SAN FRANCISCO — Swedish crankwave band Viagra Boys were rushed to Zuckerberg General Hospital after their latest performance exceeded four hours in length, confirmed concerned sources.
“Their set went way longer than normal,” diehard fan Mike Danby noticed while attending the concert. “They usually don’t last very long — maybe 20 minutes if you’re lucky, a little longer if you focus on enjoying the opener — so I knew something was wrong right away. They were in the middle of a 35-minute extended version of ‘Sports,’ and the paramedics showed up just as the band finished listing the full roster of the ‘95 Bulls. Nobody really explained what happened, but I figure it must have been pretty painful to go for hours on end like that.”
Band members report they’ve made a full recovery from the incident.
“You see it happen to older acts, the Stones and the like; you just never think it’ll happen to you,” singer Sebastian Murphy acknowledged. “I can speak on behalf of the whole band when I thank the staff at Zuckerberg General. Your slow, bureaucratic care has gotten us just healthy enough to smoke four packs a day again and has inspired an album’s worth of new lyrics. Doctors have always warned us to seek medical attention if our set lasts more than four hours. But hey, at least the audience was left satisfied.”
Cardiologist Dr. Emmanuel Zorkin sees Viagra Boys’ prolonged setlist as a cautionary tale for aging musicians everywhere.
“I’ve seen painful, artificially extended sets from plenty of older punks trying to prove they’re still macho enough to not be posers,” Dr. Zorkin explained. “Every once-young punk thinks they’re invincible until they start struggling to perform. Just because you could crankwave every day in your room for hours on end as a teenager doesn’t mean you can still do that — and that’s okay. You can talk to your doctor about specific ways to healthily improve your scene cred as you get older, but the key word is moderation. If crankwave is important to you, try limiting yourself to only one Viagra Boys, Fontaines DC, or IDLES album per day.”
At press time, Dr. Zorkin was seen overprescribing Morphine’s “Cure for Pain” to otherwise healthy patients.