Everclear Rocks Vegas!

Close your eyes and picture the 1990s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was about to destroy the music industry. Glass-Steagal was being overturned and we didn’t even know. The world was a few years from being turned upside down. And, we had this thing called radio, where everyone discovered new music they would come to know, love, and time the memories of their lives to. The music of Everclear in the mid to late nineties was one in a long line of those musical discoveries for me.

In the early winter of 1998, I along with two friends from college at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC escaped the snowy mountains and took a Friday afternoon drive down to Charlotte, NC enjoying Pete’s Wicked Strawberry Ale to see Everclear play Tremont Music Hall in support of their latest album So Much for the Afterglow. It was the night I wore my lime green Johnny Carson branded leisure suit with a black Appalachian State baseball cap with a gold-embroidered “A” on the front. During one of the many epic crowd-surfs I performed that evening, my black baseball cap inevitably was lost in the mayhem. It eventually turned up in the hands of Everclear front-man Art Alexakis. “Look, this hat has an ‘A’ on it….like Art,” he said as he put the hat on his head. He continued; “This one is for the hatless mother f***er that couldn’t find anything else to do on a Friday night other than take his girlfriend to a cheap-a** Everclear show. This one is called “I Will Buy You a New Life.”

Fast-forward 24 years later and I am about to walk into a Las Vegas casino, the M Resort, and watch Everclear play a stop on their 30th-anniversary tour. After all of the years since first hearing “Santa Monica” on the radio in 1995, Alexakis’s lyrics were something with which I personally identified. I think we were a lot alike and had experienced very similar things. This became truly apparent with the single “Wonderful” on Everclear’s 2000 album Songs From an American Movie Part 1: Learning How to Smile. As I walked into the venue, I really wanted to hear that song in the coming evening.

But, first things first. This tour was being opened by The Nixons and Fastball, two other bands that shared high notoriety during Everclear’s height in the nineties. Zac Maloy from The Nixons, over the years, had become one of my personal favorite songwriters I held in the same category as people like Eddie Vedder or Brian Fallon. The anticipation of seeing them was equal to that of Everclear. Anticipation soon gave to lament. Neither opening band was there. There was no explanation as to why. They just weren’t there. It was a bummer.

There was no time to be bummed. The house lights soon went down accompanied by the harmonized Beach Boys-esque intro into “So Much for the Afterglow” filling the room – and all was ok. It, like many Everclear tracks is like a soothing day at the beach at sunset, that escalates into punk rock madness once the sun fades into blackness. It wasn’t until after a few songs into their set with “Everything to Everyone” and “Heroin Girl,” that one truly starts to appreciate how many dime pieces Alexakis has in his back pocket.

Everclear doesn’t have the same personnel lineup as the 90s and early 2000s, however, the band members they had on the stage were truly talented. Most of the time, when an older band needs new members, it looks like they just went to have drinks at the Rainbow on Sunset Strip and found whatever guy was leftover from 80s hair metal with a perm and skinny jeans that looked like he needed a job. This wasn’t the case. Or maybe it was and I was just bamboozled. Nevertheless, they poured song after song into the audience like they had been there since Everclear’s early days with World of Noise and White Trash Hell.

Alexakis dug deep into his catalog, pulling out deep cuts such as “Local God” from the Romeo + Juliet Soundtrack and “Song From an American Movie Part 2” ending with the iconic lyric “sometimes I’m happy just to be alive” in reference to his daughter making him proud to be a father. These deep cuts mixed in with classics such as “Summerland,” “AM Radio,” and “Father of Mine” made this setlist fire in a bottle for a 30th-Anniversary show. Though some of my favorites such as “Sunflowers,” “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” and “Learning How to Smile” were understandably omitted. Being the dark-sided subject matter, they didn’t fit the mood of the room – but man oh man how great would that have been?

The first notes of “Santa Monica” turned the room from a casino concert crowd to a group of thirty and forty-somethings into teenagers again singing along and dancing in the aisles to an anthem of their youth. That is always a beautiful thing to see. And nobody, I mean nobody had more fun than the lady in the pink sweater on the second row. For a band, seeing a fan like that who has transported themselves to a different place and a different time regardless of who is watching makes it all worth it.

Though 60 years old now, it is apparent that Art Alexakis still has the chops to perform – even to a casino crowd that as any musician knows can be hit or miss. It is apparent that he still feels his lyrics to “Wonderful” when it is hard to utter the lyric “I don’t wanna meet your friend, I don’t wanna start over again. I just want my life to be the same just like it used to be. Some days I hate everything – everyone and everything. Please don’t tell me everything is wonderful now.” His still feeling that lyric made it ok for me to still feel it. And that’s what music is. Yes, it is rhythmic emotion but it is also emotions that are shared. It is OK to let them out like wildfire. That is better than anything therapy a doctor could ever provide.

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