Date: 1996-03-29
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Venue: Riviera Theatre

Setlist: (incomplete)

Empty Glasses

Hoverin’

Surfaced: No

In Archive: No

Notes:

Memorabilia:

Review:

Chicago Reader – April 11, 1996 by Sarah Vowell:

Merely watching Kim Deal’s new band the Amps set up their equipment is downright riveting. Checking her mike, Deal squawks and slides on top of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” playing in the background, commanding the stage with her tomboy swagger.

The Amps play with a low-key, hangout sound. Deal’s singular raspy voice lets her get away with a lot, grabbing your slight interest during nothing-special songs when nine singers out of ten would send you to the bar. At first, playing cuts from their debut album Pacer (on guitars borrowed from the Foo Fighters since they forgot theirs back home in Dayton), they plod.

Deal gestures for a smoke from the kids up front, gets pelted with cigarettes, and soon doles out a nicotine-fueled dose of the old get up and go. With “Empty Glasses” everything clicks. Deal’s unladylike war whoop prefaces unruly garage noise punctuated by her scruffy, repeated cries of “Empteeee!”

“Now I’m gonna play snare,” she remarks as a puny drum is trotted out, and she bashes into “Hoverin’.” Deal whacks the thing, mostly with her right hand, her hair swinging, her body turning into a picture of childlike spaciness–Peppermint Patty sleepwalking through a Charlie Watts dream. When she finally adds her left hand to the rotation, it’s some kind of epiphany.

Photos: