thoughtcrumbs

At the unusually early hour of 6:30 PM, three dozen preppy, professional twenty- and thirtysomethings forewent (we're pretending that's the past-tense of "forego") their last hour or two of Saturday sunlight to watch this cutie guitar virtuoso in the dark and funky Roseland Grill. The ferociously bluesy Shea Seger opened. Then, the twenty-fiveish John, who's been playing Hendrix-style guitar in clubs for a decade, and only switched to the singer-songwriter genre a few years ago, came on with a tight "Why Georgia" for an enthusiastic audience. Other fine points included a rousing "Neon" and the climactic "83" with snippets of Phil Collins, Rockwell, and Michael Jackson.

But the beauty of the concert lay in John's rapport with the audience, and his goofy soliloquies on opening a cap and sunglasses haberdashery for people with large heads, the refrigeration qualities of apples, and how his bass player was picking up chicks in the self-help section of Powell's. At one point, he picked up someone's recorder and chatted into it with his band members, while jamming on a funk riff to obscure his conversation from the audience. His bizarrely endearing puckered faces during electric guitar solos begged a sexual comparison, but here I'll just say that he looked like Tom Everett Scott on lemons. Lit, a rock band performing in the theater upstairs to an overly pierced and obviously predominately fake-ID carrying crowd, began just as John started his encore. Our ceiling throbbed several inches over our worried heads, giving a wild heartbeat to John's closing "Love Song for No One."