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
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