Totally by accident, I found out via twitter that something interesting an dare I say magical? (yeah, probably shouldn’t have done that) was going down in DC this afternoon. I had sort of settled on a plan for a quiet evening chilling in the hotel room – it’s really hot outside, and I’m not feeling all that great (summer viruses suck), but when word got to me through a musician acquaintance that the reigning kings of an obscure genre of music were playing a free show, I kind of had to go, didn’t I?

So, after leaving the office for the day and changing into something a little more comfortable, I headed out to the Metro station and across the Potomac for Harry and the Potters:

The genre, as you might have guessed, is wizard rock, a strange offshoot of filk devoted to Potter fandom. It’s a lot of fun. I’m only tangentially a part of this, but given how popular the works of JK Rowling are in my house, I’ve had one or two run-ins (the musical acquaintance mentioned above is another wizard rock artist I met at a convention last year) with this corner of the music world.

These guys, as I said, are pretty much the leaders of the wizard rock pack, or at least the most prominent and popular performers. Part of the schtick is that lots of these band pretend to be characters from the novels – these guys, by virtue of their appearance, both pretend to be Harry Potter himself, one as Harry year 4, the other as Harry year 7. It’s weird, but it works. They write funny, hooky punk rock songs about things like Hagrid’s beard and Harry’s first date.

Also, being reasonably attractive young guys, they have become sort of sex symbols. And, their audience is kind of self-selecting toward teen and slightly older bookish geeky girls. I imagine these guys are up to their lightning scars in cute nerd groupies (why didn’t I think of that racket when I was a younger man?). I kind of felt like a dirty old man just being there, because, yeah, I kind of have a thing for the cute nerdy type – after all, I married one.

I’d heard some of their recordings before, but it really surprised me how punk rock they actually were; there’s a lot of Weezer and Ramones in their stuff, but some of it’s got more than a hint of Black Flag buried in there. It was kind of strange watching a bunch of teenage girls squealing and pogo-ing to what was essentially a hardcore song about werewolves!

Oh well; I had fun, and it was a nice adventure. Now I am going to bed, because I feel awful.