Caught the Poison show last night in Madison, WI, with Sara and some friends.  Not a bad show–a decent, albeit strange crowd of blasted out 30 and 40+ year olds reliving their high-school years in the 80’s.  There was more than one real mullet in the crowd.  If I were to rank the music, it would look something like this:

1. Dokken - They rocked!  I was surprised at how good their sound was.  No George Lynch on guitar, but whomever they got to fill his shoes could really tear it up.

2. Guns ‘n Roses playing on the PA - Before Poison played, they played GNR on the sound system.  Yes, this was better than…

3. Poison - They aren’t known for their musicianship, and they proved that tonight.  But they can put on a good show, and everyone was having a good time, so it was fun.

4. Sebastian Bach - He has a good voice, but he didn’t prove it tonight.  His sound was terrible and his band awful.  Thank goodness I missed most of this.

Some pictures from the show, in order of how they played (Sebastian Bach, Dokken and  Poison):

I also shot some videos at the show.  Here’s Poison doing “Talk dirty to me”:

Popularity: 73% [?]

Further showing the power of Twitter, Sara and I were going to the New Pornographers show at the Orpheum last night and my friend Nemolian clued me in that Chris Pirillo of TechTV fame was enroute to Madison to go to the show via this twitter post. A few hours later, we went to the show (which was awesome!) and then met up with Chris and his brother Adam after the gig to do a little bar hopping in Madison.

We ended up to my favorite dive bar in Madison, The Paradise, and surprisingly who walked in but the New Pornographers! (great band, naughty name) We chatted with them for awhile before going off to Paul’s Club, enroute to a failed attempt to get some food.

This is where the night got a little weird as some guy wearing a Jack Daniels bandanna (that he no doubt earned that night) was running around yelling HASTA LASAGNA at people… Tragically, Adam ended up getting his coveted New Pornographer’s setlist stolen! Luckily, we did find it though, but not until after we found some other guy who was bizarrely scribing a white-boy rap song ode to “Paul’s Club” rhyming “Guinness” with “Chemist”… (?!) on the back of the setlist. I guess the setlist is more memorable now at least.

All-in-all a very good night, and a pleasure to meet the New Pornographers. Awesome to hang with Chris Pirillo and his brother Adam who are totally cool, stand-up guys. Look us up if you come back to Madison again!

Popularity: 14% [?]