The Walkmen @ The Echoplex

It was kind of like a dream. You know the one where you're in a familiar location—the house you grew up in or a relative's home—and you know the place very well, except there are doors or hallways where they shouldn't be and the whole layout of the place turns into something unexpected.

We went to The Echo last night to see The Walkmen. That showed, paired with The Jesus and Mary Chain show last Thursday, was our substitute for the 100º+ heat and long lines for Coachella, happening out in the desert this weekend.

We tried to time it so we would arrive between the second opening band and The Walkmen. The line was short to get in, and once we did, it was like I was somewhere else. Instead of giving our tickets at the entrance and walking straight into the small open dancefloor near the tiny Echo stage, we swerved to the right, down a stairway I had never seen before, and emerged in this huge space with a ton more people than the normal. Two full-sized bars compared to the single bar upstairs. An actual sound booth for the technicians to work from rather than the DJ platform upstairs. And a much bigger stage than upstairs.

The Echoplex. I had heard rumors of its existence, but for the first time I was seeing it, as if in that dream I mentioned. A band came on and everyone gathered. They had the right number of musicians, but we didn't recognize their first song (and admittedly we haven't been Walkmen fans for very long). Is that them? I looked for clues, like the singer's voice, and how densely the crowd was packed, and things the singer said between songs. We finally decided it wasn't the Walkmen yet, though we really enjoyed the set.

When the Walkmen came on, there was no mistaking the lead singer's voice, which my girlfriend astutely pointed out is a mix of Bob Dylan and early Rod Stewart. We didn't expect them to look the way they did – generally clean cut, healthy and not dangerskinny, wearing Oxford shirts tucked in to jeans and sort of coming off a a displaced group of fraternity brothers.

And yet they rocked. My favorite line was apropos of the evening:

When I used to go out
I'd know everyone I saw
Now I go out alone
If I go out at all

It feels like that now that we're well older than the median age of people at these shows.