Picking Up Crumbs: GAYNGS

So The Last Prom on Earth came and went, and the Earth hasn’t stopped turning and Gayngs, the Midwest-indie supergroup that started as a stoned joke dropped their 69bpm album Relayted and made their improbable stage debut. It was a logistical feat to get everyone there and that was impressive in and of itself, but I’ll cop to it, I never had the chips to buy into this game (gayme?). I didn’t grow up with any awareness of yacht rock, and when I am subjected to something like 10cc or “Lady In Red”, I range between ambivalent and nauseated, I have no desire to reclaim some high-school glory-days-past prom nostalgia and I dress up pretty much whenever I goddam feel like it. With Ryan Olson and Solid Gold and Bon Iver and Megafaun and The Rosebuds and Doomtree and Maggie Morrison and Leisure Birds and Channy Moon Caselle and Michael Lewis on stage, this is what it was? Call it hayterayde if you will, but instead of the comfortable cushion of nostalgia, I would take a flawed but serious project that was personally felt from any one of those artists any day.

Yes, it was fun to see everyone else indulge their sartorial silliness and it made for awesome pictures, but was it really that sexy? Like shook down to the fundament or lingerie-model-on-lingerie-model hot and heavy (as one of their teaser videos suggested)? Not really. There was more awkward fumbling back in the day. When Mike Noyce of Bon Iver, whose appearance would make you think it was an all ages show, took off his shirt and howled it out, that was just about as louche as it got. And, with 23 people trying to re-create an overdubbed and sanded down and studio polished sheen on stage, we should just be happy that they got through most of the songs intact and hit the changes. There was also the whispered appearance of Prince showing up backstage- when the rumors flew, it was as close to high school as it got- who plugged in his guitar before declaring that Gayngs didn’t need his help. I do wish his Purpleness would have considered us underclassmen though, because as the cool kids messed around onstage, we could have used that spark to build up to that fancy expensive balloon drop. Still, I do really love what they did with Godley & Creme’s “Cry”, and the style shown by the many Minneapolitan partiers out that night was impressive. Keep that around and we’ll live up to the standard set by that freaky little man out Chanhassen.

Cry from GAYNGS on Vimeo.

Check out Staciaann’s City Pages slideshow of the shindig, and I gotta say, the #GAYNGS Twitter results are a nice mix of love, hayte and snark.