I'm down with P

Today is a great day. I was just perusing the concert dates in my Slim's/Great American Music Hall mailer and I noticed that The Rentals were booked at Slim's!! What the fuck? The RENTALS?? They stopped playing years ago!! Well. I went to their site and found that they have indeed reformed, sort of. The only original members in this incarnation are the really important ones - Matt Sharp (formerly of Weezer) and Rachel Haden (of That Dog). I am soooo excited, but also a bit wary.

I "discovered" The Rentals in 1995 or 1996 when they opened for Blur at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. My girlfriend at the time and I drove the 7 hours from Phoenix just to see Blur, who were supporting The Great Escape - still one of their strongest albums as far as I'm concerned.

These Days

The Rentals

We got up early that day and hit the road, arriving in L.A. around 5 or 6pm and not knowing where we were going. I was familiar with Hollywood, so we headed over to Melrose to do some record shopping at Vinyl Fetish and Bleecker Bob's.

Green Eggs and Crack

The excitement of the day elevated to near insanity when I discovered a vinyl copy of Too Much Joy's "Green Eggs & Crack" in a bin at Bob's for like $4. TMJ has always been a favorite band of mine, and GE&C was their first record that they'd recorded right out of high school. There were only 100 copies pressed and most that were still in existence were in shitty condition. This one still had the plastic on it! We bought it and rejoiced because not only did we just score a record that we'd been searching for for years, but we were about to see Blur!!

We made our way over to the Wiltern and debate was held over whether to get dinner and miss the unknown (to us) opening band, or wolf down some candy and get ourselves inside. Thankfully, we chose the latter.

We found our seats just as The Rentals took the stage. I was astounded to see not one, not two, but THREE Moogs on the stage. We immediately recognized Matt Sharp as the bass player from Weezer, and wondered what we were in for.

Answer: delicious synth-ey slightly punky pop music. I was blown the fuck away. I loved The Rentals!

Maya Rudolph

They motored through a great, tight set, which as far as I know was basically all the stuff from their first album. They had pretty girls playing Moogs (one of whom was Maya Rudolph, who went on to be a regular Saturday Night Live cast member) and frighteningly catchy songs. So good.

Blur played a great set that night too. They had a horn section!! It was before their annoying noisy "woohoo" phase. Hooray for Blur.

Later, the Rentals released a second album, which I didn't think was as good. In fact, I hated it. Nowadays when I listen to it, it's not so bad, but it's definitely not as good as the first one. Somewhere along the way, they collaborated with Weezer on a song called "I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams", which is beautiful, and which even served me once as a "I just broke up with someone so now I gotta be all emo and listen to one song 4000 times" song. Ah, youth. Wait, no. I was like 25. Damn.

I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams

Weezer & The Rentals

2 comments

Anyway, I'm excited to hear what their new stuff sounds like, and how much of the first album they bust out live. YaaaaayOMGYAY!