpkins at the old 9:30 club just before it closed. It was great show. The old 9:30 was a dump, but I can't help but miss it. I am sucker for history.

My life of Brian moment came in college when I noticed that all of my fellow students who tried to be different from the mainstream of my middle USA state university all dressed exactly the same as if they had been issued uniforms.

Jesse Walker|3.21.06 @ 11:34AM|#

Just a note for the Hit & Run Kinkophiles (I know you're out there): It was a great show. If the tour comes near you, run don't walk to get tickets.

|3.21.06 @ 11:39AM|#

One question Jesse. Did he play Paranoia? I love that song.

|3.21.06 @ 1:22PM|#

If the tour comes near you

Would have been nice to add a link :)

Ray Davies Tour

M.J. Basial|3.21.06 @ 1:29PM|#

I had a similar experience at a Rush concert in the early 1990's, during "Free Will". Thousands of people declaring "I will choose free will" in unison, and me looking around to see if anyone else gets the joke. I always wonder if the musicians are smirking when these things happen.

Jesse Walker|3.21.06 @ 3:19PM|#

John: Do you mean "Destroyer" ("paranoia may destroy ya...") or do you mean "Acute Scizophrenia Paranoia Blues"?

Not that it matters -- he didn't actually play either one. Here's a setlist:

first set:

I'm Not Like Everybody Else
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
Till the End of the Day
After the Fall
20th Century Man
Oklahoma USA
Village Green/Picture Book
Animal Farm
Johnny Thunder
Sunny Afternoon
Dead End Street
Next-Door Neighbour
Creatures of Little Faith
Over My Head
The Tourist
Low Budget

second set:

Stand-Up Comic
Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After)
Long Way from Home
The Getaway (Lonesome Train)
The Hard Way
Tired of Waiting
Set Me Free
All Day and All of the Night

first encore:

Days
You Really Got Me

second encore:

Lola

|3.21.06 @ 3:23PM|#

As a Kinkophile, I second Jesse's recommendation. It was a great show, one to please any Kinks fan--and even make some new ones.

Highlights for me included Ray's dedication of Long Way from Home to his brother Dave and a great performance of 20th Century Man, possibly the most conservative rock song ever written:

You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I'll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough,

Girl we gotta get out of here
We gotta find a solution
I'm a twentieth century man but I don't want to die here.

Jesse Walker|3.21.06 @ 3:54PM|#

Yeah, "20th Century Man" was the show's high point (or the highest of several high points). I've never heard the song rock harder than it did last night. Sometimes it sounded almost punk.

As for the song's politics, don't forget this verse:

I was born in a welfare state, ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants and people dressed in grey
Got no privacy, got no liberty
'Cause the twentieth century people took it all away from me

|3.21.06 @ 4:08PM|#

Thousands of people declaring "I will choose free will" in unison, and me looking around to see if anyone else gets the joke. I always wonder if the musicians are smirking when these things happen.

Probably not. They've probably already grasped that people given free will might nonetheless choose to engage in group activities.

lunchstealer|3.21.06 @ 7:34PM|#

Yeah, Rush is talking more about personal responsibility vs determinism in that one than conformity/iconoclasm.

I have certainly freely chosen to join in such group geek-outs.

|3.22.06 @ 1:46AM|#

Thousands of people declaring "I will choose free will" in unison, and me looking around to see if anyone else gets the joke. I always wonder if the musicians are smirking when these things happen.

I kinda have to throw in and say, yeah, the joke was pretty much on you. ;)

|3.22.06 @ 8:39AM|#

They can call that place the 9:30 Club, but if it doesn't have that 9:30 smell, it's not the 9:30 club.

Yawn. joe, you should've been a baby-boomer. I hear Woodstock was better the first time around, too.

|3.22.06 @ 8:41AM|#

I always wonder if the musicians are smirking when these things happen.

Since you're speaking about Rush, I wonder if the musicians ever smirk that people actually consider them to be musicians. What a wacky world we live in!

Juice Leskinen|3.22.06 @ 8:47AM|#

'Got no privacy, got no liberty...'

Well why don't you get in your time machine and go die in the Libertopia where DaVinci lived. The time travel part might be tricky, but once you get there it should be reasonably easy to die. Try saying something against the Church or the Medicis for example.