Today’s Open Thread topic is a simple one: Tell us about your most memorable concert experience. Could be the best, could be the worst, but it’s gotta be memorable.
Here’s mine: It was early ’99, and I happened to be selected to go visit Argonaut Games (Croc, Alien Resurrection) in London. Being that one of my favorite bands of all time is based in the UK and almost never visits the States, of course I had to see if New Model Army was playing a show while I was there. And I was in luck: They had two within an easy train ride from London.
Not ever having been to London before, I e-mailed NMA’s manager on the off chance that he might be able to suggest which of the two shows would be easiest to get to from the Tower of London area. As it turned out, he was an enormously friendly and helpful guy, and we exchanged several e-mails while he helped me figure out how to get to the University of East Anglia in Norwich. (A sad side note: He passed away recently. Rest in peace, Tommy.) And when he learned that I was there on business and coming all the way from Chicago, he offered to put me and as many colleagues as wanted to come on the guest list.
Turned out no one did, so I headed up to the train station on my own and settled in for the ride out to East Anglia. The concert was a short walk from the station, and I showed up just in time — and sure enough, there I was on the guest list. Of the band that had been dominating the top of my favorites list for the past, oh, eight years or so. And the show was spectacular; seeing the band on their home turf (I’d only ever seen them once before, in Cleveland) was exciting, and they put on one hell of a show.
Afterward I hung around to chat with the band and meet their manager in person. I remember asking their keyboard player if he knew where Tommy was, and he instantly replied, “Oh, you’re the bloke from Chicago! Welcome! How did you like the show?” Tommy — and everyone else in the NMA family — was just as welcoming and friendly as he’d seemed over e-mail.
As things finally would down, I headed back to the train station…to discover that the last train back to London had left five minutes ago. No worries, I thought, I’ll just find a 24-hour restaurant or pub something, and a place to buy a book, and hang out for the next six hours.
Just one problem: Norwich essentially closes down at 11:00. There was a Chinese takeout place open, a gas station (that thankfully sold magazines), and — get this — the “Chicago Rock Club” bar. A theme bar where all their food, drink, music, and decor was American. I will never quite forget the surreal feeling of drinking Budweiser and listening to Bon Jovi at 2:00 in the morning in Norwich, England. (Thankfully, although the beer was called “Budweiser,” it was clearly a different recipe than we have in the U.S. By which I mean, it actually had a taste. A taste other than watered-down urine, I mean.)
After everything closed up, I headed back to the train station and ended up sleeping on a bench, along with a few other stragglers from the show. The next train arrived at 5:00 am, and I collapsed in my seat, dozed a bit more, and finally walked back to my hotel as the sun rose and the businessmen scurried off to work.
So, yes: rather memorable.
How about yours?
2005 was the year that I really started to go out of my way to go to shows. Wait- that’s misleading. I didn’t leave the area, as much as I made an effort to, you know, leave my house. Saw QOTSA at the House of Blues the day the Pope died. That was interesting. Met NIN at the then-Gund Quicken Loans Arena. Foo Fighters/Weezer at CSU. None of those, though, could hold a candle to my first run-in with Jesse “The Devil” Hughes and the Eagles of Death Metal.
Quick background. The Eagles of Death Metal (or EODM, as they will be referred to from here on for brevity’s sake) started off as a Boogie Rock side project involving Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh “Baby Duck/Carlos Von Sexron” Homme and childhood friend Jesse Hughes. Whereas Queens had more in common with Kyuss and Sabbath, EODM harkens back to mid-70s Stones. Lots of hip shaking and love for the ladies. While Homme still records with the group, now expanded to feature Desert Rock icon Dave Catching on lead guitar and Brian “Big Hands” O’Connor on bass, he was replaced on drums on this tour by Miss Samantha Maloney, of Hole and Motley Crue fame.
I had picked up the band’s first album, “Peace Love and Death Metal”, and while unpolished and fuzzy, I found it irresistible. When I saw Queens at the beginning of April, Homme made a comment between songs (when he wasn’t disparaging Mark Lanegan, who was in town with the band, but decided to not come on stage) that Interscope wouldn’t let EODM tour with them, but that they would be in town a week later, playing the Grog Shop. “Well, then,” I thought, “why not check it out?” Bought the tickets from Ticketmaster the day before, just in time to have my buddy bail on me. “Oh man, my knee really hurts. Plus, how good can it be? They only have one CD,” he told me. So I soldiered out alone.
Now, I’ve never been the most friendly guy at concerts. I’m not the “I can’t wait to punch your girlfriend in the face in the mosh pit” guy, though either. I just find a cozy corner with a place to set my beer and enjoy the show. The Grog Shop is good for that (not as good as the old Grog Shop, but that’s a rant for a whole different day), so that’s what I did. Grabbed my prerequisite PBR Tallboy and took stock of the room. There was a lot of really cute girls. A lot. There was also a lot of those really cute girls wearing fake mustaches. This was gonna be my kind of night.
Sat through the two forgettable local openers, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and drinkin’. I, not surprisingly, had quite the buzz on by the time the band started to take the stage. That buzz didn’t prepare for what came next, though. Hughes transformed from “some weird guy with a mustache” that I had seen on an album sleeve into “The Devil”, the most charismatic frontman I’d seen since the Stones. Samantha Maloney… well, I dont know what it is about petite female drummers, but they’re just sexy to me. The fact that she was a really good drummer just compounded it. The fuzzy and unpolished music exploded through the speakers. This was one of the few bands that will never find real commercial success because the music was meant to be played live, and they didn’t care! That was the genius part. These were three guys and one sexy lady who didn’t care about a hit song. They were a band just to kick your ass and make you dance. And they did. The cute girls with the fake mustaches danced right in front of the stage, so I moved right up near the front of the stage, resting my beer on a speaker stack and just soaked it in. They played the whole CD, a few soon-to-be-recorded song, and even a cover of “Brown Sugar”. Pretty girls and great music? It couldn’t get much better. I even managed to make some concert buddies who would prove to be very useful later in the night.
So, after the show ended and people started to clear out, one of my concert buddies, Adam, told me how he hung out with the band after their show the previous January, and said to hang around if I was interested. Why turn that opportunity down? About an hour later, out came the band, and one of the first things that Jesse did was pick up a flyer on the ground advertising that Har Mar Superstar, who also had played in town that night with Ben Lee, was having an afterparty downtown… somewhere near West 6th, I believe. The band was going to crash it. He wanted us to come. The second thing he did was give us all passes to see the band play the first ever “Silent Concert” at the Rock Hall the next day. The gimmick was that everyone wore headphones, and the band played without speakers. The music was just broadcast to the speakers. Interesting, but I had to work. Got some pictures, had a few shots, and decided that was that. We all piled in our respective automobiles and headed out, hoping to at least make it to the afterparty…
…And I got lost. It was now about 12:30 on a Monday morning. I had to be at work in 8 hours. I was lost, semi-drunk, in Cleveland. Stopped at a Convienient on West 14th. Bad idea. 7 words on my part, and 30 words on the clerks (easily 15 were curses or racial slurs), and I could at least get my way back to 90. It was so disappointing. There was my chance to party with some rock stars, and the labyrinthine Cleveland streets held me back. Talking to Adam the next day, I found out that apparently there was free booze abound at the afterparty, and everyone got to be on the news the next day at the Rock Hall concert.
It was still a great night, and the one concert out of many since that still stands out clear as day. I did learn an important lesson, though. Forget about Lake Erie catching on fire. Forget about our perpetually awful MLB and NFL teams. Stay away from Cleveland just due to the roads. They could really ruin your night.
Thanks for reminding me I need to get down to the Grog Shop one of these days. I haven’t been there since they moved — sounds like it’s still a decent place, though.
People always comment on my strong sense of direction; I wonder if it’s because I was raised in Cleveland. I never really thought about it before, but you’re right: Cleveland roads are weird. Contrast them with, say, Chicago — where every road is arrow-straight and runs for dozens of miles with the same name — and it’s a pretty shocking change.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with three different things here – one DJ set, one live PA and one concert – I may get a bit waffly
DJ Set – Shpongle @ Antiworld festival 07/07/07
The Antiworld festival was a bit of an oddity – the biggest Psytrance night in the world decided to put on a festival, but to say it was shoddily arranged is an understatement – half the live acts didn’t show up, DJs were complaining that they weren’t getting paid and the weather was so unpredictable you didn’t know what was going to happen from one minute to another. Shpongle played the main arena on the sunday morning, and it was blessed with an incredibly beautiful day – for the first time all weekend we had no wind and blazing hot sun. The choice of tunes played by Raja and Simon was incredible, covering not just the Shpongle stuff, but also a lot of the other artists on the Twisted record label.
Within 5 mins of Simon spinning the first tune you couldn’t move near the arena, literally everyone was there – even to the point where DJs who were supposed to be playing in the other tents wandered over to see what was going on – the rest of the festival was dead. At the time I was working with a dance troupe as a photographer and backup dancer, so I was in a UV harlequin outfit, dancing between the security barrier and the stage, watching other dancers, circus performers and other artists dancing to this incredible DJ set. Everything about it was perfect, it was two blissed out hours dancing in the sunshine, and it will forever be burned into my soul
The best live PA (for those who don’t know – it’s the dance scene’s version of a live band) was a group by the name of Lab4, playing at Heresy/Infamous in Bristol. At the time the night was one of the biggest hard house/hard trance nights in the country, running from 10pm until 10am – it also happened to be the night that I really discovered dance music.
I’d been in the pub most of the afternoon with the Bristol Goth’s – it was typical for us to meet up on the saturday afternoon, get drunk on snakebite and black and figure out where we were going to go that night – most of the group were heading up to London to go to Slimelight (the biggest and best goth night outside Batcave) but me and one other person couldn’t be bothered with the 3 hour drive, so we set off up the road to try and find a night out.
As we were walking past one venue we could hear some really thumping music, and being more into the Industrial scene than the goth scene I thought I’d give it a shot. Walked in the venue and was literally blown away, in a matter of seconds my entire music taste took a dramatic polar shift and I was lost on the dancefloor. At about 2am these two guys got up on the stage behind a mountain of keyboards and computer hardware. They looked the part as well – looking very cyberpunk and completely manic. The first song dropped…
The venue was a strange place – a long low room made of stone – it used to be a wine cellar. The ceiling was vaulted in places, there were huge columns and a flagstone floor…. back then, clubs were in fun places!
It’s a very strange experience when a guy who’s been listening to the likes of Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Front 242 and the like gets somewhere and hears the intro to “Jesus Built My Hotrod” and then a major drum beat starts off and there’s synth lines that came tearing out of the speakers (linky – Lab4 – DingaLing… there was something incredibly visceral about it all. For an hour, these two guys who looked like they’ve come out of a William Gibson novel work the crowd blasting out song after song, all the way through to end with a song called “Reformation 2″.
After they finished I fought my way out to the courtyard for a smoke, and the band came out – they were really nice, down-to-earth people, and they had loads of time to talk to the punters. I’ve seen them five more times since then, and they’ve always been willing to chat to anyone and everyone.
As for Live Band – that’s easy. Massive Attack @ Queen’s Square, Bristol.
Bristol used to have a fantastic music scene – with people like Massive Attack, Portishead and Goldfrappleading the scene. Massive Attack put on a gig in Queen’s Square – a huge grassy square in the middle of bristol. They were playing late on in the evening, with the sun setting behind the stage they were on, bathing the crowd with the colours from the sun, whilst on the stage was a huge computer screen with the band playing in front of it. Musically they were top notch, and it was the first time that Massive Attack had played as a full band in over 5 years.
Everything about them was well organised and handled with an emotional level I hadn’t expected – and the screen behind the band was incredible – it was almost like watching a running stream of information. From the US Debt to the total number of Big Macs sold world wide… a map of their long tour, with photos of each venue…. random patterns and artworks… it was constantly changing and tied in almost perfectly to the music.
There’s just something about a band playing in the middle of their home city that is different. They just seemed… releaved to be home I guess. They were completely relaxed, incredibly happy, and glad to be playing this one off gig in the middle of their city, where no-one else had ever played before.
Of course, the support bands helped – Goldfrapp were out of this world, and even Goldie Looking Chain were surprisingly listenable!
TL;DR –
DJ – Shpongle, Antiworld
PA – Lab4, Heresy/Infamous
Live – Massive Attack, Bristol