Yoshi's presents Mononeon
Jack London Square, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland, CA 94607-3506 USA
9:30 PM Late Show, Saturday, September 2, 2023

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2023 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2023 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

Yoshi's promo poster for tonight's show

[9:39 PM] {House announcements}
[9:45 PM] {Band onstage and noodling}
[9:46 PM] {Announcing Mononeon}
[9:47 PM] {Mononeon enters}

1. [9:48 PM] Hot Cheetos »
2. [9:53 PM] Banana Peel on Capitol Hill
3. [10:00 PM] Am I Trippin'? (overthinkoverlove) »
4. [10:10 PM] Basquiat & Skittles
5. [10:18 PM] Wish Our Party Would've Last
6. [10:28 PM] The Little Green Man
7. [10:35 PM] Tell Me That This Love Ain't Real »
8. [10:44 PM] Women, Water & Weed
9. [10:53 PM] Invisible
   
   Finale
   [11:02 PM] {band introduction}
10. [11:03 PM] Under the Spell of You
    [11:09 PM] {band intro again; all off; lights up; post-show announcements}
    [11:11 PM] {show ends}

• ?Dennison Maxwell?: drums;
• Julius Rodriguez: keyboards;
• Angie Swan: guitar, harmony vox;
• Dywane Thomas, Jr. AKA MonoNeon: bass, vox.

We leave the house around 8:15 PM or so, drive down to Jack London Square, park, and join the short line – only a half dozen people ahead of us, yeah! Hopefully that will translate into getting a decent pair of seats! The line grows quickly, and by 8:50 PM we're up to about two dozen people. 9 PM and the line stretches around the corner. Makes me really glad we showed up early! Extra warm outside tonight: gotta be close to 70F right now. Weird, considering that it was cool and overcast all day!

They let us in between 9:15 and 9:20 PM – close enough to the advertised door time – and we snag a pair of bar stools at Table 60 – my top choice of late, yeah! The house is slow to fill up – seems like the holdup is their method: throttling the influx to try and suggest seats versus letting folks search and select for themselves. Consequently, the place is still mostly empty by the nominal start time at 9:30 PM, and only 3/4 full by 9:39 PM when they play the prerecorded house announcements. It's supposed to be a sold out show tonight, so I'm not surprised we wait a little longer for every last table to be seated, and the band finally hits the stage at 9:45 PM. It might sound like I'm complaining, but really, I'm not. Just recording my observations for future reference. Fifteen minutes is perfectly acceptable!

The band starts to play without Mononeon, who waits for the hypeman to announce his entrance, then bounds onstage in his crazy outfit. Gotta be pretty hot under all that gear! I'd say it's comfy inside the club tonight, but by the end of the first tune, the drummer takes off his shirt and plays the rest of the set topless and glistening with sweat. Mmmm, beefcake! Angie Swan, the guitarist is wearing some sort of bizarre skort-like bottom apparel that kinda makes me think she got a giant black t-shirt, put her legs through the arms, then tied or buckled it around her waist. I suppose that's fashion for ya! The keyboard player, Julius Rodriguez, looks to be barely 20, but he has buckets of chops, and I spend more of the set listening to him over anyone else onstage. I dig Mononeon's bass playing, but I'm not really keen on some of the effects that he applies, especially the octave pedals that shift his tone up into the guitar range.

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Big thanks to Ting for the photo gallery!

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2023 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2023 event list! ☸ On to the next event!