Last week someone at work emailed the office and said that he had Death Cab for Cutie tickets on Saturday night at the Greek Theater, so - mistakenly believing that they must have sold out - I impulsively replied and said I would take them. Then Ian ditches me the night before the concert and I end up going alone cos I decide not to be wimpy and lame.
I spend the whole concert imagining (or not) that people are giving me funny looks because I’m sitting on my patch of grass with my plastic cup of lemonade all by myself. I also eavesdrop on the group of chatty Asian American guys sitting next to me that talk about girls like they’re in high school even though at least one of them is apparently old enough to have graduated with an MBA at some point (more reason to believe that anyone can get an MBA). Also silently cursing the group of morons in front of me who blow cigarette smoke in my face and my general vicinity all night. Like jeez, I can deal with the smell of weed, but if you want to kill yourself with cigarettes please leave me out of your damn stupidity.
Anyway, in spite of all that, I really enjoyed myself. They played a lot of their older stuff and I’d spent the last few days doing the pre-concert cram on their latest album, so I ended up recognising most of the songs. A lot of their music is too emo for my taste, but I think good concerts make you walk away wanting to go home and immediately listen to not just the songs you already liked, but the songs you thought were completely mediocre before. And Transatlanticism is soooo good live! Made me all teary. Sniff.
Then today I went to the free Alice 97.3 concert at Golden Gate Park. I went with SW and her coworker who really wanted good seats, so we got there about 2 hours before it started. We did get really good spots near the stage, but as the day progressed more and more people started invading the spots between the picnic blankets in front of us and ruined our view. Bastards. 90% of them were either tall teenage boys with spiky hair that looked retarded but was very effective at getting in the way of pictures, or screaming teenage girls who wouldn’t stop talking and tromped all over our picnic blanket with their shoes. GAH. As you can tell, these concerts have done nothing to lessen my enmity towards the general public.
I was there to see Lifehouse, but there were 4 other bands/artistes that played - Secondhand Serenade, Marie Digby, The Last Goodnight and Ingrid Michaelson. Thanks to Real Rhapsody, I’d spent the last week acquainting myself with these heretofore unheard of people, but it was pretty much in vain. They were entertaining enough, but I emerged from the concert without much of an urge to download any of their music. How sad is that, if you perform live and it was so unimpressive that you can’t even motivate someone to turn on their web browser and search for a torrent of your CD.
Lifehouse was really good though. I’d forgotten how much I liked their first album because everything that came after that was so uninteresting. Or maybe I’m just biased because Jason Wade is so hot. Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia he’s been married for 7 years. My life is over!!!!
So now I’m all psyched and in concert going mode. Before Saturday, my last concert was probably over 2 years ago. Goodness knows what I missed!
