It’s 11:15 pm on Monday night
when Alex Billig, 22, guitarist for acoustic trio The Best
Thing Ever, enters the fancy men’s bathroom at the Top of the
Hub lounge, the Prudential Tower’s 52nd-floor candlelit
upscale-bar area perched high above Copley Square. The band’s
video-camera-packing friend has already staked out one of the
two stalls, with vocalist Noah Britton, 23, following close
behind him. Three minutes later, cellist Jen Page, 22, sneaks
into the men’s room. (Paranoid that big instruments will
attract attention, Billig only brought his Irish whistle, and
Page plans to play percussion by banging on trash cans.)
Minutes later, from the hallway, you can hear the faint rumble
and ostinato thump of a certain late-’70s rallying cry:
Britton’s Stephin Merritt–like deep-baritone chanting We will,
we will, rock you ...
The anthem
is interrupted abruptly. It’s not an irate employee’s fault,
but nature’s: two older strangers are waiting impatiently for
the stalls. So the threesome stops earlier than it would have
liked. “I felt bad making people wait to take a shit,” Britton
later says with a sigh.
The Top of
the Hub was the eighth date on The Best Thing Ever’s 12-day
early-May swan song, “The Bathroom Tour.” In the past week,
the threesome has bashed out hardcore songs in the pay toilet
outside the Boston Public Library, whipped out “Wipe Out” in a
Revere Beach shore-side restroom (where a bare-chested local
yelled at Page for being in the men’s room and threatened to
call the cops), and completed a full-length set for friends in
Billig’s Allston-apartment bathroom (during which Billig
showered and, Britton says, “You could totally see through the
[shower] door, so everyone saw him naked”). But so far,
probably the most amusing restroom run took place last
Saturday night, when The Best Thing Ever roamed around with
the intention of ambushing the lavatories of “every party in
Allston.” In more than three hours, they played roughly 15
bathrooms (in one, they covered Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa”
while a drunk girl quietly puked in the corner), and they got
turned away by only one angry host.
“I’m sort
of OCD, actually, so this is really helping me conquer my
fears,” says Page. “I would be one of those people who would
take a paper towel and open the door of the bathroom. And now
I’m like, I don’t know, drinking toilet water.”
The Best
Thing Ever is a musical sideline for all three members. Page
not only belongs to a string quartet, but she also auditioned
for American Idol in 2004 as a face-painted mime who mouthed
the words to Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and
ended up on the Best and Worst of American Idol Seasons 1–4
DVD. Britton performs under his own name, manages a small
label called H.I.G. Records, and tours with his ex-girlfriend
as the duo Hip Hip Hooray. And Billig’s solo project, Never
Heard of Zeppelin, is him screaming over a Casio.
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Before “The
Bathroom Tour,” The Best Thing Ever hadn’t played together
since April 2004. In their short-lived existence, they have
never bothered to get booked at an actual Boston club, never
released more than a single, and never earned more than a
buck. They had a few original tunes, but they tended to cover
ironic songs (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s 1998 kiddie-corn
tune “I Am the Cute One”) or more-familiar songs in ironic
arrangements (Ou tK
ast’s “Hey Ya”
as a 45 slowed to 33 rpm). They once opened for the Dresden
Dolls at Vermont’s Bennington College, but otherwise their
shows were considerably more informal: they’d invite their
friends to an MBTA platform at a predetermined time and play
until they got kicked out.
Since Page
and Billig are graduating from BU in a few days (Britton
already graduated) and Page will be moving to South Dakota to
teach elementary school on an Indian reservation, this is The
Best Thing Ever’s final incarnation. (They plan to release the
toilet-tour footage in DVD form this summer.) And so nights
like the Top of the Hub, when things don’t go as expected,
aren’t really a disappointment. “It doesn’t matter how [the
show] goes,” says Britton. “Doing it is so awesome. Who cares
if it works? It works automatically because we’re doing
it.”
The Best
Thing Ever play at 11:59 pm on Thursday, May 11, in the South
Street Diner bathroom, 178 Kneeland Street, Boston, and at
6:30 am on Friday, May 12, in the bathroom of an undisclosed
Cambridge gas station. | neonvomit.net/higrecords