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Manu Chao and Kinky After missing the baby bullet by a scant twenty seconds, i caught the later Caltrain and made it up to SF and V around 5:30pm. We then drove over to Berkeley, fighting traffic on the 80. We found a parking spot on the street on northside, and i bought Veronica her (amazingly) first Top Dog. She contended she had waited this long to eat one for a reason, but i wolfed down my kielbasa and bratwurst undaunted. We then walked the few blocks to the Greek Theater, and were a bit dismayed to learn we had missed roughly half of openers Kinky's set. We took a spot in the top row of the concrete amphitheater at its extreme left edge, and settled in for the show. I find Kinky a breath of fresh air in the whole "rock en español" genre, in general avoiding traditional hispanic musical influences and instead spinning a techno dance punk pastiche. Apparently we missed my personal favorite "Presidente" from their 2003 album Atlas, but we were treated to a collection of suitably groove-dominated songs, including a smattering from their forthcoming third album. An enjoyable set all around, giving me cause to regret my insistence on getting hot dogs before the show. Manu Chao emerged after an appropriate interval. I'm only familiar with the multilingual laid-back pop song Veronica used to play for me ("Me Gustas Tu"), and was a bit perplexed when the first half hour of the band's set consisted more or less of reggae. Hrm. I was also dismayed by the fact that the frontman (Manu, as i referred to him) and the bass and guitar players had a severely limited array of synchronized movements that they employed on every song. During the chantier parts of their songs, the trio would shout into their mics, then would walk backwards in unison, returning a few bars later to repeat the process. You could also tell when a song was ending because the bassist and guitarist would together walk in front of the mics to the edge of the stage to jam during each song's climax. These antics also pointed out to me how each Manu Chao song follows a fairly standard blueprint. The crowd ate it up with a spoon but i was fairly disinterested, even when the reggae stopped. To add to my annoyance, the frontman spent four or five songs of their set declaring "This is the end!". Twenty minutes later, i was seriously P.O.ed. V was losing interest as well, so we left when two or three minutes into the encore, which i was convinced would run for another half hour. Perhaps if i'd been stoned like the rest of the audience i may have formed a different opinion, but them's the breaks. We headed home to doggie after a brief stop at the relatively new Nation's on University for burgers and chili cheese fries.
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