Copyright The Dallas Morning News
By Andy Langer
08/06/2000
AUSTIN - What price tag can you put on a celebrity sighting that will make great water-cooler conversation Monday?
Apparently, about $400. That's what some Russell Crowe fanatics have paid on eBay and from ticket brokers for the right to say they saw the Gladiator star play the first of three sold-out shows at Stubb's Bar-B-Q.
Mr. Crowe and his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, are in Austin all month recording a new album. Three shows announced in May sold out in just three hours and have become events of international interest. Stubb's co-owner Charles Attal maintains that nearly 90 percent of the original ticket allotment was sold to fans flying in from across the country and as far away as the actor's native New Zealand.
But Friday's gig was primarily for Austinites; 1,700 extra tickets were made available Thursday when Mr. Crowe's camp decided to move the show from the intimate club side of Stubb's to its large outdoor amphitheater.
While the last-minute release of so many $12 tickets may have disappointed fans who paid so much more on the secondary market, it didn't stop diehards from lining up as early as 24 hours before showtime for a chance to stand in the first few rows. Women seemed to outnumber men at least 5-to-1. They wore hats and T-shirts bought from the Web site gruntland.com and used words such as "dreamy" and "scrumptious" to describe Mr. Crowe to television crews and paparazzi.
And what did these superfans get for their dedication, money and effort? Nothing and everything - a simple two-hour gawk at a movie star's rock 'n' roll hobby.
Mr. Crowe opened by asking how many fans had heard a song by 30 Odd Foot of Grunts before. The roaring applause was clearly a disingenuous courtesy - none of the band's three albums has been released by an American record label and the only record store in town to import them says they've been slow sellers.
So what's a 30 Odd Foot of Grunts song sound like? If you've got to ask, you missed the point; the midsong screams from the crowd reinforced that seeing Mr. Crowe wiggle in a tank top was more important then hearing him. That's good news, because 30 Odd Foot of Grunts is about what you'd expect - a folk-rock bar band perhaps better than the Bacon Brothers but not quite as good as Keanu Reeves' Dogstar.
If the band were a Crowe movie, the script would be about personality's failure to triumph over a lack of substance. Mr. Crowe talked more between songs than chatterboxes such as Steve Earle or Lisa Loeb, and while his extended stage raps about Texas heat, Shiner Bock and Crowe family history were charming, they were only temporary diversions from the fact that he's not much of a singer or songwriter.
His voice fell somewhere between Warren Zevon's and Scott Stapp's of Creed, and his songs were equally scattered. Imagine long verses and hackneyed choruses ("Oblique Is My Love," "What's Her Name?") that sound as if they were co-written by a team of John Mellencamp, Richard Marx and John Hiatt.
The band was tight and well-rehearsed, but there was a distinctly mid-'80s vibe to both the stabs at working-class anthems and up-tempo dance numbers. Worse yet, a tune Mr. Crowe asked the crowd to line dance to had little to do with Texans' idea of country - nor did a double-speed cover of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues."
For as awkward as the take on Mr. Cash may have been, the set could have used a few more covers. Two-plus hours of songs few had heard before got old fast. Well more than half the crowd decided it had gotten its $12 worth and exited before the first of two long encores. Nobody yelled, "Bring in the lions," yet few but the eBay-buying diehards seemed overly impressed either.