From the looks of their tour bus, Grandaddy doesn't appear to be a very glamorous rock band. A large pile of dirty socks is lying on the floor, several old burritos are congealing on the counter, and two Dancing Grannies videos, with smiling hair-sprayed old ladies in spandex posed on the cover, are leaning on the faded upholstery of my seat. I decide it must get awful dull on the road, but who am I to question the entertainment and/or educational value of old women who jazzercise?

Guitarist Jim Fairchild certainly looks right at home in the belly of the mess as he clears some junk in front of the fridge to see what he's got to drink.

"We've got some carrot juice and some green juice," he says, lifting out a jug of what appears to be bile but is actually just wheat grass.

Perhaps sensing these options are lacking, he scans the counter, which is loaded with half-empty bottles of booze. "I don't know, you guys want some Jack Daniel's?" he says. "Haven't been drinking too much lately so we've got a lot of leftover whiskey."  He pauses, then adds, "I think the number of vodka drinkers increased."

Fairchild isn't defensive about being a lush, but he seems annoyed by the typicality of this fact. "It's a stupid thing to really talk about. It's like, just so archetypal rock 'n' roll. I still like to drink a lot, but I've just realized that being prone to depression to begin with, stacking on a bunch of booze doesn't help at all." 

Certainly booze, depression and Grandaddy might make for a low night.  At times, their pop-electronic soundscapes can be "pretty fucking sad," as Fairchild puts it.  But contrary to what you might conclude from listening to The Sophtware Slump or last year's Sumday, Grandaddy is not in the business of making kids depressed. The depression comes first, about the same time as headgear, and after that stage in adolescence you certainly can't blame it on "Jed the Humanoid," if life seems to require too much energy.

But if Jim is feeling a bit down lately, he's got good reasons.  Roughly four years ago, Grandaddy played a show at this theater (the Vic Theatre, where security is incidentally staffed by assholes) with Elliott Smith.

"He was one of my close friends," Fairchild says. "It's actually been really hard today because we played here with him. It's happened a few times on this tour where I've been in the same room and I can picture the conversations we had in there." We sit in sad silence for a minute. "It's hard," he says again.

During the show, Fairchild dedicates a song to Elliott.  "We played here a few years ago with Elliott Smith, this song's for him. We miss him a lot," he says, and opens into "Lost On Yer Merry Way." At one point, the tempo drops as Jason Lytle sings "I wanna get back home," and the whole theater sort of hangs its head. When the song slowly ends, it sounds like Grandaddy's battery just ran out.

Despite all the sadness and friends lost during the last year, Fairchild says the band is feeling resourceful. Sumday, he says, was a conscious effort to perk things up.

"With Sumday I think it's kind of weird, because… the goal was to have more optimism. But I don't think that we actually felt that optimistic at that point," he said. "The melodies tend to be a little bit more buoyant and the songs are a little bit more concise, but I think the next one will probably, somehow be more actual optimism, because we feel that way more now."

This is pretty evident in the remainder of the concert. They play videos of a guy in a bear suit kicking someone's ass, and a segment featuring the "Mr. Booze" mascot, who heckles people to drink him ("I'm tasty!" his label reads). Best of all is the home movie in which band members slide off the hood of a white mini-van and then throw logs at it. During this bit the audience bursts into laughter, and every last kid in the room wishes they lived next door to Lytle.