Notice: notice musicians!

I saw the band Phoenix tonight.

Not in the sold out Fillmore though, huddled and mired, entangled amongst the prepubescent and the prepubescent-at-heart, trying to dance and be 'seen', but ignored and disgusted by everyone else trying to score.

No, I saw Phoenix next door at the Boom Boom Room long after their 55 minute headlining set, when they left their tour bus after the okay from their tour manager that it was ok to go out and get a drink. I saw them sitting next to the stage, admiring LAHAR, the young four-piece funk-rock band, grooving away on their third hour of the night.

LAHAR pulled out all the stops (literally!) as they always do, improvising and jamming everything they knew - and a number of numbers they didn't - to keep the room, the bar, and themselves happy. The guys can play; they also don't take themselves particularly seriously, which is a pretty admirable quality in a musician. They made music, and they rocked.

I'm not about to say that Phoenix didn't rock themselves earlier in the evening. But from beside the stage, watching the band and the dancers from upon their bar-stool perches, grinning from ear to ear during LAHAR's closing jam of the Meters' Sissy Strut, they looked blissfully envious of the musicians on stage playing their balls off. Tonight's LiveNation/TicketMaster gig at the Fillmore and tonight's gig at the Boom Boom Room were two very different gigs.

And at the end of the night, after their well rehearsed stage act at The Fillmore, Phoenix took their circus off to Reno, with an unfathomable amount of cash in their pockets to play the same set, for the same fans, in a different town.

And at the end of the night, after all the laughs and all the good times playing with instruments on a stage, LAHAR went home with just under $100 to split amongst their four members, and went to sleep knowing they were going to wake up tired and go to work the next day. But soon they'll get to try to stick different movie theme song into one of their jams, just to see if anyone else notices.

Let me rephrase that: I saw a Phoenix tonight. I saw four musicians rise from the ashes of their every-day and soar, aflame.