Jail Weddings at the Silver Lake Jubilee Saturday, May 21, 2011
Jail Weddings were playing on the Santa Monica stage around 6pm at the Silver Lake Jubilee, and I did not want to miss another one of their dramatic performances… Having already seen them I knew what to expect, and it is always a lot of fun to look at the drunk dancing moves of frontman Gabriel Hart. Nobody seemed disappointed…
Yes it is over the top, and that’s the point! The band’s fabulous catchy songs with their layered vocal harmonies, Roy Orbison-esque country-doo-wop-pop melodies and epic delivery are definite crowd pleasers.
It’s a large ensemble, they are 10 on stage but the eyes of the audience were especially concentrated on Hart who never stopped moving, acting like a drama queen or a manic preacher… preacher may have been the appropriate word, as he made an allusion to the rapture which was supposed to happen just before their set, and described a scene he had witnessed the day before, in a nearby church full of people mourning and crying,… insane!
He dedicated the next and appropriate song, ‘When We're Together (We Let Ourselves Go)’, to ‘these people’, keeping the dramatic allure, running in the front of the stage, dancing on the large amps, looking at us as if he wanted to eat us alive, throwing a half empty beer can, and spitting his drinking water.
The band pursued this intense performance till the end, with some of my favorites like ‘I Thought You Were Someone I Knew’, ‘Tough Love’, ending the show with ‘What Did You Do With My Gun?’, Hart descending in the middle of the crowd for the last minutes of the song, and doing some crazy hugging-dancing-moshing with people in the crowd.
