If you didn't already know that Ryan Miller, Adam Gardner, and Brian Rosenworcel of Guster are Tufts alumni, most of the campus could probably fill you in. For this reason, it may be hard for some Tufts students to realize and accept that the rest of the world does not consider Guster to be a headlining act.
At Thursday's concert at the Providence Civic Center, the band could only play a brief 40-minute set to warm up the crowd in preparation for the Barenaked Ladies. There were, however, a surprising number of actual Guster fans screaming along to each song. Rather than trickling in and ignoring the opening band - the standard tactic at concerts - people had already filled most of the stands by the time Guster started up. Judging by the numerous Guster shirts on fans, it seemed that some of them had come for the opening act and not the headliner at all.
Although Guster was only able to nail the highlights of its playlist in the allotted time slot, they certainly were good notes to hit. For those uninitiated into the band's local fan base, the night served as an excellent introduction to its hallmarks. The three men on stage preserved all the high-low dynamics and expressive emotions found on their recordings. Most of the night's material came off the band's most recent album, 1998's Lost and Gone Forever, including "Barrel of a Gun" and the melancholy epic "Either Way." Guster has had few songs reach the radio, but it did manage to slip in two commercial favorites: the percussive "Airport Song" and the eminently singable closer for the show, "Fa Fa."
In the break before the Barenaked Ladies took the stage at 8:30 p.m., one might have marveled at the age range of the audience. Both BNL and Guster have reputations as "college bands," and much of the crowd certainly fit into that demographic. However, there were numerous people in their thirties or forties, some with toddlers tagging along. Something about BNL's comical, harmless image appeals to a greater range of people than one might expect.
The billowing sheet that had hung behind Guster for the first hour of the show was whisked away, revealing one of BNL's obligatory sets - this one an inflatable, clown-like head reaching to the ceiling of the arena. As always, the stage was full of ramps and video screens, giving the band members both room to dance around and the means to pull various stunts throughout the night.
The band strove to please, hitting the audience with fresh material from Maroon and enough classics to keep them quiet and content. New songs like "Too Little Too Late" and "Falling For the First Time" contained enough of the smiling, confident BNL style to get the crowd jumping, even if few of them seemed to know the words.
Predictable screaming reactions came when the band played radio singles like "Pinch Me," "One Week," and "The Old Apartment," which found sorority girls and inebriated middle-aged women convulsing (or "dancing") in the aisles. With their excellent sense of stage performance and timing, these crowd-pleasers would follow up skits or ballads to get the audience shaking again.
BNL concerts are known not only for their enthusiastic performances and fans, but also for their humor. While one band member took a few minutes for a solo performance onstage, the video screens would show the others sitting around backstage in bathrobes, smoking cigars. A staple of such concerts is the band's "pop medley" routine. In Thursday's concert, BNL covered everything from Britney Spears to Eminem - complete with a quasi-intimidating Ed Robertson in a black stocking cap.
At one point, the band told the crowd that it had something special planned. "Lock the doors," Robertson ordered, "we're going to play every song that we've ever done." The group then launched into a medley of its own music, playing or singing a few lines from songs off of every single album without a single pause or silence.
The evening's most memorable moment came during the band's unending fan-favorite, "If I Had $1000000." During one of the vamps in between verses, Robertson came up to the edge of the stage to talk to a woman in the audience. "You've been singing along into your cell phone all night," he said, and he took it away. Robertson then proceeded - in the middle of the ongoing song - to chat with the woman on the other end, spinning out a story about how her friend had been arrested and her phone confiscated. The audience loved it, in no small part because the woman on the other end could not have had any idea who she was talking to.
Every band gets an encore nowadays, and BNL finished things up with a new song, "Go Home." The audience refused to get the hint, though, and kept pounding the floor and screaming furiously until the band came back out for one last number. The Ladies wound things down with the bitter, plaintive "Call and Answer" and were done, leaving behind the giant inflatable head and an arena full of satisfied people of all ages.
