Get Up, Get Out and Do Something

It is not uncommon to hear musicians talk about wanting to "blur the line" between the performer and the audience. "I want the people watching to feel like they are actually a part of the show," says the sensitive, khaki-wearing bass player.

Boring.

The best entertainers let the audience do what it does best: watch the show and get drunk.

Gainesville's Future Legends don't worry about blurring any lines, they reiterate them. The Future Legends aren't concerning with "closing the gap" between themselves and the crowd, they look to make the gap painfully obvious.

The Future Legends don't wear Dockers and baseball caps onstage, they wrap themselves in cellophane and grow their fingernails long. When your band is named after a Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie song, you don't invite fans on stage.

But like the man who fell to Earth, the Legends' time in Gainesville is fleeting. Headlining the only downtown club capable of out-glooming them, the Future Legends are about to disappear, playing their last show for a few months at Full Circle's Saturday night Pop Rocks dance party.

"I need to leave town," said the group's frontman, Eric Legend. "I'm moving to Brandon to help my mom, save some money and to take a break from the Gainesville lifestyle."

By default, the Legends have become the finest goth-chic/glam rock band in town. To lovingly quote Detours' living legend, Chris R. Weingarten, the Future Legends "play like someone switched Robert Smith's black eyeliner with glitter paint."

Not that the band's members would be caught dead wearing glitter paint.

The future Legends' act is full of unforced pomp and shoegaze-y guitar noodling, not to mention a few winning, Bauhaus-tinged tunes - these Legends don't take the title of Gainesville's best goth-chic/glam-rock act for granted (although they probably could).

Slow down now, don't go all goth on us until Saturday. Go make some love. It's Valentine's Day.

--Geoff Eisler