Staff Blog
The Juan MacLean, Sept. 30, Johnny Brenda’s
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He may look like a younger ginger version of Uncle Fester, but John MacLean knows the recipe for the perfect dance show: a live band rounded out by !!! drummer Jerry Fuchs and LCD Soundsystem keyboardist Nancy Whang, a bar venue that’s pulsating but not overcrowded and enough sexy vibrations pumping out of the speakers to get James Brown shaking his hips righteously from beyond the grave.
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MacLean’s alter ego, The Juan MacLean, cooked this all up at Johnny Brenda’s last night. People went crazy. Hips swayed; arms raised. Converse-shod feet stomped Morse code. Whang, completely absorbed in the music, sang for the majority of the songs. Tracks like “Happy House” and “The Simple Life,” off MacLean’s new The Future Will Come, married vibrant electronic music and vintage funk. Movement on the dance floor became especially intense when older singles like “Titos’ Way” — I always imagine confetti exploding every which way and go-go dancers bursting out of giant birthday cakes when I hear it — and “Give Me Every Little Thing” hit live.
One of the only dampers on the night was when The Juan left for a DJ set at Silk City after a little more than an hour — the energy at JB’s was palpable enough to merit a few more songs. The other tarnish was recorded when a friend of mine — presumably executing the move immortalized by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever — set her index finger on a collision course with my eyeball as I boogey-oogey-woogeyed. Luckily, I had consumed enough Dogfish Head Pumpkin Ale to resist clutching my face in horror and screaming something like, “Ow, my eye.”
