“Is Third Eye Blind still a band?” and “Is that the doot doot doot band?” are two questions a 3EB fan may have heard throughout the last two decades of the California band’s three-decade long existence. And to answer both of them, yes, I can attest that they are still a band, and yes, they are the same group whose claim to fame is the seminal 1996 hit “Semi-Charmed Life,” colloquially known as the “Doot Doot Doot” song.
But oh, how those poor, uninformed people forget the literal string of hits The Blind had throughout the ’90s and early millennium, spread across two platinum albums. Songs like “Never Let You Go,” “Deep Inside of You,” “How’s It Going to Be,” “Jumper,” “Graduate,” and “Losing A Whole Year.”
Maybe they forgot about the tongue-twisting, syllabic gymnastics of frontman Stephan Jenkins’ lyrics that never felt overwrought or out-of-place—like he really needed that many words in order to convey that he will “Never Let You Go.”
Or perhaps they forgot about the sheer songwriting audacity of such bold ideas as “what if we brought that one riff back, but this time it’s reggae?” (See “Jumper.”) Or “what if at the end of this song I do a spoken word rap about mood rings?” (See “Never Let You Go.”) Ideas that should feel labored but go down smooth. Ideas that shouldn’t work but do.
In this reviewer’s opinion, there is no better ’90s alt-pop band than Third Eye Blind. They will forever trump the likes of the Goo Goo Dolls, the Counting Crows, and Everclear. Pick your favorite baggy jeans-wearing, bleached-blond pop rocker and then try to stack their catalog against Third Eye Blind. It’s a futile exercise. So please, save your “’90s one-hit wonder” slander for the Marcy Playgrounds, the Chumbawumbas, and for the love of god, Milwaukee, The BoDeans.
On Saturday night, Third Eye Blind brought their immense catalog of palatable-yet-complex hits to the Potawatomi Casino Hotel’s Outdoor Stage, for the casino’s final “Amplified” show. However, an early highlight of the night came before the band even played, when a Potawatomi employee asked my date and I if we wanted to bump up our ticket class from the GA standing area to the gated-off zone all the way in the front known as the “VIP pit.” It was a twist of fate that can only be described as “Semi-Charmed.” With no opener for the show that night, the band took the stage promptly after we took our new spots up front.
The setlist was a marathon of gold-standard alternative pop rock. Third Eye Blind opened with their debut album’s deep-cut and fan favorite “Motorcycle Drive By,” the dark stage exploding with colored lights right at the big moment when Jenkins yells “I’ve never felt so alive.” Me and the other VIP Pitters were pumped.
There were the beloved chart toppers like “Graduate” and “Deep Inside Of You”; those deep-in-the-album-groove classics like “Narcolepsy” and “Wounded”; and a mid-set rendition of “Faster,” a personal favorite from the band’s criminally underrated third album Out Of The Vein. The set even featured two covers: an interpolation of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” with 3EB original “Dust Storm,” as well as a Blind-ified take on TV On The Radio’s 2006 hit “Wolf Like Me.”
The casino crowd was enthusiastic, belting out every word to the hour-and-a-half long set. Jenkins even treated us all to acoustic sing-alongs to newer song “Shipboard Cook” and tried-and-true “Jumper.” It was after this intimate mid-show moment that he told the crowd: “I was practically born here. My family moved away when I was six. Milwaukee will always have a piece of my heart.” Congratulations, Milwaukee. We can now claim Third Eye Blind as “from here.”
Third Eye Blind themselves were terrific, but often felt a little loose and sometimes downright sloppy. Jenkins admitted on mic that “we haven’t played together in almost a month,” and that he had just “gotten here on a plane from Burning Man” hours before the show. But the folks in the audience were Third Eye Blind’s best cheerleaders, their enthusiasm and collective singing supporting the band throughout the night, and made them seem like they were genuinely having a good time.
After we all yelled those ubiquitous “doot doot doots” right back at 3EB for set-closer “Semi-Charmed Life,” the band left the stage. And when the Potawatomi crowd couldn’t quite pull together a unified “one more song” chant, the band did us a solid and came out anyway to perform a rousing encore of “How’s It Going To Be.” Every voice was hoarse, Jenkins’ included, but we all howled those classic last lines in unison, “I want to taste the salt of your skin, the soft dive of oblivion,” after which the band called it a night and the crowd went back inside to the slot machines.
Between the crowd and the band, Third Eye Blind’s colossal catalog was the focal point and takeaway of Saturday night. No matter what state of preparedness or drunkenness each one is in, performer or audience respectively, the songs themselves still hold weight and many of those tunes have been cemented as classics of the ’90s and Y2K eras. It’s this body of work that keeps Third Eye Blind on the road 30 years later, and why the crowds keep coming back to sing along.
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