My most vivid Les Savy Fav concert memory involves shirtless, bearlike frontman Tim Harrington shoving a microphone below his belt line, grabbing a nearby audience member by the head, pulling that head against his crotch and forcing the dude to scream into the mic through his pants. It was opening night of CMJ 2003 in New York, and while Ben Gibbard was tearfully eulogizing Elliott Smith somewhere across town, Harrington was flinging himself off the Knitting Factory balcony. I can’t recall which songs they played that night, but Harrington’s hijinks linger in my temporal lobe almost a decade later. Les Savy Fav is just that kind of band.
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