Fountains of Wayne "Hey Julie" (13.9 MB) from Welcome Interstate Managers High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 8, 2009

What do you do when you bring people up out of the audience to play incidental percussion parts, but then one of them starts singing unsolicited back-up vocals? Apparently, you just go with it. The guy on the right sang, I think, the entire song, and I don't think the band actually noticed. Meanwhile, the scarf-wearer on the left was on stage for the second time of the night -- he was also picked to come up and play a piano line during Jon Auer's solo opening set.

About that set: wow, so weird. Auer is best known as the guy from the Posies, and there were a handful of Posies fans in the otherwise inattentive crowd. This is pretty par for the course at the High Noon -- openers get talked over, and that goes double for solo acoustic openers. This makes Auer's decision to play a song unamplified, from the middle of the floor, and facing the stage, all the more inexplicable. He stopped during the song twice to shout at the crowd to shut up (it didn't work, obviously), and even standing right behind him I couldn't hear any of it. He ended his set by covering Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him," which he mocked repeatedly. The whole thing was quite a big fail, which is why the headliners got episode #500 and he didn't.