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Belle And Sebastian
Hollywood Bowl
Filter Grade: 90%
by Hannah Withers | 01.01.2007

It’s a long ride home.

That is, the bus from the Hollywood Bowl to Pasadena, packed with exhausted strangers, chugging down the highway, and bathed in electric red light from the “Stop Requested” sign because someone thought it would be funny to pull the stop cord. Even though this is a charter bus. That’s a long ride home. Luckily, my mind is somewhere else completely. Perhaps it’s some happy side effect of the complete hypnotism I’d just undergone, but I still fancy myself to be in my cramped wooden seat at the Bowl, shaking my little white butt to some cello-laden boogey. This, my dear reader, is the story of the night that Belle and Sebastian, with their accomplices the LA Philharmonic took over the Hollywood Bowl.

When I say “took over”, I mean just that. I mean nothing short of hypnotism, mind control, a magic act. The 17383 members of the sold-out audience were ready to eat their own shoes if skinny singer Stuart Murdoch had recommended it. The magnitude of this success is comparable to our country’s greatest military victories (remember, back in the revolution?). How else, other than using will-altering techniques, does one convince the enormous Mozart-devouring, gold watch-wearing audience of the Bowl to get up and dance, really shake their asses, to run through the aisles and jump around like children, singing along and hanging off your every word? Just to illustrate the skill necessary here, let’s discuss The Shins. Now, The Shins, openers for said seductive Scottish songsmiths, are a good band, and put on a good show. They played well, and jubilantly, clearly overjoyed to be at the Bowl, and took every opportunity to thank the audience and joke around. It was by every standard a good performance. But, although the audience clearly enjoyed their work, The Shins just didn’t have them. As good as they may have been, they just couldn’t take control. People were still talking, eating their sandwiches, and filing into the venue. They simply didn’t have control.

So, what exactly was it that swaggering Stuart Murdoch, arriving onstage only after the first number, harmonica laden “Fuck This Shit” had finished, did to incite such an enthusiastic and compliant response from his audience? Well, maybe it was the way he spent the entire show expelling the common belief that he’s shy and reclusive by dancing along in a divinely bouncy and energetic manner. Maybe it was how he, in introducing “Lord Anthony” asked the ladies of the audience if any of them had a spare dress to loan him - to get him in the mood for the number - and when no lady had such a dress to offer, pulled a woman from the fifth row to the side of the stage to apply mascara to his eyes.

Maybe it was the way he, during “Jonathan David,” pulled a woman out from the audience who claimed her name was ‘Baby Biatch” to dance with him, and then Stevie Jackson (guitar), and then him again, to represent the woman over whom the two heroes of the song fought over. Maybe how he, during a truly epic version of “Your Cover’s Blown” jumped out into the audience and made a frantic lap around the seats as he gasped the lyrics to the bridge. Or maybe it was the way that the ever infallible LA Phil helped to play “Don’t Leave The Light On, Baby” and “If You’re Feeling Sinister” the way they were meant to be played, harp and all. Then again, it could have been the way each member of the band seemed to fill their own role, each doing their own version of a dance to the same beat.

Whatever it was, by the time the sunny guitar line from “I’m a Cuckoo” issued forth from the speakers, suddenly and frenetically, half the stadium jumped to their feet, and low and behold, began to dance. The younger members of the audience, as usual confined mostly to the farther back, yes, cheaper, seats, ran forward in a childlike frenzy, jumping and doing 180’s in the air, until they reached the front, where they danced together en masse, strangers and friends alike. The Hollywood Bowl, as they say, was on its feet. And it was dancing.

After a particularly lovely version of “Sleep the Clock Around” the orchestra and band alike saw themselves offstage to thunderous applause. Thunderous enough, perhaps, that a blushing band saw themselves back onstage for Murdoch to admit sheepishly, “We’re actually running a little short on time… We need to get you all out of here,” in that high Scottish drawl we all know so well. Without the enormity of the Phil behind them, they proceeded to play “The State I Am In” and finished with a rapturously toe-tapping version of “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” to which the boogying crowd of youngsters in the front all jumped onstage and danced with the band, against security’s firmest wishes. As the huge screen on the side of the stage zoomed in, a piano playing Murdoch proved to be smiling at the kids who’d stolen his stage. No, not smiling. Grinning.

The doors open, the red light flashes off, and I’m back in Pasadena, and all I want to do is get up and dance once more, still under the mind control of some magical Scots.