A Geezer Takes In A '90S Rock Show: Oasis, A Band With A Beatlesque Bent

Having listened to the band's CD about 50 times in a row while doing some house painting, I figured I'd better go see them in concert. I hadn't been to a rock show in a while.

You know how life can get. Work, commute, buy a pizza, rent a video; work, commute, buy a pizza, rent a video. You get to a certain age, and the Top Albums charts and the artists in them start reading as though they're in some strange foreign language.

But the full-page article in Newsweek, headlined "Next Stop, the Universe . . . Britain's Oasis, having cracked America's top 10, has modest ambitions. The band wants to have it all," couldn't help but catch my attention.

That's how I ended up listening to "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" 50 times in a row. Read the excerpt from the following review by Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times' rock critic, and you can understand why I liked Oasis:

"Don't be surprised if you soon hear a song so Beatlesque on the radio that you wonder how Paul, George and Ringo could have come up with something so good again - even if they were working with an unfinished John Lennon song . . . guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher infuses the best tracks with such craft and uplifting spirit that `Morning Glory' offers a teasing glimpse of what the Beatles might have sounded like in today's musical environment."

Geezers go to a concert

And so there I was, having bought scalped tickets for the sold-out show (at $8 over the listed price). Me, maybe 20 or 30 fellow geezers who read the same Newsweek article, and 5,400 kids whose average age was roughly 15.

"This is ridiculous. I feel like an old person. These kids have barely hit puberty," Jennifer Sumstad, who works at a health-food store, told me. She is 21.

Actually, I was pleased that Oasis' success was due to eighth- and ninth-graders, who have kept the band's CD in the Top 10 for seven months. It meant this wasn't some oldies revival band going on the country-fair circuit.

If you haven't been to rock concerts for a while, what you notice right away is how tightly controlled they are. At the Mercer Arena here, kids were channeled into roped-off lines that went around the block, while speakers blared the rules: They'd be searched for weapons, fireworks, cans, bottles. If they're caught with booze or drugs inside the building, they'd be "ejected immediately."

Clean-cut young men and women wearing uniform blue polo shirts efficiently conducted a "visual search," a "pat-down search" and used metal detectors on the kids. They worked for Crowd Management Services, which has contracts to do everything from rock shows to University of Washington football games.

"The concept of the way we do business has evolved from finding the biggest, beefiest guy, and putting on them a shirt two sizes too small to make them even burlier," Ron Stephens, operations manager, told me. "We've gotten more into the `guest relations' mindset."

The staffer didn't even bother with me. One of the advantages of age is you can loiter all you want in the lobby.

One fab band, without manners

The show: Oasis is a quintet, led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, 23 and 28. One thing they haven't borrowed from the Beatles is that famous Fab Four bouncy manner, or even any manners at all. Mostly, the band stands on stage without moving or saying much.

But the music is there, cranked up in volume to the maximum, a faithful live rendition of what I heard on the CD. The kids didn't seem to mind that there was little movement on stage, except for the strobe and flood lights. I watched the audience around me, and it was transfixed. You remember being 14 or 15, and standing transfixed by the rock band on stage, don't you?

Of the 5,400 at the show, about 600 or 700 crammed themselves in front of the stage. Liam, the lead singer, when he was not singing, stared down at the kids in the mosh pit below, where sporadically, somebody from the audience would be lifted up by the crowd and passed around. With such a young audience, the crowd-control staff said, the kids were still learning the basics of body surfing, like balancing on top of a dozen pairs of hands. Oops, another body surfer took a fall.

Suddenly, after three songs, I strained to hear what Noel Gallagher was telling the audience. It was a thick working-class Manchester accent in which he spoke. Every third word began with "f." A few kids had been throwing stuff on stage, coins or something, and Noel told them to quit or the band was walking off.

That's what Oasis had done a few nights earlier in Vancouver, B.C., after various objects were thrown on stage, including a shoe that hit Liam on the head.

He told the audience, "We're not a bunch of f--- monkeys up here - we're the best rock band in the world!" and Oasis quit the stage.

The Seattle crowd decided it better stop throwing missiles. I wondered how the Beatles would have handled it; maybe a joke, maybe a pleading to the audience.

Not Oasis, a 1990s band. Their songs are so melodic and engaging, that if they combined the tunes with Beatles charm the kids would reject them.

"Kids today are more adult than kids were," said John Thorson, 25, a security guard, whose two favorite groups are the Beatles and Oasis. I know what he was trying to say. In 1996, John and Paul on stage, cutely shaking their Beatle haircuts, would be a joke.

But Oasis makes no excuses for its Beatles influences. As Noel succintly told Newsweek, "Oh, -- it, man."

Tune after catchy tune, Oasis played on. It unapologetically ended the show with the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus."

Afterwards, I watched the crowd being herded to the exits by a phalanx of crowd-controllers.

Hey, kid, what did you think of the show?

"Awesome."

Well, what better review could you have? A new crop of kids, and the music just keeps going.

Erik Lacitis' column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 464-2237. His e-mail address is: elac-new@seatimes.com