After playing 97 BHT’s “High School Hookup 2009” at Riverside – The White Tie Affair met up with Ralphie at T.G.I. Friday’s, and you could tell that they weren’t speaking in front of a high school anymore.
Check out photos from “High School Hookup 2009” here.
It felt like a bunch of my old friends I grew up with comprised The White Tie Affair, a pop-rock band from Chicago. Sitting at a table at T.G.I. Friday’s in Wilkes-Barre, the fellas and I chatted candidly about porn videos, gossip, and (alleged) sexual escapades with or by friends and tour mates.
Then, I turned on the microphone and began the interview. If you think the band tamed the lingo – well, you thought incorrectly. In between dishing on the group’s next MTV cameo (in a couple weeks on The Hills) and Lady GaGa (they opened for GaGa on “The Fame Ball”), TWTA jumped at every spare moment to change the subject. The guys constantly mentioned premature ejaculation (or as guitarist Sean P. commonly referred to it: premature evacuation) and Daryl Strawberry.
“A lot of times what happens, there’s like premature evacuation going on and you don’t want to be embarrassed by the way you evacuate due to weather,” the guitarist all-but-blurted out. I didn’t care to inquire as to the origin of the inside joke, but the constant references to the former baseball player Strawberry peaked my curiosity.
“Was Daryl Strawberry there?” keyboardist Ryan McClain asked after a question about the group keeping up with the storylines of The Hills. “Candle (Sick and Tired)” first gained notoriety after the show featured the track and TWTA.
After a few more mentions of the former Yankees and Mets outfielder, lead singer Chris Wallace attempted to shed some light on the joke.
“We did this event in New York at CitiField, the Mets new stadium, and we heard Daryl Strawberry was gonna be there,” said Wallace.
“I’m a huge fan,” continued McClain. “Apparently, he had some problems back in the day.”
Those problems were alluded to early in the interview, when Wallace abruptly speculated that he heard Strawberry, “could no longer smell.”
Perhaps a lack of sleep could be attributed to the meandering of the interview. Wallace wrote the next day on the band’s MySpace blog that TWTA pulled an all-nighter – driving from Rochester, N.Y. to Wilkes-Barre. The next stop: Riverside High School, where Wallace and his crew performed for 97 BHT’s High School Hookup 2009, complete with a few of the group’s own tracks and covers of GaGa and Kanye West.
Anyways, the interview moved on, or at least I attempted to move it on – asking the guys about touring with the aforementioned GaGa.
“Let’s just say, she’s very polite and very generous with her ‘givings’,” Sean P noted. He couldn’t elaborate any further without inciting an FCC fine, however the guitarist did revert to a familiar topic in the conversation.
“If you were to run a city and there was a hurricane to come, you don’t want to be caught up premature evacuating even though it’s safer, and you get what you get done, I would never want to say that I premature evacuated a city when a tornado was coming.”
And on that note, I did not find anything premature about exiting the interview – after all, I knew the “tornado” of an editing task that awaited me before I could air the conversation.
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