Wizard Rock & Dinosaur Cake

One of my most awesome nerdy loves is Wizard Rock.  Oh, you've never heard of Wizard Rock?  It's cool, let me explain.

A Quick (and probably inaccurate) History of Wizard Rock:
I'm fairly certain that you can call Led Zeppelin the Godfathers of Wizard Rock.  If I have to explain that to you, we are no longer friends for at least 3 reasons... But that was back in the day.

In the early 2000s a band called The Switchblade Kittens wrote a song called "Ode to Harry Potter" which was from Ginny's POV in Chamber of Secrets.

A little while later, in 2002, two brothers somewhat jokingly formed a band called Harry and the Potters and wrote a bunch fast and sloppy songs about the first few Harry Potter books and from Harry's POV.

After that, the world exploded – Wizard Rock caught on BIG TIME and now along with Harry and the Potters and their evil counter-parts, Draco and the Malfoys, you can find tons and tons of other Wizard Rock bands (there was even a Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club for a couple of years and Christmas CDs and everything)!

And now you know.

So, anyway, the champions and reigning kings of Wizard Rock are still Harry and the Potters.  At some point their cute, few-lined, silly songs turned into really good, introspective, interesting, and often hilarious songs.  They're pretty good and are super fun to watch live (Boyfriend said that if they practiced they might be really good, but he also said he wants to join the band and play bass as Cho Chang, so I'm not sure I can take him seriously anymore).  They get so into the songs and into the characters (one brother plays as HP year 4 and the other as HP year 7) and there is tons of bantering and Wizard jokes.

I saw them for the second time this weekend at the Sunnyvale Public Library.  It was hot, outdoors, and there wasn't a huge crowd.  Still, it was a good show in the way that a show is good when a lot equipment gets knocked over and one of the Harry Potters is wearing his sweater backwards for half the set before noticing. 

They played a lot of the songs off their earlier albums which was fun (though "Power of Love" is hands-down their best album). And their drummer apparently keeps changing his identity at each show – at our he was Sirius Black. They also made a Pog joke that kinda fell flat, but I suspect that's because 3 of us in the crowd were old enough to know what Pogs were... And Boyfriend was stoked over their many Back to the Future references, too!

Also, before the show I bought their super awesome, punk rock 12" vinyl record "Live at the New York Public Library" (I collect records, too) and met the band – brothers Paul and Joe.  My dear friend, Kate, has been friends when them for ages, so she insisted that I go introduce myself at the show (she had warned(?) them that I would be saying hi when she saw them a few days earlier in San Diego).  I was wearing my Pterodactyl dress in preparation for the next part of my night and the boys – in a moment of absolute hilarity – tried to invite themselves to the Jurassic Park Party I was going to next, then realized they had another show to play in Santa Cruz.  That, my friends, is the drawing power of the dinosaur.

Which brings me to later that night...

My friend Peter, aka The Mayor, had been putting off his birthday for so long that I decided to swoop in and declare it a Jurassic Park Themed event.  Unfortunately, this didn't really work as Boyfriend and I were the only one who stuck to the dinosaur theme (my dress, his t-shirt)... Oh, and our friend maRk did bring dinosaur toys, so there was that.

But, not realizing that everyone would be total Flounders, I had spend the morning getting dinosaur type goodies ready for Peter: some candy that looked like dinosaur eggs, chocolate rocks, dinosaur toys, and a dinosaur cake, which ended up looking more like Reptar from Rugrats than the actual cake tin (because I frosted it backwards)...  Still, we had a good time at dinner and then went and drove go-karts before eating the dinosaur cake.

All in all, awesome Saturday night.  Did you do anything amazingly awesome, too?

Also, find out more about Harry and the Potter's Ride the Lightening 2011 summer tour here!