The announcement went out at 10 PM the night before: Geese would be playing an unannounced warm-up show at Bowery Ballroom, doors at 11, entry free with a Getting Killed ticket stub. Three hundred people showed up. It was one of the best rock shows this magazine has attended in years.
The set opened with 'THERE'S A BOMB IN MY CAR,' which is exactly how you should open a late-night secret show at one of New York's best mid-sized venues. Cameron Winter was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and appeared to have decided, for the evening, to be as present and unpretentious as possible. He introduced '100 Horses' by saying 'this one has a complicated bass part that our bass player has been doing perfectly for two years so I'm going to watch him while we play it.' Then he watched.
The version of 'Cowboy Nudes' from the 3D Country era received what might be the most enthusiastic response: the room knew every word, and the song sounds even better live than on record, which is how you know a band is serious. 'Forever' was played without announcement and without irony, which is the only way to play a song that takes its own sincerity so seriously.
Winter's stage presence is unusual enough to deserve its own paragraph. He doesn't move the way most rock frontmen move — no practiced gestures, no microphone choreography, no leaning into the crowd. He stands or sits at the edge of the stage and delivers the songs as if he's giving a deposition about something that genuinely distresses him. It's riveting. You can't look away. You don't want to.
The set closed with a song that wasn't on the setlist, which the band played apparently from memory and without introduction. The three hundred people in the room stood very still for four minutes while it happened. Then it was over and everyone cheered and went home. Tomorrow, Geese would play SNL for ten million people. But last night was for the three hundred, and we were among them, and it was something.
