last night's gig

LCD Soundsystem’s Secret Sauce: Champagne and Whiskey

“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re here. The bad news is that I’m wasted.” Best way to start a show, or only way to start a show? Yeah, last night’s LCD Soundsystem gig — a surprise appearance at the Music Hall of Williamsburg announced late Tuesday — was a monster from any angle: James Murphy’s gleeful, staggering front-man bit was ever the delight and the perfect complement to his band’s militant chess-master, laser-focused grooves. The sound was massive; the crowd beyond keyed-up. The walloping “All My Friends” alone reaffirmed our faith in blah blah blah. And that stage banter! Oh, what wonderful stage banter.

Murphy unconvincingly claimed that “this isn’t really a show. It’s just us learning how to be a band again after a long time off. This is the longest we haven’t played since we first started playing.” (He must have repeated that last bit five or six times, and we still don’t quite understand what it means.) He introduced the guitarist, Dave Stone, another half a dozen times, pointing out he played with “Melvins … I’m not saying ‘the’ Melvins because I know that there isn’t a ‘the’ in the name.” Also, Murphy’s 40 now, so every show he remembers had Fishbone open? Keyboardist Nancy Whang got in on the action, too, telling rowdy dudes in the front to “look two people to your left, then two people to your right … if you don’t see a girl, you’re dancing wrong.”

But our favorite bit came when Murphy motioned to a lackey hanging on the stairs by the side of the stage amid the rest of the Wu-Tang–size posse to “get me a drink. You know how to make my drink?” Eventually, Murphy revealed the contents of his “drink,” a brownish liquid he was swigging from a Poland Spring bottle: “Champange and whiskey … the Champagne gets you drunk fast, and it’s like a guide for how the whiskey will make you feel in twenty minutes.” And as disgusting as that sounds, we now must try it.

LCD Soundsystem’s Secret Sauce: Champagne and Whiskey