Super Diamond

Touching You, Touching Me
Showbox, Seattle, WA

It's Saint Patrick's Day, our national drinking holiday. People lean out of cars wearing green headbands, t-shirts, and rapidly-transforming skin color. Even Hawaiian restaurant O'Hana is packed tonight on account of the O'. But really, is there any better place to be than inside the Showbox watching Neil Diamond cover band Super Diamond? I think not. Plus, mama gots a new toy.

The people here are surprisingly attractive despite the garish hues that most everyone sports. It's a pleasant cross-section of fans of Super Diamond and fans of Neil Diamond, which are actually a little bit different. While we're over the irony motivator of liking Neil, the fan-of-cover-band vs. fan-of-actual-singer duality is still lost on some people. I run into Paul Jensen, lead singer of Dudley Manlove. He's been performing a lot of these songs for as long as SuperD has, and I personally think he does them better. I imagine most Dudley fans are here tonight as well.

Now for a few vignettes. (1) Two gals sit on bathroom floor tending to blistered feet and help each other carefully lace up their fantastically pointy shoes. (2) Drunk girl runs full-on into Chip, bounces back against a wall, and slumps to floor. (3) Guy in Guiness shirt dances like crazy, looks over to make oogling eye contact with me and slips on spilled beer, landing hard on his tush.

And then there is Pedro. This awesome guy wears huge sunglasses that at least two other people in this room also have. He's in character all night, slithering up to girls and introducing himself as "Pedro, your Latin lover." After I take his picture he keeps babbling at me about some kind of proposed follow-up, but I can't decipher his fake accent enough to know what he's saying.

A few notable drunk gals make their presence known throughout the evening by stumbling with full force into as many people as possible. The great thing is that they have no qualms about having their photos taken, which pretty much tells you how Girls Gone Wild became so successful. These are happy/tipsy people, and I only see one incident of bouncers marching purposely into the crowd with Spanish Inquisition-type flashlights.

The band stops after a short while, then trots back out for the requisite encore. No one is ready to go home yet, so they'll stand around for the next half hour wondering what to do next. At the end, the lead guy says, "I hope we've brought back some good memories for you tonight." And while he means memories of the actual Neil Diamond, more people here have memories of seeing Super Diamond play at a conference in San Francisco in 1998. And those are good memories too.