Hi, M. D. here…
Austinite, Bob Schneider of the Scabbs, played Friday evening, April 29th at Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff. He treated Dallas with two acoustic shows which both sold out. All seats were taken plus people standing in the aisles. He was celebrating the release of his new album, A Perfect Day.
Mr. Schneider sat on the stage wearing a sports coat, t-shirt, and jeans, implying an informal setting to take seriously. His keyboard, one cymbal, a trumpet, looping pedals, his harmonica and of course his guitar accompanied him on stage in the dark with a white spotlight on him. The audience was so quiet, you literally could have heard a pin drop, (although I did hear a beer bottle spill over) between his songs. There were a few times where you would hear laughter coming from the audience because of an “f” bomb put into his song or something he would change to make it “Dallas friendly” – for example he changed the name of the Randall’s grocery store to Tom Thumb, but then changed it back because it didn’t go with the song, and he made a few jokes about it… as well as some other intimate stories he shared with us that evening.
Mr. Schneider engaged the audience with his looping pedals, distortion, and drum beats from his keyboard along with personal anecdotes combined with his guitar playing and sexy voice which is the pure talent of Bob Schneider! Women want to be with him and men want to be him… yeah, he’s that awesome!
He mentioned a few times about how much he doesn’t care for Sean Penn (giving us two specific stories and a few random mentions) and incorporated it in a few of his songs… Sean Penn was what threaded the evening. He would stop in the middle of songs to interject little tidbits of information or whatever came to his head that sometimes lead to personal stories.
About half way through the set, an alarm or phone goes off and Mr. Schneider stopped to ask where it was coming from and what it was exactly. At that point people started to yell out names of songs and Schneider says, “What the fuck just happened? Is this like song turrets?” A few songs later, he asked for the lights to be turned on so he could see the audience and then took requests from the audience. The first two songs that were requested, he played immediately. The third song requested was “Horny Girls” and Bob laughed and stopped in the middle of the song making jokes and adding to personal stories that had been spoken of throughout the evening. Then the fourth song requested was “Ass Knocker” and he said no but then changed his mind. By the end of that song, the audience was singing loudly and he was happy to see the spectators participating.
Then he played one last song, “Batman” and referred to “the shit you can’t unsee” that he thought of during the song… and that he had regrets of things he had said during the duration of the set (probably because of the personal, graphic sexual nature of the content that he spoke of).