Blondie

I'd been looking forward to this double-bill for weeks, and OK, I'll admit it: I lost all semblance of cool during X's set. Every time the band would plow through a classic song ("Los Angeles," "Nausea," "The World's A Mess; It's In My Kiss" et al), I found myself leaping off the ground, shouting along and sweating it all out.

Although I was hardly the only ardent fan, there were a fair amount of people in my immediate vicinity that clearly hadn't taken their Geritol, gently sipping wine and not caring less that behind nearly every chooglin' Chuck Berry riff sat harrowing and horrifying tales a la “Johnny Hit And Run Paulene.”

If X are still the scaly, existential underbelly of this thing we call life, then Blondie (as if the names of the groups themselves don't give it all away, anyway) remains the glittery, fully fleshed defiance of human weakness. On bills like this, everyone wants the hits, and Blondie (now composed of Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Clem Burke and a few young guns) delivered en masse, performing "Hangin' On The Telephone," "Call Me," "Heart Of Glass" and "One Way Or Another," each punchy anthem functioning as a big, fat middle finger to that nagging inner voice that threatens daily negation.

The horror show of X's protagonists and demons weren't exactly rendered impotent by Blondie's lithe hedonism (which was at its lightest during the group's cover of "The Tide is High" and most muscular during "Rapture") but were made irrelevant via the odd chronological inversion of experiencing the stuttering/staggering guts of life first and then having them all wrapped up in a sensational gift of bliss and glamor.

It's easy to tag tours like this as "nostalgia packages"—Debbie Harry is now 68 years old, and X's Billy Zoom is 65—and, sure, each group's major work is well behind them. But with performances this powerful of material this strong, pangs of nostalgia (i.e. "homesickness," "bittersweet longing," etc.) are set adrift—not because these songs aren't clearly about how life was but, in all actuality, how it still is.