Red Elvises at The Blue Cafe, May 2001
By Kayt Owens

May 6^th

The Blue Café has a nice dance floor with two handy white columns, one on either side…that way, if someone doesn’t feel like dancing they can stand by or in front of a column and still look cool. There are also lots of nice tables, most with good views of the stage. For a Sunday night, there was a half decent little crowd there, mostly at the tables but some out on the dance floor as well, to watch, drink, dance and generally enjoy a night with Our Favorite Band.

We had the special treat of seeing Avi again for the first time in many months, and everyone was very happy to see him. He got a drink and sat down to enjoy the show, whistling and jokingly yelling for "Free Bird!" at one point. Near the end of the show, Igor invited him up onstage to play a song with them which brought back sweet memories of old times. Things change, people change, times change…the new is sometimes as good as the old, but either way it sure was nice to see Avi and hear him play drums again too.

One of the joys of being a devoted Red Elvises freak is never knowing what they’ll do next or what may happen at their shows. This show started as all their shows do, suddenly and with irresistible danceability. They did all the great songs we would expect to hear at their shows, as well as a relatively new one, a bluesy rock number called Meltdown on which Zhenya sings lead. The Blue Café is a blues club after all, so it fit in very nicely and is a cool song too. It was a funny night, alternating between mostly couples dancing rock ‘n roll and/or swing style and a bevy of people pointing video cameras toward the stage from time to time. Once I looked to my right while dancing and there was a video-shooting squad of at least four people in a row there. That should make some VCRs very happy! It seemed like a bit of short show but it was fabulous as always.

May 20^th:

This show got kicked up into a higher gear mostly by some nice Russian girls (is it some kind of law that Russian girls have to be beautiful as well as great dancers?!) cranking up the energy on the dance floor with their wild happy dancing and inspiring the band to even more fierce and wondrous playing than usual. The crowd was apparently inspired too, there were a lot more people out there shaking it than there had been at the previous Blue Café show.

Some of the songs they played to fuel all the energy and warm red fuzzy atmosphere were, not in order: "Who’s Your Daddy," "Spacecowboy," "San Antone," "Meltdown," "I Wanna See You Belly Dance" (with no girls onstage for a change, on both May 6^th and this night), "Sad Cowboy Song" with the very cool triple drumming effect in the middle (that I can never seem to get a sharp enough picture of!), "Gypsy Heart," "200 Flying Girls," "Lovepipe," "Scorchi Chornie," "Telephone Call From Istanbul," "Girls Gonna Boogie Tonight," "Three Alley Cats" with that cooler than cool change-of-beat rap in the middle, "Closet Disco Dancer" which had pointing disco fingers flying in the air in every direction, and "Romeo and Juliet" for an encore, known and loved for its groovy beat and definitely non-Shakespearean language, or as it may be better known, the "Juliet, ooh ooh, where the f*** are you?" song. If you haven’t heard it, it’s great for singing along, like most Red Elvises songs.

One of the greatest things about Our Favorite Band is that they never let us down in either the musical sense or for a plain old rocking good fun time. This was another great show in the series of home turf area shows they played this month, giving us lotsa fun, lotsa great sounds, lotsa beer (enough for a keg I’m sure although there were no potato chips) and three guys who are not only amazing musicians but pretty terrific people as well.