Maneater.

Hall and Oates minus Hall plus fat drunkard in front row: The excellent adventures of Paul and Gabe in Gowanus a.k.a  Coming clean about what I did last night.

There is nothing I love more than to walk around underneath a dark deserted overpass in the middle of the night. That is the shit that keeps me young and spry. That said I have to hand it to my dear friend Paul for coming up with the brilliant idea of going to see John Oates unplugged at The Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn. To be fair, John still has his Jerry curls in springy abundance that fall ever so softly around his crow-magnum mug. His soul patch still drives the women wild. Woman is wild, woo hoooman is wild! That’s right, he certainly was driving the man-eaters who were sitting (yes, sitting) in the front row nearly to tears. They begged and prodded for rich girl, they squirmed in delight as he recounted sarah smile, and even when he invited a rando ( bus boy?) to sing the entire song for him as he strummed away on his acoustic ax, they cheered him on. Well, the show wasn’t all bad, the dude to his left also playing the guitar had a MV sticker on his guitar case. Granted he had no idea what I was talking about when I screeched to him “Marthas Vineyard, Yeeaahhhh boy!” from the audience, he still seemed pretty chill. Chill is actually a great adjective to describe what was going on up on stage last night. Oates is probably the chillest dude I have ever seen in real life. Even when a big fat drunk man upstaged him in the front row by lumbering through the chairs of seated patrons muttering his requests for various unidentified song titles, Oates kept his cool. He didn’t even flinch in regards to the man having an even more ridiculous soul patch than the master himself.

Oates talked a lot, he went on and on. As much or more than he sang, in fact. He told us several times of his inspiration for the queued song coming from Philly, being on a bus, seeing a girl, the girl leaving the bus, him missing his chance and so on and so forth. All very interesting, but really Oates, I came to hear Rich Girl and you didn’t deliver. And you know what else Oates? We are in New York City. We don’t really care about Philly, or Colorado. Nope. We like our city, that’s why we are here and not in Atlanta (which you also happen to be so fond of) so please do us a favor and try sticking to the script.

I would like to give a shout out to the guy in the front row. Good one with stick on mustache and the shitty attitude! He was also pissed about the “songs from my new album”. Oates, when has it ever worked out in a shriveled up old timer’s favor to play songs from the new album?  Bob Dylan, Mic Jagger, John Lennon, need I say more?  When in doubt, remember: Nobody came here to hear your new jams.

Wrapping things up here,we did have a good time (after like 5 tecates and a round of SHOTS). The Bell House is a really cool venue and I highly recommend trying it out as long as no shaggy deadbeats from the 80’s are there to meddle with your intentions of having a good ol’ time.

Is this really mean? Whatever.