Diego’s Umbrella onstage is hard to explain but easy to enjoy. The band members pose with Elvis-like regality, sound like “Fiddler on the Roof” and dance better than the Soggy Bottom Boys. Visceral gyrations in the audience aren’t as polished but just as pure. The gypsy rock band from San Francisco recently shared the Crystal Bay Casino Crown Room with fun seekers who left with smiles and sweaty feet.
In a series of Tahoe Onstage columns, Ben Leon and Tyson Maulhardt of Diego’s Umbrella explain why they love live music.
It’s really important for people to get out and just blow off steam. Even if they hadn’t heard us before, by the end they are blowing off steam. A mass exodus of steam is what we are hoping for and everybody to go home happy.
Live music can make you laugh, make you cry, make you divorce your wife.
The most important thing is to enjoy the moment because that’s the beauty of live music. You are not hearing a DJ, it’s not prerecorded music. What you are hearing is live and I think being able to lose yourself and enjoy that specific moment might be awesome, it might be awful sometimes. Bands don’t always sync up perfectly the entire show. The imperfections bring a humanistic aspect to the whole thing.
People become participants as well. If we have a particularly great crowd, there’s this energy that goes back and forth and even words: We’ll end up talking to people. We just played Vancouver and it ended up almost being a halfway comedy show. We were talking to people and they were talking to us and it just ended up being a great time. It’s just this cool, interactive thing you don’t get listening to iTunes on your computer.
