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Live Local Music

Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s

Posted by Ryan Chase on 06/15 at 04:56 PM

A small, rowdy crowd watched Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s last Friday night at the Phryst. Girls lined the stage, dancing. Guys stood behind them, bopping their heads and sipping from their beer bottles. The lead singer rapped—a hint of Bob Dylan in his delivery—about an attention-hungry woman, while his guitar spiraled higher and higher into crescendo. He smiled, the brim of his gray cadet cap shadowing his eyes, thanked the audience, and stepped back from the microphone. Someone cat-called and yelled, “I love you.”

He replied, rather sheepishly, “I love you, too.”

Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s are a State College favorite. They play the Phryst every Friday night and are documented on the bar’s website with a short blurb featuring a picture of Ted and links to the band’s official Web site and MySpace page. Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s are a poppy indie-rock band, exploding with Chuck Berry-esque riffs and catchy melodies that summon heads and feet into rhythmic beat like an Indian snake charmer.

This Friday was business as usual. Even as I struggled mightily to escape the outline of Mount Kilimanjaro (the mountain of a man who was standing in front of me and sometimes on my foot), the music was (unlike the aforementioned man’s cologne) inescapable.

Patrons came and went, some drunk and some about to be, but the music permeated through everything in its path. Once you extend a foot to touch the first step of the wooden staircase leading down into the dark,  cold basement called the Phryst, the scene is the same when Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s are on stage: tapping feet and bopping heads.

Ted McCloskey and the Hi-Fi’s, Friday nights at the Phryst. In the immortal words of SpongeBob Squarepants, “be there or be square.”