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Sarah Tomlinson

Friday Night at the Legion Hall

When the cherry cigar-smoking security guard outside the Legion Hall in Highland Park on Friday night asked if I had ID, I momentarily feared I was going to be deemed too old for the lo fi debauch inside. But the show, which I was invited to by my amazing writerly friend Jen Sincero of “Don’t Sleep with Your Drummer” fame (www.jensincero.com), was a fundraiser for an Internet radio site called Kill Radio, so it was a good mixed crowd (i.e. I clearly wasn’t the only one feeling nostalgic). It’s not that I miss the faint smell of mildew or the crummy house sound, but the sense of possibility, that those in attendance might have stumbled upon a little bit of magic.

In this case, the something special was being thrown down by a local garage rock quartet called Spider Problem. Raw, raucous, and helmed by a frontwoman who actually managed to make rock seem dangerous again, the band played the kind of set that’s truly refreshing — funny, dirty and dangerous. Now that yoga is the new Starbucks, her waterfall back bends were less spectacular than they might have once been (even that most sexy and serpentine of frontmen, Iggy Pop, would probably seem stiff and stilted after the number of people I’ve seen doing yoga at parties; well, this is California), but the overall effect was delightfully demented as she rambled nonsense between songs, wrung a symphony of emotion from her one mighty note, and repeatedly dropped, slid and crumbled to the ground, often taking her guitar player with her.

Spider Problem (http://www.myspace.com/spiderproblem). Wow. Playing at a house party near you.