Thurston Moore at Bourbon St, Columbus OH 8/27/06

Last night, Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore played a kind of/not really secrety show at Bourbon St in Columbus Ohio with Athens musician Leslie Keffer. I say “kind of secret” because it was promoted on Bourbon’s Myspace, there was a donewaiting.com message board discussion, and some flyers were up around town, but it was otherwise kept under the radar. Hell, when I first saw the flyers on Thursday I thought it was a joke.

Let me back up. If you’ve never been to Bourbon St., you probably don’t understand how crazy it is to think Thurston Moore would be playing the club. See, Bourbon St probably comfortably holds about 30 people. There’s a DIY soundboard for the musicians, and the stage is small. This is about as intimate as you can get for a show without it being in your basement.

We got word that they’d only be letting about 100 people in and doors would be opening at 7pm. Around 3pm I started driving by the club to see if any sort of insane lines had started to form, but it was a ghost town until around 6pm. I finally stood in line with about 30 other people at 6:30pm.

At 7pm the doors finally opened and Bourbon St had made the smart move of giving wristbands out to people so you didn’t have to sit in the club for five hours until Thurston played (there was four opening bands). Not that spending an evening in Bourbon is a bad thing – the Taco Ninja makes some delicious food – but sometimes you just can’t be in a club that long waiting around. (Besides, I live a few blocks from the place and Deadwood was having a season finale!)

I went home, had dinner, watched some of the Emmys, Deadwood, and the Entourage season finale. I went back to the club around 10:45 wondering if there was going to be thousands people hanging around. As luck would have it, the crowd was pretty small. I imagine most people thought that the idea of Thurston Moore playing Bourbon St was the most insane thing ever and kept away a lot of people. That plus Bourbon St’s handling of the crowd made it a surprisingly comfortable show from a “personal space” point of view. I bet there was about 50ish people when they played, but I am never good at judging crowd numbers.

Thurston and Leslie went on close to midnight and played about a half hour set of noise and feedback and it was pure bliss. It was more about creating an atmosphere and mood over any sort of resemblance to melody. I won’t lie and say that this is music that I typically listen to, but having Thurston play such an intimate club on his day off really was something special. Seeing Kim Gordon walk around Bourbon St was surreal. The whole thing was just crazy, and even when I paid the cover at 7pm I still wasn’t sure that it was actually happening. But it did, and it was a blast.

I heard some people complain about how short the set was, but I was happy with it. With things like this, expectations get pretty high and you really don’t know what’s gonna happen.

Thurston was taking pictures with people, videotaping the opening bands, and generally having a good time (from what I could tell). Later today he’ll be playing with Sonic Youth in front of thousands, so it was a really amazing experience to see one of my musical heroes play in such a small venue.

I have a few OK photos that I am posting, but if anyone has any better pixx post a link in the comments or email me and I’ll get them up.

more pix after the jump…