thoughtcrumbs

Last night's Spearhead concert at the Crystal Ballroom was so full of street cred that even the Gap-adorned squares like me came out feeling cool and ready to attack the establishment. Frontman Michael Franti knows how to keep a weeknight crowd jumping, Nike Air style, for three hours with unselfconscious funk punctuated by plaintive political lullabies. One of the highlights was seeing prolific vocal percussionist Radio bring his newborn onstage in a sling for one of the mellower tunes. Throughout the night, Radio seemed equally comfortable beatboxing and cooing affectionately into the bundle across his chest. Similarly, the band's music ranged from the compellingly frisky Rock the Nation and Stay Human (All the freaky people) to the dreamy Bomb the World ("You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace").

And then there are the smaller details, swirling into the atmospheric gestalt: Franti's t-shirt ("Unfuck the world"), the legendarily bouncy suspended floor at the ballroom, hundreds of frenetic limbs and sweaty torsos possessed with the spirit of Oakland breakdancers, and the joint that the band lit before the encore and passed to everyone in the front row. (Nota bene to my impressionable little brother: I was in the second row.) During the lengthier ballads near the end of the (45 minute!) encore, much of the audience looked groggy and dreading of their ever-impending 6:00 AM alarms. But then Franti would break out in another invigorating jam, interweaving brief covers of Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Bob Marley, and the end result was an exodus of perspiring twenty-somethings ready to fight for social justice. At least after we've had a couple hours of sleep.