concerts

Concert Review, Club Sized

A.B. Kelly · January 31, 2026 · Musings · concert review, concerts, Lake Street Dive, live music, music, Pop Culture, The 502s · No Comments

Last time I wrote about some of the big name artists I saw last year. Maybe Mumford & Sons and Nathaniel Rateliff don’t count as top line artists, but trust me, they’re a step above the other bands I saw. Today, we’re going from arena level to club level. But they all at least have one song that have been played on the radio.

Three of the four actually have that designation this side of 1983, too.

The first concert I saw was in a brand new facility in Sacramento. So new, in fact, that the bands were continuously listing it as “Sacramento TBD.” I started worrying that maybe they weren’t actually coming to Sacramento, and that they were just using it as a placeholder in case they wanted to add an extra stop in between the Bay Area and Portland.

Turns out this new venue just wanted to announce their entire run of shows all at once. Super fancy announcement. Even the mayor was there. They talked about how great this new venue would be. Because it’s “mid-sized” instead of “small” like Ace of Spades or Harlow’s, which have been a staple of the downtown scene for decades and have this fancy thing called “parking.”

This new venue, instead of being near restaurants and bars, is in a residential district with no parking. Allegedly it’s right by the Light Rail line, but the Sacramento Light Rail is terrible, goes nowhere, and doesn’t have any riders except the homeless. Your best option if you wanted to ride it to the show would be to park somewhere else in downtown, then ride the Light Rail the rest of the way. Of course, if everyone were to do that, they’d have to wait an hour or two after the show to ride that mile, because it didn’t appear they were running any more cars than usual and there ain’t a ton of Light Rail running at 11:00 pm.

Good ol’ Sacramento. We also scheduled our freeway closure by the ballpark during the two years that we have a major league team playing there

I ended up parking the requisite mile away, then I just left Wife and Daughter at the venue, fast-walked the mile, then came back to pick them up.

The venue itself was fine. Not enough seats. It’s mostly standing room, which would usually be my complaint about those “smaller” venues they think they’re so much better than. Daughter was only about 5 feet tall at that point, so standing in a crowd wasn’t going to do her much good. Unfortunately, the seats were all on the balcony way in the back.

Oh, and the drinks were overpriced.

Other than that… yay, Sacramento!

The 502s

We saw two bands at the new venue. Technically The 502s was the opening band, but considering we had already seen the headliner before, this band was more than half the draw. Certainly wasn’t the venue.

If you’ve never heard the 502s, do yourself a favor and go look up some videos. Unless you’re in a bad mood and want to stay that way. Every song is upbeat and can neither be sung nor listened to without grinning from ear to ear.

They’re energetic and fun. They’ve got a ukulele and a bunch of wind instruments. Maybe a kazoo in there somewhere? Many of their videos are filmed in a laundry room or on the porch or some other random small spot where they can’t fit half the members of the band. And as far as I can tell, they’re actually playing in all these videos, not just lip synching, primarily because the audio quality isn’t mixed and is kinda raw. Laundry rooms aren’t great when you’ve got ten people playing instruments.

I don’t even know how many people are in the band. And that includes after seeing them live. Each video has a different batch of people. It seems like, on the day of recording a new song or video, they just invite all their friends over. Being Gen Z, half of them don’t show up, and then they base the new song off of whatever instrumentation they have present.

The concert setup seemed the same. There were about ten of them on stage. Some I recognized from videos, some not. They had a female guitar player who sang some verses that I’m almost positive aren’t sung by a female on the official recording. But I didn’t recognize her from any of the videos. And they put saxophone in a lot more of the songs live, presumably because the saxophone player was on the stage. Maybe if we’d seen them the following night, there would’ve been oboe.

As such, the live performance was more or less what you see in the videos. The good and the bad. The singer seemed to be shouting to sing above the instruments which made it harder for him to hit some of the notes. But you forgive him because he’s jumping around and playing his banjo with such energy and vigor. I’d be winded, too.

The saxophone guy totally stole the show. Maybe just because I played sax in high school, but he clearly stood out. I can’t be the only one who thought this, because they actually let him come center stage for a few solos. Those solos became more impressive and distinguished as the concert went on. Given how fly by night the band feels, maybe they decide on the fly who’s gonna get that treatment each concert. And for ours, it was him.

The complete opposite of a certain wind instrument dude I’d see later in the year.

Lake Street Dive

This was our second time seeing Lake Street Dive. The first time was back in ’22, our first trip after Covid, when we flew to Boston to see them on their home turf. They were one of the first bands to open a new venue there, too. Guess it’s kinda their thang.

And by “we,” I mean not only me and Wife, but also Daughter. She’s eleven years old and is already seeing repeat performances. On both coasts. Plus front row at a Billy Joel concert and Taylor Swift in another country (sort of – Vancouver) and next year she’ll see Ed Sheeran. Damn. At her age I had been dragged along to a Thompson Twins concert and that was it.

The Boston venue we saw them in had many similarities with this new Sacramento one. Mostly standing room, only a few seat and they’re all around the fringes on the second floor. But the Boston ones weren’t reserved seats, and Daughter was maybe eight inches shorter then, so even though we tried our best to give her a spot to see from, each spot seemed worse than the previous one.

Reason number two why we made sure to purchase seats this time.

The people who sat next to us paid for their seats, too. Not sure why. They missed the entirety of The 502s. To be expected for an opening band. Our neighbors weren’t the only ones to hang out by the overpriced bar instead of witnessing a fun band. But, you know, the longer the seats next to you go empty, the more you hope that you’re going to have some elbow room for the next few hours. Then, wham, the a-holes show up and no more man-spreading for me.

So yeah, as soon as Lake Street Dive took the stage, a man and a woman take the spots and I’m grumpy. Fortunately they only stayed through the third song. Then left.

I’ve noticed a trend in the last few years that bands aren’t always holding their biggest hits back for the encore. In fact, they tend to ambush us with one of their top hits as the second or third song of the night. Mumford and Sons almost always has either “Little Lion Man” or “I Will Wait” as their second song. The other one goes to the encore, and they’ll usually swap them night to night.

For Lake Street Dive, “Hypotheticals” is, if not their biggest hit, at least their biggest crossover success. It’s the song that I discovered them with. And sure enough, they played it third.

After the song, the couple next to me, who again, hadn’t sat down until the first song was already starting, got up and left. I assumed they were grabbing another drink, but I joked that maybe they only knew that one song and were done.

Turns out that wasn’t a joke. They never came back. I guess that’s why you usually put your most popular song at the end. Not that I’m complaining. I watched two bands I liked and only had to sit with my legs together for three songs. But man, does it occur to these people that a band might have more than one song they like?

As for the songs and the concert, I’ll refer you back to the first time I saw them, because it was more of the same. They’re very good. You go back and forth between what’s more impressive: Rachael’s voice or Bridget’s bass playing. Or the only thing that’s more impressive, which is Akie’s belief that he’s the star everyone’s there to see.

Both Bridget and Rachael are phenomenal. So good, in fact, that you tend to forget about them. It’s an easy trap to fall in – “meh, that’s what they sound like” – but occasionally it helps to be reminded: holy crap, that’s what they sound like.

This time, I think Bridget impressed me more. Something about her playing an upright bass with the finesse and cadence of an electric. Unfortunately, I didn’t film any of her solos. The best I got is the two of them vibing off each other.

One of the songs on their recent album was called “Twenty-Five.” It’s a melancholic song about those loves we had in our early adulthood. The ones that everybody knows wouldn’t and couldn’t last, because at 25, we’re still becoming who we’ll become. But those transitionary years are important. After verses about how totally impossible the relationship would have been going forward, the refrain is “But I will always be in love with how you loved me when we were twenty-five.”

When I first heard the song, I found it interesting because they also have a song called “Seventeen.” That one keeps saying “I wish I’d met you when we were seventeen.” Before we became jaded, before we put our defenses up. You know, when all the lead was still in the pencil. “I bet we could’ve had a good time.”

I love these two songs as bookends. They were released a decade apart from each other. As with life, right? Guessing they were thirty when they wrote Seventeen, when you’re harkening back to the good old days. Hell, the lover from your mid-twenties was too recent. But by the time you get to forty, you realize those twentysomething relationships were foundational.

Can’t wait for another decade when they release “Thirty-One.” That’s about the time we finally know what we’re looking for, but are having trouble finding it in the right people. It’s like they’re turning every verse of Frank Sinatra’s “Very Good Year” into its own song. And I’m here for it.

The odd thing I found, when Rachael introduced the song, was that Bridgett wrote it. I don’t know why that surprised me. Maybe because it feels so personal when Rachael sings it. I guess I just assumed Bridgett was all bad-ass bass playing and Rachael was the emotional crooner. But it turns out their musical talents don’t predict their emotions and/or relationship history.

I just looked it up: Bridgett wrote “Seventeen,” too.

State Fair Concerts (OAR, Air Supply)

The State Fair is always quite the crap bag of bands. Sorry, did I say grab bag? I meant crap bag.

You always know how far you’ve fallen, or how far you have yet to rise, by playing at the state fair. True, it’s a step up from the county fair, but is it really? You’re still playing for an audience who didn’t have to buy a ticket and is in between watching pigs give birth.

And tomorrow, this same stage will be occupied by a Poison tribute band.

This year, I saw one of each type: Air Supply, decades removed from their height, and OAR, a one-hit wonder if you’re very kind with the definition of “Hit.”

Air Supply

This wasn’t my first time seeing Air Supply. If I were to guess, it would be four or five. It’s at least the second, possibly third, time I’ve seen them at that exact same State Farm venue. The other times were at Indian Casinos, the third part of the Fair triumvirate. County Fairs are one extreme, only catering to up-and-comers (or never-will-be’s), while Indian casinos only take the retreads, because their fans are old enough to gamble.

The first time I saw Air Supply, I invited my future wife. She said no. I took an old friend, then proceeded to get drunk and make out with her. Not bad for a backup.

So when we started dating a few months later, we had to rectify the mistake. I think that was one of the Indian casino shows.

The first time, I was blown away. Kinda figured it as a lark, a bunch of crooner songs my parents listened to when I was five years old. You know the songs: Making All out of Lost in Love. They were the Ed Sheeran of 1981 playing a State Fair.

They fucking rocked. Seriously, go listen to those songs again. They actually have a bit of drive to them. Some guitar riffs, too. And in concert, they cranked the volume, maybe sped them up a bit, and when they they sang “And I can make all the stadiums rock,” it didn’t sound like a complete fever dream.

Except that instead of making stadiums rock, it was just the cow stalls.

That was 2008. In 2025, the venue and artists might have been the same, but the result was decidedly not. Seventeen years might be a blink for a young whippersnapper like myself, but considering they started that seventeen years already a decade older than I ended it… yikes.

There’s two guys in Air Supply. The belting singer doesn’t play any instrument. He could still hit most of the belting notes, but when he wasn’t in a certain range, he couldn’t get any volume or force. And the emotion was gone. When I saw them in 2008, I was amazed how much they still punched the lyrics and made songs I’d heard for decades land differently. From docile to passionate. This time the verses were lackluster.

Then there’s the harmony guy. Don’t want to call him a back-up singer, because he’s one of the two leads and he sings a fair amount of the verses. However, he sings substantially less than 50% and he never sings any of the choruses, except as back-up. More importantly, though, he plays guitar. Most of the time. So yeah, Air Supply is a duo of the belter and the other guy.

Well, Other Guy’s voice is struggling. Raspy throughout with a range substantially less than he had in the Bush Administration. It was a little painful to listen to.

Not as bad as Eddie Money, who I also saw at the fair, and who struggled through a couple songs, gasping for air between with his hand on his knee between each phrase – “Baby hold on to me” (huff, huff) “Whatever will be will be” (gasp, wheeze) – then left the stage to let his daughter, who was trying to break into the music industry, sing a bunch of songs she’d written. Good thing I didn’t pay for a ticket, or else I’d demand my money back.

And don’t even get me started on the time I saw Eric Clapton and he let some dipshit play the majority of the guitar solos.

So yeah, my best advice for seeing Air Supply would be to check their upcoming tour dates. With a time machine.

OAR

A few days after Air Supply, I did my friend a favor by going to see a band he liked. I don’t think I had ever heard of them, except when he talked about them.

He said they were good live, so sure. Why not? It’s not like I had to pay for a ticket and it had been a full forty-eight hours since I’d last eaten a funnel cake.

In case you, like me, know nothing of the band and thought it was named after a paddling instrument, that is not the case. You pronounce every letter of the band name. Oh-Ay-Are. It might be an acronym, for all I know.

Turns out I did actually know one of their songs. The refrain on it is “Turn this car around,” although I doubt that’s the actual title. I think it was big somewhere around 2010.

Although to the fans, that must not be their big hit, because they buried it somewhere in the middle of the concert, The song that everyone went apeshit for came last. I think it referenced gambling at the beginning, or maybe a card game, and then all the fans took out playing cards and started flinging them everywhere. Up in the air, at the stage, at each other. If a card fell at your feet, you picked it up and flung it along like it’s a giant beach ball at a Dodgers game.

I was having a real “virgin at Rocky Horror” vibe. Like seriously, the crowd was all polite and calm one second, and really for the entire hour up to that second, and then wham! cards everywhere! But unlike Rocky Horror, this wasn’t one of many schticks. This was just everybody bringing a pack of playing cards to a concert and leaving them in their pockets or purses until one specific lyric, then descending into chaos like a middle school 6-7 rally.

Good thing they didn’t sing that song first or I would’ve come away with a drastically different perception of both the band and its fans.

Oh, and my friend is totally fired for not telling me this was going to happen. Nor bringing any cards. And he calls himself a fan. Pfft. He probably calls them Oar.

The other thing that jumped out was the trumpet player. This dude thought he was the main draw. He always knew when the camera was on him. Sure, he was standing behind the lead singer, so it was on him a lot, but if, say, the cross-shot went up, all of a sudden trumpet was sliding over to the singer’s side. And if lead guitar had a solo, well then, guess what, he’s gonna have a trumpet player staring at his strings.

Dude mouthed the lyrics. Dude made hand gestures. Dude stuck his tongue out and shook his head. For instance, when the lead singer sang “Turn this car around,” there was Trumpet Dude right behind him twirling his finger around in a “run the clock” motion. You know, just in case we didn’t understand the complex phrasing of turning something around.

I filmed this video for my daughter, since it’s a Taylor Swift cover, and although Trumpet Dude is relatively docile in it, you can tell he’s just champing at the bit:

Hey, does this count as seeing three bands at the State Fair? Because I’m pretty sure there was a Taylor Swift cover band on the docket.

Meh, I’ll wait a few decades and she’ll be playing the Fair herself.

Concert Reviews, Arena Sized

A.B. Kelly · December 30, 2025 · Blog Entries · 2025, concert review, concerts, Mumford and Sons, music, Nathaniel Rateliff, year in review · No Comments

Holy shit. We’re already at the last day of 2025 and I haven’t done any of my usual year-end posts. As per usual, my concerts stretched well beyond a single post, so we’re going with the big-ish bands and venues today and take the indie shit later this week. Then Camptathalon will crop up some time in mid-January.

Nathaniel Rateliff

My first concert of the year was all the way back in February. Hardly seems to count as part of 2025 proper. Concerts are for summer, people!

Fortunately, I jotted down some of my thoughts at the time, so this might be marginally representative of what actually happened.

Nathaniel Rateliff has been on my short list of acts to see for some time now. Wife got us tickets for Christmas and she was kind enough to accompany me despite not knowing many of his songs.

We went through a similar situation a few years ago at Ed Sheeran. I knew maybe three or four of the songs he performed. For Nathaniel Rateliff, we set the over/under on songs Wife would recognize at 3.5. She claimed to hit the under.

I don’t know how that’s possible. I mean, when one of us listens to music, the other is often right beside us in the car or the house or whatever. Yet somehow she knew pretty much every Ed Sheeran song, including one that was a Justin Bieber song, and I made it through a Nathaniel Rateliff concert knowing all but a couple songs, despite not owning any of his albums, but each of our other halves were utterly clueless.

The only difference was the “And One” for Sheeran was a bit pricier than Rateliff.

Nathaniel Rateliff is kind of a fascinating story. If we played the “How many times in the multiverse” game with Nathaniel Rateliff having a music career, this reality might have Dr. Strange holding up the “one” finger.

While attractiveness isn’t necessary for recording contracts, it certainly helps. A level of fitness, too, which he doesn’t seem to have. Yet everything about Nathaniel Rateliff makes him more suited to be a bookie standing on the docks in the background of a mafia movie than a multi-gold and -platinum selling musician.

Adding to his unlikeliness is that he was almost 40 years old by the time he had a legitimate recording deal. In sports terms, we’d say that’s far beyond the stage when someone goes from “prospect” to “suspect.” He was 37 when “S.O.B.” hit. Taylor Swift is two years younger than that now and already had to divide her career into “eras” to differentiate which ex-boyfriend each song is about. Nathaniel Rateliff’s like the Kurt Warner of the recording industry. How close was he to bagging groceries before “S.O.B” signed him to back up Trent Green?

I do believe there are other portions of the multiverse where he at least gets “S.O.B.” recorded and then becomes a one-hit wonder.

Or maybe he is a one-hit wonder in this universe? My wife probably thinks so.

He kinda reminds me, both in voice and mannerism, or Joe Cocker. Maybe a little bit of Meatloaf, too. So I might not have been as surprised if he became a musician in 1978. Just not in this century.

This time warp also worked for the venue we saw him in, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. Man, this place must’ve been spectacular in the 1970s, or more likely the 1950s. Unfortunately, my ass ain’t the same size as a 1950s ass. It looks and feels like a multi-purpose room at any high school. Most of the seats were in a U-shape around what probably works as a dance floor sometimes, although today it had seats (can’t remember if they were folding chairs), some on the floor but others on risers leading up to the permanent seats, which started maybe twenty feet off the ground, accessed from the second floor.

The auditorium has been renamed after Bill Graham. I assume it’s Bill Graham, the concert promotor, not Billy Graham the televangelist. I always thought it was odd that the two had the same name. Grateful Dead, brought to you by Billy Graham? What the hell? Buy shrooms from the guy who believes you’ll go to hell for using shrooms. At least he’s cutting out the middle man.

At the front of the dance floor, there was a cordoned-off section that was literally designated as “Pit.” Like, there were signs and stuff. I’ve been in a few pits in my life and most of them aren’t officially designated thus. If you gotta ask if you’re moshin’, ya ain’t moshin’. Then again, with the average age of this particular crowd, myself included, there wasn’t likely to be much moshing. And they probably needed signs because if the directions were in an app, half of us would complain about downloading it and the other half would get lost trying to authenticate it. Then we’d all complain about the price of beer.

Speaking of beer, I had one at the concert. It was in the $13 range. Then they gave me one of those “The machine is going to ask you a question” about tip statements. As per usual, the lowest tip option available was 20%. I could’ve also gone up to 25% or even 30%. But the lowest option, when put into dollars and cents, was about $2.50. Look, I’m all for tipping for good service, but what the hell did she do? She pulled a can out of a tub of ice and then she pulled the tab on it. Is that worth $2.50?

Not to get all old and crochety, but back in my day, there were legitimate debates about whether or not opening a beer was worthy of a tip at all. Seems you should have to actually make a drink to get tipped. Stirring the tonic into the gin is the service for which I am tipping. Pulling something out of the refrigerator and then handing it to me is labor, not a service. And that’s when I was only giving you the change from my $5 bill, not some bullshit $2.50!

Hold on, a one dollar tip on a $4 beer is… let’s see, carry the seventeen, round up to…

Regardless, handing me a can ain’t worth $2.50. And given the average age of the crowd in attendance, I couldn’t have been the only person who took the extra time to write in a custom tip of a dollar. Except those older than me might not know how to do that.

Let’s see, I talked about the venue, I talked about the beer. Anything I missed? Oh right, how was the concert?

It was really good! Even if my wife only knew two songs.

I derisively compared him to Joe Cocker and Meatloaf earlier. But you know what? Joe Cocker was a damn good singer. And Meatloaf wrote some great songs. Nathaniel Rateliff can sing like Cocker and write songs like Meatloaf. With the folky guitar picking of an early 1960s Timothee Chalomet. Oops, sorry, I meant Bob Dylan.

Trust me, that joke woulda slayed back in February when I thought of it.

He’s also got some of the relentless raspy energy of 1980s-era Bruce Springsteen. And I thought that up before he ended his main set with a cover of “Dancing in the Dark.” Unfortunately, without Courtney Cox.

You know that last song energy? Sometimes it’s the last two songs of a concert. Many groups keep it going throughout the entirety of the encore, while some slow down the middle of the encore only to reach the height again.

Nathaniel Rateliff hit that height maybe four or five times throughout the concert. A lot of his songs started out slow then grew to big endings. Unfortunately, one dingbat in front of me decided to stand up for every goddamn one, including a couple that didn’t build toward anything but stayed balladic the whole time and then she just looked like the only fucking moron in the section that didn’t know that song stays like that.

Mumford and Sons

I remember thinking, either during or shortly after that Nathaniel Rateliff concert, that that whole “end of the concert” energy, which Rateliff hit about 30% of the time, accounts for about 90% of a Mumford and Sons concert.

When I initially made the connection, I didn’t even know Mumford was going to tour this year. Whereas most tours are not only planned, but already on sale, over a year in advance, this showed up out of nowhere. After five years of nothing, they announced a new album in March along with an, oh by the way, we’re touring starting like, I don’t know, tomorrow. I just double checked my email and, sure enough, the tickets for their Berkeley show went on sale April 3. The concert was June 10.

In contrast, I bought Ed Sheeran tickets this past September for a show next July. And when we bought Taylor Swift tickets, we bought them twelve months in advance, and those had already been on the secondary market for three months. And in a foreign country, to boot.

And yes, I know, Mumford & Sons doesn’t have the appeal of Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. But it’s not like they’re some obscure indie outfit. Furthermore, they cater to a fan set of middle-aged men, who have a ton more disposable income than the other two.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen Mumford & Sons. Somewhere around the second or third time, I remarked that I’d see them any time they were touring, and figured that it was only a matter of time before they passed Blues Traveler as the band I’ve seen most often. Then they stopped touring for a half-decade and kicked one of the guys out of the band. It’s a good thing they didn’t tour much in the past five years, because for a large portion of that time, I would’ve given them a hard “meh” and looked up if Blues Traveler was coming to town.

Part of that is because, as talented of a musician as Marcus Mumford is, I’m kinda tired of how full of himself he is. In fact, the album that came out this past year was mostly drivel. I know it’s trope for musicians to become more boring as they age. One might easily forget that Sting was part of a cutting edge punk rock trio. I won’t reference the name, because I don’t want him to look them up and decide he has to cancel such misogynistic lyrics as “Every woman I date becomes my mother in the end.”

Speaking of cancellations, which of course “never” happened around 2020, Mumford has one less Son these days. Their banjo player was following a conservative on social media, so of course he couldn’t be associated with the band anymore. Nowadays many of us realize that maybe we went too far with the whole cancel culture. But magically, none of those affected have gotten their jobs back or anything. Including the only banjo player anybody’s ever heard of.

Interestingly, the last time I saw them, which was in March of 2019, I remember remarking that the banjo player didn’t seem as into it as the other three. A noob suggested maybe that’s just his schtick, being the aloof one. But I responded that no, I’d never noticed any of them going through the motions the other times I’d seen them. So maybe he was just as ready to be canceled as they were ready to cancel him.

Of course, they’ve hired another banjo player. Even if they didn’t put any banjo in their new album, they’d still be expected to play it at concerts. And the new banjo player is… fine, I guess? As a banjo player. The biggest drop isn’t in the banjo department, but in the harmonization. Most of their songs contain four-part harmony, and… now they only have three. I know we’re on Winter Break right now, but to my recollection, three is less than four.

I encourage you to check out Mumford & Sons at the SNL 50th Anniversary. They sound thinner than used to. Then again, everybody sounded terrible on that broadcast.

Regardless, I was skeptical I’d ever rush out to see them again. Then I got the notice for an artist presale and, well, next thing I knew I was heading to the Greek Theater in Berkeley, which is a beautiful outdoor arena that dates back decades. It’s a stone bowl, one of the few bowls in all of Berkeley that doesn’t contain weed. The acoustics were probably perfected two millennia ago and you’re sitting on stone benching like a goddamned Roman!

(Edit: Probably Greek, not Roman, huh? Just like Hercules)

So blame it on Nathaniel Rateliff, but yeah, the concert was, well, what can I say? These guys fucking rock. Marcus Mumford may be a sanctimonious prig who wrote a song about people’s obsession with their online persona (“Blind Leading the Blind”) then fired his banjo player eighteen months later over an ephemeral social media thing, but damnit if he can’t work a crowd.

And sure enough, that “end of concert” energy that most bands hit maybe twice over a two-hour set is pretty much the norm for a Mumford concert. They might not start every song at that level, but by the first chorus they’re at 90% and by the bridge, they’ve gone to eleven.

And they don’t even need to change costumes to get there.

Sorry, couldn’t help a little dig at the Eras Tour there. In fact, when Marcus Mumford did his usual run into the crowd (something I forgot he did – one benefit of going five years without seeing them in concert), I pulled out my phone to record, muttering to my friend that it was to show my daughter because “Taylor Swift doesn’t do that shit.”

Not that Taylor Swift could or should do that. Her fans are a tad more rabid and she might not make it back to the stage.

But still, those videos show the energy level of a Mumford concert. I worry and wonder what they’ll be like when he slows down a bit. I’ve always heard that the first time guitar players start getting lazy is doing up and down strokes instead of just down. Glad to report that Marcus is still primarily doing downstrokes. I’ll check again when he gets past forty.

Maybe he won’t slow down. Does Elton John still do his schtick? I haven’t seen him since the 1990s. As long as Marcus keeps that bass drum at his foot. Because, you know, the singer/guitar player should also be the metronome. At the front of the stage.

The crowd at a Mumford concert knows all the words and sings along to everything. I know it’s cliche for bands to stop singing and let the crowd take over during the chorus of their most popular songs. Marcus drops out of pretty much any song at any point. I think he cut out for almost an entire verse of “Believe,” which probably wasn’t even one of their top ten singles, and the crowd kept the lyrics and rhythm the entire verse.

The one song we didn’t sing along to was off their next album. They told us last June that, after five years off, they were going to have back-to-back albums. I think I saw them before “Wilder Mind” came out and they similarly played an upcoming song. The difference was this time they actually put the lyrics up on the screen. So I know the song was called “Icarus” this time. Couldn’t tell you what the song they played back in 2014 was.

The one down part of the show is intentional, when the four… oops, three of them come back out into the crowd to do an acoustic set surrounding a single microphone. You can practically hear a pin drop when it happens. And they’ve gotten better at informing us. Last time I saw them, when they only did one song, Marcus went into how he really, really needed us to be quiet during this portion of the show, which lead to many karens shushing others for simple applause or a quick hoot, not realizing their shushing is equally, if not more, disruptive to enjoying the song.

This time he said the great thing about their fans is that we can be the loudest, most energetic crowd anywhere. “And then you can also all shut the fuck up.”

The funniest part was when they were deciding which song to do for their third acoustic song. Someone shouted out Timshel. To which Marcus replied, “We just played Timshell, love.” Then he might’ve called her a twat.

Oddly enough, despite having toured in the United States for fifteen years, they still haven’t figured out that cunt isn’t as accepted of a word in this country than in theirs.

Two other addendums from this concert: Considering we were in the Bay Area, I was really hoping to hear their cover of “Friend of the Devil.” It’s frigging awesome. Unfortunately, it’s not on any of their albums. Also unfortunately, they didn’t feel Jerry Garcia’s hometown was a great place to do a Grateful Dead cover. Instead, we got Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” Which is already on one of their albums.

And it always begs the question: why does Paul Simon say “Come-ons from the whores on 7th Avenue” like it’s a bad thing?

The other addendum was the opening band, which was called Divorce. I commented to my friend that I hoped they weren’t good, because I didn’t want my search history to show my wife that I had been looking up Divorce recently. Unfortunately, they were pretty fucking good. Fortunately, I haven’t gone looking for them again.

Seriously guys, you might want to think about a name change. Even if people aren’t intentionally avoiding searching for your name, you realize you’re not going to show up in, like, the top thousand search results, right?

I’ll be back later with my takes on: OAR, Air Supply, Lake Street Dive, and the 502s

2024 Concert Review

A.B. Kelly · December 21, 2024 · Musings · 2024, concert review, concerts, Henry Winkler, Jason Mraz, Pop Culture, year in review · No Comments

Earlier this week, I wrote about my family’s sojourn to the final Taylor Swift Eras concert in a city redubbed Swift-couver for the weekend.

Seeing as I didn’t actually go to that concert, I didn’t think it would be proper to include it in my year-end review of concerts.

This time, I’ll go over the concerts I actually did attend, even if we might quibble over whether or not one of them actually counts as a concert. Since we all know the real pop star of the Happy Days set was Ralph Malph.

Don’t believe me? Look up Don Post on YouTube. He might even be more talented than Jason Mraz.

Dammit. Getting ahead of myself.

Jason Mraz

The only musical concert I actually attended this year was Jason Mraz.

Wife and I started dating in the late aughts, so “I’m Yours” was one of “our songs.” It only seemed natural that we go see him perform it live.

Our other song was by Michael Franti. Maybe we should’ve seen him instead.

Sorry, don’t want to spoil my review of the concert.

Starting out with his opening act, which I thought was an odd choice.

It was a jam band. I’m all for jam bands. Except I like the jamming to happen at key moments throughout the show. Not be the ENTIRE show.

Like, seriously, I don’t think there was a single lyric in the entirety of their show. But the lead… um, not singer… lead player?… kept introducing different songs and claiming they were written about a thing that happened, a person she met, an emotion or whatever. But when they started playing, it still just sounded like the same old jammin’.

The… um, the person whose name was on the band… also had a tendency to mouth along the guitar riffs as she played them. Like scat singing, but with no sound coming out. Or maybe there was sound coming out but since there were no lyrics, her voice wasn’t being mic’ed.

Again, I’m all for scat singing. If Louis Armstrong starts touring, I’ll be first in line. While there, I’m might also parlay the 1969 Mets and Jets.

It turns out the opening band were actually just three if Jason Mraz’s backup musicians. I guess it saves on the expenses when the additional help is already on the payroll. Andrew Carnegie called that vertical integration.

Then again, if Jason Mraz was looking to control costs, he might’ve thought about keeping that backup band to, i don’t know, maybe a bakers dozen?

Seriously, his band was fucking huge. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty musicians. I lost track because there were rarely more than four or five on the stage at one time. There are fewer line changes at a hockey game.

He started out the concert with an all female band. I thought maybe it was a virtue signal. Like “look how un-misogynistic I am. I’m making a point that women can be musicians, too.” As if anybody would disagree with that? After all, we were seeing Jason Mraz in a glorified Indian casino. Taylor Swift is playing slightly larger venues.

It made it even worse when I was finally able to track all fifteen or so musicians and realized only six or seven were women, so the likelihood of all five starting musicians being female without it being intentional is statistically improbable. He also let the women play one more song by themselves, second from the last song, and he made a point of how phenomenal these women musicians were, before bringing the men back out for the big show ender.

Kinda feels like the main misogynist in the room was Jason.

And yeah, the women were great. Both the men and the women. It was an amazingly talented band. Most of them switched instruments without missing a beat.

One woman played not only keyboards and percussion and bass, but she also busted out a motherfucking sitar for a couple songs! She stole the show as far as I was concerned. Unlike those wimpy Beatles, who stopped touring when they took up sitar.

Largely because of the talent behind him, this concert was pretty solid from a music standpoint. When they did “The Remedy,” they turned it into a slower, funkier version great for calling attention to a song we’ve heard so often, and so fast, that the lyrics go by without thought.

Meanwhile, the guy whose name was on the marquee occasionally busted out a rhythm guitar from time to time. If had to rank the musical ability of the various people on the stage, Jason Mraz would’ve been in the bottom twenty percent.

Which isn’t a slight, necessarily. Going back to the Beatles, they weren’t the most talented musicians. George and Paul might’ve grown as their careers progressed, but there’s a reason they brought Eric Claption in for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

What made the Beatles great was their songwriting and ability to push the envelope on musical techniques. Jason Mraz has the former. Not sure if he has the latter or not.

At least I thought had the songwriting thing down. Until he told a heartwarming story that the line “I won’t worry my life away” came from a friend of his who was dying of cancer. Jason visited him and was totally bummed out, but his friend said that line and it lifted Jason’s spirits. I mean, if a guy who is dying isn’t going to worry his life away, then… maybe I can steal that line and become super popular with it.

Tough shit, Cancer Dude.

There was another lyric in another song, I forget which one, that he also admitted to totally stealing from someone. This dude is like a walking trademark infringement.

He’s clearly pretty enamored with this propensity of his, too. After one song, he said, “Wow, that’s such a great lyric.” To which I thought, “Oh yeah? Who’d you steal it from?’

Normally I wouldn’t be so snarky when reacting to a little in-between-songs banter at a concert I’d been looking forward to attending. But, my God, this guy had shit to say after every single song. A number of his diatribes were longer than the songs themselves.

He’s clearly going for a particular schtick, which is “Aw shucks, ain’t life great?” I suppose life sure is great for a dude that gets millions of dollars to steal lyrics and hide behind more talented musicians.

Not that I’m opposed to either of those things, but come on, dude, we’re paying to hear songs, not a celebrity basking in the trappings of privilege. If I wanted to hear from a life guru, I wouldn’t have needed to pay an extra Ticketmaster fee.

Plus, I’d already seen a celebrity do a similar schtick earlier this year.

And Fonzie did it better.

Henry Winkler

I wasn’t sure if I should include this. It certainly isn’t a concert by any stretch of the imagination. However, it was listed as a “Tour.” He played the Bay Area on a Thursday night and was doing the same “playlist” (really more of a PowerPoint) the following Sunday in Sacramento.

All to promote his newest album… I mean, book.

I’ve always been fascinated by Henry Winkler. First and foremost, I’m fifty years old, meaning Fonzie was everywhere during my upbringing. And unlike Jack Tripper, the other late-1970s epitome of cool, Happy Days was considered family friendly. Despite the fact that the family killed off their eldest son and then went all “Say Nothing” on it for ten more seasons. Sit on it, Motherfucker!

But then, as I grew up, I saw Fonzie taking on some very un-Fonzie-like rolls. I mean, I could maybe see an aging Fonzie coaching a college football team like he did in Waterboy. But he showed up in a random MacGyver episode as a probate lawyer. If Fonzie decided to use his charisma and charm to go the lawyer route, you know he would’ve been an ambulance chaser a la My Cousin Vinny, not a lawyer dealing with dead people’s estates.

But a mortician in Night Shift? No way Fonzie’s working with dead people unless he can hit the jukebox and bring them back to life.

It turns out that Henry Winkler is actually an actor.

Of course, I’m being facetious. But not entirely.

Given his first role, one might be forgiven for being skeptical of his acting. After all, Steven Segal and Vin Diesel might play one specific type of character really well, but I don’t see them turning a morgue into a whorehouse. I’m still convinced that the reason the first Matrix movie was better than the other two is that Keanu Reeves is best when his character is confused.

Henry Winkler, however, is a damn fine actor.

Such that his most iconic role, Arthur Fonzarelli, is about as far from the real Henry Winkler as you can get.

Fonzie is all about cool, while Henry Winkler seems to be a bundle of neuroses. Fonzie is aloof, Henry is personable and empathetic. Fonzie could take it or leave it, Henry is amazed with life.

Like seriously, how can a guy that was on every third-grader’s lunchbox in America be this humble? How can a guy who was one time at the top of the celebrity hill be so empathetic and enthusiastic about the lives of others?

(Although, Henry claims he was never top of the A List. Fonzie was. When he showed up to parties without using the Fonzie voice, they were usually disappointed.)

I took my mom to see him speak after having given his autobiography to her for Christmas. I didn’t read the autobiography, but figured it would be a generally positive look at life. My mom said it was mainly him complaining about his parents, which, yeah, is a big part of his schtick, but usually he’s very humble and introspective about it. My mom didn’t get that on first reading, probably because she imagined it coming from an arrogant Fonzie, not an effusive Henry.

By the time his show ended, she saw the book in an entirely different light.

There isn’t a heck of a lot to the show. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was basically a PowerPoint of his life story. Hoo-Wee, that sounds exciting!

But he wasn’t just reading off the slides like my students do. They were mainly just some pictures to ground him in case he got off on a tangent. And trust me, he went off on a number of tangents.

In fact, there were a number of times he forgot it was even there and then would have to jump forward multiple slides to get caught up.

My favorite example of this was his long diatribe about his father’s wood-cutting business. His parents wanted him to follow his father into this family endeavor. “Why else do you think we came to America than to give you this chance?” To which Henry responded, “Gee, I thought maybe escaping the Nazis had something to do with it.”

He continued on with this and various other stories about his family fighting his decision to do theater in college.

Maybe five minutes later, he realized he was still on a slide of him as a child, so he quickly forwarded a few slides. For the most part, it was easy to see which pictures corresponded with which parts of his story. Except for the picture of the Hollywood sign, because his story hadn’t progressed to California yet.

He took one look at it and said, “Oh. That was the only Wood I wanted to work with.” We laughed. Belatedly.

His life story revolved around the fact that he has dyslexia and therefore struggled in school. His parents called him “Dummhund,” which translates to dumb dog. Although he did graduate Emerson College and then attended Yale’s graduate school for drama. These two facts seem to counteract both his school struggles and his parents’ lack of support for his acting ability. Yale drama school might not be as selective as the rest of the campus, it’s still an Ivy League graduate school that probably doesn’t take a lot of students who can’t read.

Regardless, if I wanted my daughter to take after me in my wood cutting business, I wouldn’t be signing her up for acting school.

When his story did progress to California, it was the similar story to a lot of actors: Living on someone else’s couch, doing random commercials or sit-com walk-ons for a pittance to stave off starvation or, even worse, returning home with your tail between your legs to grovel before all those naysayers and their “I told you so”s.

He didn’t seem to wait any tables, though. Maybe that’s more of a post-1970 thing.

We learned that Fonzie’s famous “My hair’s too good for a comb” pose was not in the script. Garry Marshall wanted him to actually comb his hair, because greasers gonna grease. Henry thought that was too cliche and asked for it to be taken out. Marshall kept it in. So Henry did what he did, fully expecting them to yell cut and have him do it over, but instead they loved it.

It might have been that scene that changed the trajectory of the Fonzie character from local tough guy to main character.

In the end, it was Fonzie who killed Chuck Cunningham. Just (probably) not figuratively.

The end of Henry’s parents stories are great. After fighting his getting into acting for so long, they traveled all around proudly claiming they were Fonzie’s parents. He’s met people all around the world with his parents’ autographs on his own glossy.

“Not bad for a Dummhund, huh?”

He talked about discovering Marlee Matlin when she was a teenager. Her mother hoped he’d talk her out of her dreams, convince her that Hollywood is too shallow for a deaf girl to make it. Henry responded that he wished he could, but what he saw on the stage was a rare talent, a commanding presence, and it would be an absolute travesty if she didn’t follow through.

He told other stories, as well. My favorite was the time Robin Williams guest starred. He was mostly quiet during rehearsals as the part was continually rewritten. When he finally kicked into character, the rest of the cast could barely contain themselves. What Henry decided was to let Robin take over the episode, not pull a “Hey, this is MY show” and try to steal the spotlight. To just step aside and let the force of nature take over.

And to think, he did all this without stealing from a cancer patient.

It’s not surprising, then, that his whole schtick is about ignoring the naysayers and following your own path.

Not sure that I buy fully into the message. Sure, it works for Marlee Matlin and Robin Williams. And Henry Winkler. But I’ve seen a number of really bad community theater actors who probably need to invest in an accounting degree.

And, to be fair, his message was not just to follow your dreams, but to be true to yourself. But again, that implies people are able to separate their dream-self from their real-self.

He also focused a lot in on children, feeling his parents never listened to him, never really engaged with him. He gave an example of a kid wanting to say something when you’re on the way out the door. But you take the time to ask them what’s up, they say something like, “I like green,” and instead of saying nobody gives a shit, you say, “You know what? That’s very interesting, and I have to go, but I really want to talk more about this when I get home tonight.”

I mean, I get it. But tell me you haven’t had children around forever without telling me, am I right? If we let Daughter dictate when and how we are to leave the house, she’d be a half-hour late to school every day, and I don’t care if that’s her “real self.”

Then again, I think he’s talking more about how the Baby Boomers were raised and how they raised us Gen Xers. If anything, we’ve overcorrected for this. Nowadays, a dyslexic kid isn’t put in the “Dummhund” category. They’re given an IEP that specifies they never have to do anything, ever. Doubt they’re going to learn the perseverance necessary to do auditions.

Sometimes I’d love to treat Daughter like I was treated, allowed to range freely about the neighborhood without a GPS in sight.

When she was born, I swore I’d never give in on Elf on the Shelf. If my dad had sworn his child would never be given something, he wouldn’t have given a shit how much it bothered me or made me a social pariah. Want to know how many elves we have on our fucking shelf? Four!

So yeah, I get that children are impressionable and an errant comment or brush-off can have a lasting impact, but that doesn’t mean we should encourage them to interrupt and hold the world hostage to every whisp of a whim.

Otherwise we’ll get another generation of Jason Mrazes.

2023 Concerts

A.B. Kelly · January 2, 2024 · Musings · 2023, Big Head Todd, Blues Traveler, concert review, concerts, Ed Sheeran, live music, year in review · No Comments

Going to start off 2024 with a couple of 2023 reviews. Not a stupid ranking of my best or anything, just my usual concert review and, later this week, the results of the twelfth annual Camptathalon.

Unfortunately, I only attended two concerts this year, so my concert review might be a bit sparse. Fortunately, one of those concerts had three bands.

Stevie Nicks

I didn’t see Stevie Nicks this year.

I intended to. Unfortunately, we had a couple of last minute cancellations. First on her part, then on mine.

The first aborted attempt came in March, when Stevie Nicks canceled a week or two in advance for health reasons. Wife and I had babysitting all lined up for the makeup date in December until Daughter did her best impression of the Exorcist the night before. Figured it probably wasn’t a good idea to sick (literally) the projectile vomiter on grandma, so we sold the tickets the morning of the show.

Meh. We’ll see her next time. Even if I’ve had fifty years worth of chances to see her and she already had to reschedule the majority of this tour for health reasons. Old musicians tour till the end of time.

Speaking of which, we contemplated seeing Jimmy Buffett in May, but skipped it. I’m sure we’ll catch him next time he comes through… what was that? He won’t be touring anymore?

Hmmm….

Concert #1: 990s Redux

One of my local Indian Casinos (How are we not calling them Native Casinos or Indigenous Casinos yet? Indian Casino is still the preferred nomenclature? If you say so) opened a fancy new concert venue. See if you can spot the trend in the acts they’re booking: Air Supply, Kenny Loggins, Gladys Knight, Rod Stewart.

That’s right: Fans with Disposable Income!

My concert lineup? The Spin Doctors, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, and Blues Traveler.

When I invited my friend, he asked if there might be better uses for the time machine I’d obviously found. An asinine statement, because if it was 1994, these guys would all be headlining, not opening for each other.

Gin Blossoms were also in town the same night, playing the state fair. Some bookie is doing a terrible job, because every single person in attendance at one of those concerts would absolutely attend the other if they weren’t on the same night.

Before the concert started, one of the background songs was “No Rain,” by Blind Melon and I thought, “Wait, are they one of the bands we’re seeing tonight?” Turns out they weren’t making a surprise appearance. They were probably at Gin Blossoms.

Spin Doctors

Weirdly enough, this was the draw of the concert. I’ve seen Blues Traveler and Big Head Todd countless times, often performing with each other. Never seen Spin Doctors. Hell, I didn’t even know they still existed as a band or as living humans.

Turns out they are, in fact, alive. But the first thought I had when they came out on stage was, “Damn, how’d that guy get so old?”

I was kinda expecting the same shaggy hippie dude with the oragnish-brownish beard from 1992. Dude had, Gasp!, white hair.

No, I’m not looking in the mirror, why do you ask?

They started their concert with “What Time is It?” The song answers the title question with the time 4:30 and the rejoinder, “It’s not late, nah, it’s early.” When written, that was presumed to by 4:30 in the morning after a night of partying. Now that we’re all north of 45, the lyrics seem to refer to the early bird special at Denny’s.

They were promoting a new album, because of course they were. Doubt I’ll run out and buy it.

I learned that “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” was not about a jilted love interest, but a step-mom that his dad had finally dumped when he was a teenager. Go listen to the lyrics again. Totally makes sense.

Other than that, they were pretty standard opening band fare. Other than the fact that I knew all the songs. Minus the new songs.

Now that I think of it, they played no songs from in between their popular album and their new album. Kinda think they might’ve taken most of the last thirty years off.

Big Head Todd and the Monsters

I’ve seen Big Head Todd many times. In fact, they might actually be the band I’ve seen the second most. At worst, they’re in third place.

I’ve never really set out to see Big Head Todd. I don’t own any of their albums. I don’t check their tour dates.

That being said, I’ve always enjoyed them. If I see they’re on to a tour, my response is usually, “Oh, hey, Big Head Todd. I like those guys.”

So as long as fandom doesn’t require something like knowing a band’s songs, I’d say I’m a Big Head Todd fan. Let’s see, there’s “Bittersweet.” Oh yeah, and “Broken Hearted Savior” (although if you were to have told me that song was the Goo Goo Dolls, I wouldn’t have argued the point). And then there’s… um, well… Did I mention “Bittersweet?”

Well no more, dammit. Since this concert, I’ve asked Alexa to play songs by Big Head Todd and the Monsters (the last word of which she says with a Boston accent) at least… seven or eight times.

Damn, they’re good. They play a variety of different styles, mostly rooted in blues but with heavy influences from other genres. And Big Head Todd himself abso-fucking-lutely shreds on guitar. His solos were not too short, not too long, and energetic to the extreme.

By the second song of the night, I was in full, “Yeah, this is what I feel like every time I see them!” It was a cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom.” Not much to that song, really. It’s a whole bunch of “Boom, boom, boom, boom”s and “Bang, bang, bang, bang”s in front of that one riff from every George Thorogood song.

You wouldn’t think a guy other than John Lee Hooker, or maybe George Thorogood, could own that song, but holy crap, Big Head Todd made it his bitch. There’s something about finding fifty different ways to sing the same four words over and over. I think my favorite was when he just said “Ooooo” while rolling his finger over his adam’s apple. Right before shredding out a couple of solos.

It probably doesn’t hurt my enjoyment that these dudes dressed exactly like me. Todd wore a Hawaiian shirt while his bass player wore a Baseballism t-shirt. It’s like they’re parallel universe versions of me, where I focused my formative years developing musical talent instead of the propensity to snark on an anonymous blog.

I wasn’t connecting with the keyboardist, though. He never smiled. It’s not like he was frowning, not upset or concentrating. He just stared off into space a lot as if unaware that he was showing up in the background of most of the camera shots on a huge Jumbotron. Since the concert, I’ve found other videos online where he’s got the same disinterested look. Somebody must’ve told him by now, right?

Aside from the keyboardist, however, the rest of the band seemed to be having a blast. Todd is grinning from ear to ear during most of his songs. The only time his demeanor changed was when he was singing the soulful songs, because you can’t be someone’s broken-hearted savior if you look like you just hit a walk-off grand slam.

Seriously, these guys are having way too much fun for having been at this for thirty years. I certainly don’t approach my classroom with the googly eyes of a twenty-something anymore. Meanwhile, Big Head Todd kinda stole the show.

One minor quibble: They played a fun song about Annie Oakley’s husband called “Don’t Kill Me Tonight (over something I might’ve said this morning).” Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be recorded anywhere. Their last album came out in 2017 and their website says nothing about anything forthcoming. Meaning for the foreseeable future, the only place I can hear that song are crappy audience videos from other concerts, none of which seem to capture the fun energy I associated with it. I know bands make zilch on albums these days, but come on, people. I want high quality stuff that I will listen to for free.

Other than that, I loved these guys.

Just like all the other times.

Hopefully I’ll remember that this time.

Blues Traveler

It might take some mental gymnastics through compartmentalized memories to figure out if Big Head Todd are the band I’ve seen the second most. There’s no question whatsoever about which band I’ve seen the most. I can’t say precisely how many times, but it’s for sure double digits.

Pretty sure I’ve even written about previous concerts once or twice on this blog, so instead I’ll focus on what made this concert different than some of the others.

Last time I saw Blues Traveler was at the state fair. At the time, I mentioned that John Popper’s harmonica, while as fast as it’s ever been, didn’t have the force and drive that it had in his (and my) youth. I opined that his losing the weight, while doing a bang-up job of keeping him alive, might have hurt his harmonica-blowing ability.

Glad to say I stand corrected. The acoustics at the Indian Casino are substantially better than at the state fair. Who woulda guessed? The mouth harp was powerful and piercing.

Then again, he seemed to be growing a bit of a gut back. Not an unhealthy Jabba girth like he was known for in the 1990s, but a “Dude, I’m in my sixties, what the fuck do you expect” gut. And I’ve seen him at plenty of outdoor festivals and been fine with his harmonica before. So who knows why his harmonica was a little lackluster a decade ago. But I’m happy to report it was kick-ass this past summer.

The other thing that sounded much closer to the Blues Traveler concerts of my youth was the open-ended jams. Vegas casinos aren’t known for letting their concerts drag on. The concerts are only booked to get you on the premises. Once you’re there, they don’t want you wasting time listening to music. I guess the state fair runs a tight schedule, too. The fireworks have to go off at a certain time and that funnel cake ain’t gonna eat itself, so the bands get eighty-five minutes and not a second more.

The Indian Casinos don’t seem to mind, though, so Blues Traveler returned to their roots as a jam band. There were two or three times throughout the concert when John Popper completely left the stage. And not just to grab a quick swig of water or anything. I mean, he left for a good five minutes while either the guitar player or keyboardist or drummer, or some amalgamation thereof, jammed by themselves.

As such, Blues Traveler was on the stage for close to two hours but only played about ten songs. Big Head Todd, meanwhile, was on for half the time but managed to fit in 15 songs.

I kinda forgot this was even their thing in the first place. Considering how music is consumed these days, it’s not like I’m throwing a live albums into the cd player anymore. I ask Alexa or Pandora or Spotify to shuffle songs by them and similar artists.

The crowd reactions to these extended solos has changed since all of us were twenty-five. One of my favorite concert statements ever was when some random dude walked up to me at a festival and said, “I hope these ‘shrooms last as long as that last solo.”

Now most of the attendees were fifty-somethings who finished their second beer sometime during Spin Doctors and, dammit, have to get up in the morning. A few people left the first time Popper left the stage and a fair number more the second time. When they finished their set at damn near 11:15 pm, the exodus was on long before the encore.

Then they started said encore with a ZZ Top cover instead of one of their own damn songs.

Learn from Big Head Todd and play those covers early.

Concert #2: Ed Sheeran

My second concert of the year was a little-known redhead crooner from East Anglia.

What? The guy who sings “Thinking of You” is multi-platinum? Was Rick Astley unavailable?

Wife, back when she was still Fiancée or maybe even just Girlfriend, gave me one set of instructions: If Ed Sheeran ever toured the United States again, I must take her. It took a decade or more, but he totally made up for it by scheduling his Northern California show near our anniversary. I referred to this year as the “Ginger Anniversary.”

As a bonus, the tickets went on sale right before Christmas last year, so I got credit for both Christmas and anniversary in one gift.

Notice I didn’t say “for the price of one.” If you add in parking, this concert should get credit for the next five birthdays, too.

We saw him at Levi Stadium, home of the 49ers, which is next to an amusement park. Evidently they close said amusement park on the days of 49er games, but not for concerts, so we paid $70 to park at a nearby college and walk about a half-mile. You’d think the powers-that-be would know that concerts sell more tickets than football games, because you can’t sell field seats to a football game.

It’s why I found it odd when Ed Sheeran announced that he’d set the record for most tickets ever sold to a Levi Stadium event. “Even the Super Bowl,” he said.

We all know he really meant Taylor Swift.

Not saying Ed Sheeran’s more popular than Taylor Swift, just that he has a smaller stage. Because, much like the Super Bowl, a sell-out is a sell-out is a sell-out. It’s all just a matter of how many seats there are to sell.

Speaking of Taylor Swift, while I didn’t endure that particular grandiosity this year (fortunate for my sanity, perhaps unfortunate for my blog traffic), when I heard about the songs she sang, it was mostly songs I had heard of. Some Taylor Swift songs I might not know the name of, but when someone says “You know that song, it’s the one that goes…” I realize that yeah, I guess I do recognize them as playing in the background somewhere.

I kind of assumed Ed Sheeran would be the same. Even if I could only positively identify three or four of his songs (and only half of those by name), I assumed I’d at least be able to recognize half the concert by osmosis.

Not so much. I knew more songs at Big Head Todd.

At least I was decked out like a true fan. Ed Sheeran sponsors one of my favorite (minor league) soccer teams. Whereas the fancy Premiere League teams have sponsors like Samsung and Adidas and various airlines, in the minor leagues, they just emblazon somebody’s tour plans on the front of their jersey. I know you’re not supposed to wear shirts from the band’s previous tour at a concert. But what are the rules regarding sports jerseys featuring the current tour? Answer: I’m still not sure, because nobody seemed to notice that I was repping Ed Sheeran’s favorite soccer team. They probably just wondered where I got the concert tee that was slightly different than all the other concert tees.

I must not’ve been the only Sheeran noob at the concert. He started the concert saying he was going to play songs off all his albums. Some for the casual fans, but a lot for the big fans. “And if you just got dragged here, you’re in for a long two and a half hours.”

At one point, he introduced a song that he wrote for another artist while he was “taking time off” between albums. Finally, I figured I wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t know the song. Nope. Everyone else was singing along. I found out later it was a Justin Bieber song, so I’m not too disappointed that I didn’t know it.

About ninety minutes into the concert, he finally played “Photograph,” the first song I could positively identify. He introduced that song with “If you don’t know this next song, you’re definitely at the wrong concert. Even your grandma knows this one.” That tells you how among my peeps I was.

One doesn’t hear comments like that at a Blues Traveler concert, although I’ve gotta think more people get dragged to obscure bands because it’s harder to find another fan. Like last year when I accompanied my friend to Airborne Toxic Event.

It seems to have the opposite effect, though. Paradoxically, the more obscure a band is, the greater percentage of the audience knows the ins and outs of their entire catalog. Now I wonder how many of those record Taylor Swift crowds spent the entire concert watching a ballgame on their phones.

Which is not to say that’s what I was doing. On the contrary, the music geek in me was astounded.

One-man bands should be at a circus, not filling football stadiums. And make no mistake, Ed Sheeran is a one man band.

I didn’t realize that at first, primarily because he had a band out on stage with him. Instead, I thought him the most arrogant musician of all time. Check out the set-up of the stage.

You’ll see he’s on the rotating stage in the middle. All of his backing musicians are on islands far removed from people’s attention. Sheesh, dude. I’ve seen Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, you name it. They all put the band on stage with them. Seemed kind of a dick move to keep the stage all to yourself. I bet even Taylor Swift acknowledges that her songs have bass lines.

After the first song, the band left their individual stages and Ed Sheeran was all by himself. But in song two, background music was still coming through. Wow, now he isn’t even letting them be seen. If I wanted to listen to some pre-recorded shit, I could’ve taken Daughter to the Kidz Bop concert.

(Bonus points to Wife for taking Daughter to the Kidz Bop concert)

After that second song (first without the band), Ed Sheeran stopped to explain what he was doing. Everything was live. He had a series of pedals on the floor that basically worked as an 8-track machine. So he’d depress a pedal on the floor and beat his hand on his acoustic guitar for an eight-count. When he took his foot off the pedal, that recording would repeat over and over, thus becoming the drum beat for the upcoming song.

Then he’d lay down a bass riff. Not on a bass, just using the bottom two strings on his guitar. Then maybe a chord progression to fill in the rhythm guitar, although sometimes he played the rhythm guitar live.

The most amazing tracks he laid down were the backing vocals. While I didn’t know the song at the time, I’ve since learned the name is “Don’t.” That four-part “ah, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah” going through the song is all him. He’d keep playing the track over and over, adding a higher harmonic each time, until it sounded like a full choir behind him.

Look, I’m not saying I’m shocked at this technological innovation. Billy Joel sang all the parts in “For the Longest Time,” even though it sounds like he’s got a full a capella troop behind him. Bobby McFerrin recorded an entire album with no instruments other than his own body. And yes, I’m fully aware the Beatles were never in the same room at the same time while recording one of the most cohesive albums of all time.

But here’s the difference. Bobby McFerrin wasn’t mixing that fucker on a stage in front of 70,000 fans who paid top dollar. When Billy Joel performs his song in concert, he’s got back-up singers. The Beatles stopped touring halfway into their career because they wouldn’t be able to play their new songs live. Ed Sheeran’s doing it all live.

And the mixing didn’t stop once he started playing the song. Because nobody wants to listen to a song that has the same four-note bass riff for five minutes straight. If you’re at a regular concert, some musicians drop out for part of each song, either because it’s written that way or they need to drag on a cigarette. You know that part in every concert when all the instruments except one suddenly cut out and then the tambourine player starts clapping their hands above their head to encourage the audience to try to keep the beat, even though the audience is notoriously bad at keeping said rhythm once the band players stop their direct instruction?

Well, Ed Sheeran kept all those facets by stepping on and off the various pedals while running around the stage at full speed. He steps on two pedals and the bass and drums cut out. By the time he’s done with his guitar solo or eight bars of crooning, he’s moved to the next set of pedals and the bass comes back in. He does the “Clap along” instructions to the crowd while he’s walking to the next set of pedals and, magically, the drums come back in. Since he’s got the pedals at five different spots on the stage, he’s continually mixing in and out sounds behind his live music and singing. But, again, it’s all him.

So yeah, consider me a convert. Not that I’ve listened to a ton of his music since the concert, although there has been a time or two I’ve heard a song (like “Don’t”) and thought, “Wait, where have I heard that before?” Oh right, I saw it mixed live.

At a football stadium.

Ed Sheeran Addendum

Ed Sheeran’s opening act was a guy named Russ. He was… interesting. Couldn’t really decide if he was rap or r&b. But considering the number of f-bombs he dropped, probably the former.

He started his act by flipping off the entire audience. Like for the whole damn song. I think he was trying to flip off “the haters” or whatever, because the name of the song was either “Fuck That” or “Fuck Them,” but the effect was that those birds were flying straight at the stands. And he left that middle finger up the whole song as he walked all the way around the circular stage.

Ironically, after that song, he broke into a whole “So happy to be here.” At multiple times, he talked about following your dreams and believing in yourself because nobody ever believed in him and he used to play little shithole locations. “But now I’m playing at a fucking football stadium in front of 70,000 people!”

Um, dude, we’re not here to see you. Maybe you should go back to flipping people off.

My students, by the way, knew who Russ was. They were appalled that I a) had never heard of him, b) had gone to one of his concerts to see someone other than him, and c) was less than enamored with his performance.

Ed Sheeran Addendum #2

Both Ed Sheeran and Russ (and a third opening act I forgot the name of) kept referring to the stadium location as Santa Clara. Technically, this is true.

But Santa Clara is a suburb. None of us are from Santa Clara. And nobody has ever been “so happy to be here in Santa Clara.”

Just say San Francisco. Or maybe San Jose. Hell, you could say Bay Area or Northern California and get a more accurate reflection of the attendees. None of us are going to cheer for Santa Clara. Even people not from the city proper usually consider themselves from the metro area associated with it.

The first opening act was actually wearing a 49ers jersey.

Guess what: They ain’t the Santa Clara 49ers.

2022 Concert Review

A.B. Kelly · January 6, 2023 · Musings · Airborne Toxic Event, Billy Joel, concert review, concerts, Lake Street Dive, live music · No Comments

‘Tis the season to review concerts
Fa la la la laaa, la la la la
It is cold, my nipples are pert
Fa la la la laa, la la la la
Billy Joel and Lake Street Dive
Fa la la, la la la, la la la
And a band I’d never heard of before.

Damn, am I supposed to rhyme the last line, too? If I swapped the music groups in the third verse, maybe I could say I saw the band in Sacramento. Does Sacramento rhyme with Billy Joel? No? Damn, music is hard. It’s a good thing I leave it to the professionals.

And for the first time since 2019, I saw some of those professionals do their thing this year. So I guess it’s time for me to write a year-end review, which was once upon a time a bit of a tradition on this here blog. Hopefully this post won’t be the equivalent of jamming myself back into work pants.

I’ve already made oblique references to all three concerts, mainly about the experience of going. First, back in April, I wrote about the strange concept of attending a concert at all, and how I was sure I’d be contracting the ‘Rona any day now. Turns out I probably caught it at a concert in June, instead.

That concert was Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden, which I also blogged about because we got the magical Billy Joel upgrade from the nosebleeds to the front row. After that, honestly, who gives a fuck if the concert is terrible?

Not that it was terrible. Just saying that if the entire concert was him taking a giant dump at center stage, I would still give it four-and-a-half stars based on the vantage point.

So sure, let’s start with Billy Joel. I mean, what can one say about a Billy Joel concert? I highly doubt anyone’s here to figure out what he’s like in concert. He’s been doing it for fifty years. Hel, he used to have hair when he was on stage!

I saw Billy Joel way back in college, when the River of Dreams tour came to an arena in Oakland that no longer exists. But damn, I saw some good concerts there. Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, Tom Petty. And, back in 1993, or maybe 1994, I saw one William Joel. Turns out my future wife was also there at that show. Who woulda guessed? We sat much closer to each other in 2022 than in the 1993(4?) show.

I just checked, and it turns out the Oakland Arena is still there. But the Warriors left for San Francisco, so what’s the point?

Billy Joel is only doing one show a month, so he doesn’t have that “middle of tour” fatigue you sometimes get with the bands, having little clue what city they’re in from day to day. When I saw Joe Cocker in Oakland, he was solid, but a few years later I saw him at a winery on the last night of an eighteen month world tour. He could not WAIT to get off that stage. Living on the West Coast, we often get the tail end of tours.

The nicest thing about Billy Joel only doing one show a month is that it’s not a predictable setlist. He delves beyond his singles. The night we saw him, he went for deep cuts like “Zanzibar” and “Vienna.”

Then again, his playlist is my only, minor, gripe. The others I was with got all the songs they wanted to hear, but I didn’t get mine. Daughter’s favorite Billy Joel Song is “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” That came up about halfway through the concert. Wife was hoping for “Vienna,” which also came early. She doubled down on “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” which came up near the end of the concert. She threw down for the trifecta requesting “We Didn’t Start the Fire” while we were applauding for the encore (a ritual we had to explain to Daughter – “No, the concert isn’t really over. No, it’s not halftime. The assholes just hold back their best songs.”). Guess what he opened the encore with?

Daughter also got “Piano Man.” But that doesn’t count, because even if he doesn’t feel compelled to play his greatest hits, there’s no way Billy Joel doesn’t play “Piano Man.”

Still, if you’re doing the math, that’s five straight requests for the two of them. Wife also loves “Downeaster Alexa,” another deep cut he played.

But could the asshole play “Keeping the Faith” for me? Just one teeny song? Evidently that’s too much to ask.

But yeah, the concert was great. He seems happy, which I know isn’t always the case with him. His glaucoma looks pretty bad, an odd mixture of lazy eye with additional glassiness, exacerbated by being up on a Jumbotron. Hard enough to figure out which eye to look at when they aren’t twenty feet apart from each other.

I know we went to see him in New York, but I found it odd when he brought a couple Rangers out with the assumption that we’d know them. I follow hockey a bit, nut I had no friggin’ clue who these dudes were. For all I know, they ride the bench. Maybe they’re water boys. But I had to clap as if these were the love children of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.

It reminded me of the time I saw Trans-Siberian Orchestra. All concert long they talked about an extra special guest star joining them on stage later. A musical legend, they claimed. Someone they were awed to share a stage with. BB King, I was thinking? Stevie Wonder? Clapton? Turns out it was somebody who played in the band Yes. Sure, I like “Owner of a Lonely Heart” as much as the next ’80s kid, but as a general rule, if you have to tell us which band he played for, he ain’t a rock legend.

Same goes for “if you have to tell us what team they play for,” Billy. I get that he’s THE New York guy. And we traveled all the way to New York to see him. But the whole point of him playing Madison Square Garden every month is to make it a destination. He ain’t coming to see us, so we’ve gotta go see him, meaning a lot of us in the audience are from out of state. We’re fine listening to “New York State of Mind,” but if you’re going to bust out a local athlete, it better be Aaron Judge.

From one end of the spectrum, a music legend playing to a packed arena, to another. My first concert of the year was a band I’d never heard of.

Seeing bands I’ve never heard of before isn’t my normal m.o., but my friend had tickets from a canceled pandemic show. The second ticket was supposed to go to his son, who now didn’t want to see a mid-week concert on account of him now having a child and a full-time job.

Besides, I hadn’t been to a concert in a few years. Gotta ease back into it, y’know? What if, my first concert back, it’s, like, my favorite band, but I forgot how to enjoy it? The Beatles, for one night only, but I left before the encore and never heard “Hey, Jude.”

So yeah, if you want to know what songs Airborne Toxic Event played or didn’t play, I can’t tell you. I could look up the setlist for you, but it wouldn’t do much good. I don’t know which songs sounded similar to the album versions and which ones they improved on. The only thing I can comment on is lots of violin.

Or viola, according to my friend. It looked like a damn violin to me. If it was in the south, they would’ve called it a fiddle, and I’m pretty sure they don’t call violas fiddles. Maybe next time I see Airborne Toxic Event, it should be in Texas.

My lasting impressions of the concert were the backlighting on the viola player whenever she did a solo was totally reminiscent of Poindexter doing his rock violin (yes, an actual violin) during the Revenge of the Nerds concert. And the bass player totally looked like Razor Ramon. Not bad for a band of whippersnappers to give this old guy not one, but two, 1980s references.

It almost makes up for having a standing-room-only concert. Almost, but not quite. Cause fifty-year-old calves and knees weren’t made for five hours of standing in the same spot. At least I wasn’t one of the people who passed out. Now that I mention it, those guys were youngsters. Maybe they haven’t gone through the groomsman “flex your knees” training. Then again, one of those pass-outers was just drunk. Us oldies know how to hold our booze. Or else we’re muttering, “What the hell does the beer cost? Boy, back in my day it only cost a nickel.”

(Nickel being a five-dollar bill in this case)

But yeah, in case it wasn’t clear, the concert was good. The band interacted great with the crowd, who were totally into it. But it wasn’t good enough for me to look up any of their songs in the intervening nine months.

Then there was Lake Street Dive. They’re one of my new favorite bands and, as an extra bonus, they are my Daughter’s absolute favorite band. Lots of pandemic days were wiled away with Alexa shuffling through their catalog. As a bonus, we were seeing them in Boston, home of the actual Lake Street, where they were founded. Unfortunately, the dive bar that became the basis of their name has gone out of business.

In retrospect, perhaps seeing them in their hometown wasn’t the best plan.

You know how fans who have been with the band since the beginning hate all those johnny-come-latelies who go to the bathroom when the classics get played?

Well, now I’m one of those new fans. Even worse, I’m seeing them with the old fans who made them a thing. During the concert, the band talked about playing in those dives and how great it felt to come back and play the bigger venues. Many fans in the crowd nodded along. Then they turned and punched me in the face.

Okay, maybe not. But in spirt.

Right before the concert start, somebody saw my daughter, decked out (really, swimming) in her very first concert tee. She asked Daughter if she was excited to see the show. Yep. Favorite band, first concert, all the way from California, yada, yada. She left out the whole “front row at Billy Joel two nights ago,” thankfully, or the Lake Street mob might’ve tarred and feather us.

Then the lady asked the password question. “Who’s your favorite, Rachael or a Bridget?”

Daughter froze.

Perhaps I should explain for the uninitiated. Two women front Lake Street Dive, and it’s Blair vs Jo all over again. Rachael Price is the lead singer, while Bridget Kearney is the bass player. Sure, the others in the band write a good number of the songs and play their own instruments as well. But it seems to be, mostly, the Rachael and Bridget show. Bridget plays an upright bass, which is pretty bad-ass for a pop/rock band and Rachael has a voice that should not exist in nature, especially not in a blonde thirty-something from, am I reading that right, Australia? But raised in Tennessee. Close your eyes and you’ll think you’re listening to the love child of Idina Manzel and Macy Gray, who happened to steal the soul from Shirley Bassey on the way out of the fallopian tubes.

Lots of same-sex love children today, but you get the meaning.

The two ladies’ personalities, or perhaps their personas, match their role in the band. A lead signer is flamboyant, a bass player the steady bedrock. Rachael is every bit the diva, wearing extravagant outfits, exhibiting elegant curls that must take the better part of a day to make look so effortless. Bridget is down-to-tacks business, her hair often in a yeoman’s ponytail. Scratch that, a side pony, which is the name of one of their best songs and albums. Rachael doesn’t even sport a side pony on the cover of the album Side Pony. Bridget does. I feel like Rachael’s hair would demand a United Nations investigation if it were placed in the same general vicinity as a scrunchie.

Daughter wasn’t sure how to respond to the Rachael or Bridget question. In the Mean Girls world of second and third grade, friendship is a zero sum game. If she chooses one, that’s tantamount to saying she hates the other. Just like the kid she played with yesterday, and will play with again tomorrow, but who is playing with someone else today. Might as well be Russia and Ukraine for the next 24 hours.

Finally, with a little coaxing from me, she opted for Rachael. Shouldn’t have been that hard to figure out. She had a pink strip in her hair before she even turned eight years old. A lead singer if I’ve ever met one.

I, of course, am Team Bridget all the way. And yeah, I was always a Jo-boy in Facts of Life, too.

There’s some cool YouTube videos of people hearing the band for the first time. Everybody’s absolutely floored by Rachael’s voice. Voice coaches are at a loss to explain how she does what she does. It’s refreshing, and the refresher I sometimes need after listening to her rendition of “Rich Girl” for the 1000th time that it is anything but rote. But then I get annoyed that none of those first-timers are sufficiently in awe of Bridget’s bass playing. It fucking slaps!

Good thing I was never around to join the McDuck part of the civil war.

Being one of those rat-bastard new fans, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about McDuck, the original guitarist, leaving. Twenty years from now, some of those old guard will bust out their McDuck shirts to shove all our faces in the fact that they were here first. Like when I throwdown with the other history teachers at my school that I remember referring to Mondale and Ferraro as “Fritz and Tits,” something that doesn’t show up in the history books.

McDuck leaving sure seems like poor timing, with the band on the verge of hitting it big. After all, I discovered them in 2020, ergo nobody had ever heard of them before then. Except maybe people in Boston.

Okay, fine, you want proof that I’m the barometer of the entire nation? “Hypotheticals,” my gateway drug song at the beginning of the pandemic, peaked at #2 for adult alternative. Then McDuck left.

Maybe the hitting it big was the thing that made him leave. Maybe he was all in for the regional shows but didn’t want to do the forever tour that’s become standard for musicians these days. Used to be you could record a new album and live off the residuals. Nowadays musicians only make money when they go on tour. I wonder if the post-1966 Beatles could survive these days. They’d probably just sell their music to commercials a lot earlier. Mr. Socialist John Lennon was nothing if not a chaser of every dollar bill in existence. Imagine no possessions… because I have them all.

Therein lies my problem with joining this band late. I don’t know if McDuck leaving is the equivalent of (to keep the Beatles metaphor going) Stuart Sutcliffe, who left voluntarily because he didn’t want to keep playing gigs, or Pete Best, who was dumped to bring in a better musician. Maybe the concert in Boston was the new Ringo’s debut. And I had no idea.

As for the actual concert, it was great. Even better, after the Billy Joel fiasco, I got my favorite songs, but Wife didn’t. Daughter got the pick of the litter once again, with “Hypotheticals” being the second song of the concert. My number one request, “Good Kisser,” showed up near the end. Wife didn’t get “Call Off Your Dogs.” Too bad, so sad.

At least she was prepared for this eventuality, based on the concert setlists leading up to this one. I have a love/hate relationship with those online setlists. It’s nice to have an idea of what songs they’ll be playing and, more importantly, skipping. Had I prepared myself for no “Keeping the Faith,” I wouldn’t have missed it as much. Or at least I wouldn’t have listed it as the song I wanted to hear so Wife and Daughter could mock me for its absence.

But, I don’t know, didn’t that used to be the fun of going to concerts? It seems so formulaic when I can look at your setlist from last night and know I’m getting the same songs in the same order. I know they have to practice and it would be difficult and confusing to change up the order every night. It’s not like Billy Joel just decided the songs that morning. He just has the benefit of a month passing between each show, so he can make each one distinct.

Some artists think they’re switching up the setlist by moving two songs. It’ll be, like the second song of the night Saturday, but the second song of the encore the next night. And the other fifteen songs are all in the same spot. I guess that gives it a different flavor from night to night, but meh.

In fact, this Lake Street Dive concert rearranged four or five songs from the night before. And honestly, I think I would’ve liked the previous night’s finale.

Much like Rachael vs Bridget, there seem to be two distinct flavors of Lake Street Dive songs. They go soulful or poppy. The soulful seems to be the basis of their YouTube fame. From at least three “first time reactions” to Rachael’s voice on “What I’m Doing Here” to the jazzy, half-speed rendition (think the difference in the two Beatles’ versions of “Revolution”) of Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” performed live on a random Boston sidewalk, complete with Bridget’s stand-up bass.

And don’t get me wrong. I love the jazzy. If, after discovering the band via “Hypotheticals” and “Know That I Know,” I had looked up their catalog to find a slew of songs sounding like “Hypotheticals” and “Know That I Know,” I don’t know if they would’ve been on constant Alexa rotation, thus making them Daughter’s favorite band and an impetus for a cross-country trip. A band I’ve recently discovered, the 502s, had a similarly infectious first song. And while I like more of their songs, they have a specific style that I can only listen to for a few songs at a time.

Shuffle a Lake Street Dive playlist, on the other hand, and you’ll go from ballads to pop to hard-edged rhythm & blues. I love it all.

Except during an encore.

Their last two songs going into the break were “Bad Self Portraits” and “Good Kisser,” two absolute bangers, the last of which I would’ve been sweating about if I hadn’t already seen it on the previous night’s setlist. When they came back on stage, they did “You Go Down Smooth,” another one that shows off Rachael’s range and Bridget’s driving bass. Three songs in a row, riling up the crowd and building momentum. Interestingly, the night before they had played the same three songs with a swapped order, with “You Go Down Smooth” leading into “Good Kisser,” then finishing the concert with “Bad Self Portraits.”

Yes, they closed out the song with a screecher the night before. The ballad, a snoozer called “Sarah,” was the first song of the encore, not the final song.

So when they started the encore with “You Go Down Smooth,” I was a little worried. Surely they couldn’t do the ballad last, could they? Maybe Wife will actually get “Call Off Your Dogs,” even if they haven’t played it all year.

No such luck. Maybe they felt safe among the True Fans or maybe they thought the ballads are what we really wanted. So they left us on a low note. Turns out it wasn’t even “Sarah,” but a song called “My Speed,” which I wasn’t even aware of until I just went back and checked the setlist. The YouTube version of that song has 80,000 views, as opposed to “Good Kisser,” which has 2.6 million. “Call Off Your Dogs,” a song they don’t play anymore, has 1.5 million. Not saying video views should dictate setlists, but if you’re hoping to direct us toward one of your lesser-known songs, maybe do it in the middle of the concert.

And yeah, I once waxed poetic about Jimmy Buffett ending his concert with an acoustic ballad. But that was a different situation. He came out with the whole band and played an energetic encore. Everyone did their bows and left the stage, but Jimmy lingered. He played the last song by himself, acoustic guitar in his lap, legs dangling off the edge of the stage.

The concert was over, he was playing us off. A digestiv, not a dessert.

Also, that song was “He Went to Paris.” Okay, maybe it was “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” Heck, it coulda been “Son of a Son of a Sailor.” Whichever one of his ballads it was, it’s from his greatest hits. Way more than 80,000 views.

My point is, if you’re going personal for the finale, it’s gotta be personal to all of us.

Props to them for swinging for the fences, though.

Too bad those types of swings often result in strikeouts.

That being said, you better be damn sure I’ll be seeing them again, multiple times. Often with Daughter in tow.

Excellent fucking band.

And if they add “Call Off Your Dogs,” Wife might join me, too.

New York with Family, the Personal Stuff

A.B. Kelly · July 12, 2022 · Musings · Billy Joel, concerts, family vacation, music, New York, travel, travelblog · One Comment

A few weeks ago, we took my eight-year-old daughter to New York for a trip originally planned before the pandemic. In my last post, I wrote about the touristy stuff we did, like Statue of Liberty and Coney Island. This post will delve more into the personal things, the people and oddities we encountered that you won’t exactly be able to book through a travel agent.

Concert Upgrade

While in New York and Boston, we did two concerts and a Broadway show. The show was Aladdin, which was neither great nor terrible. There isn’t much chance for surprise from a show that follows a 30-year-old movie beat by beat. Unlike the Frozen musical, which adds a song, “Hygge,” that might be better than any in the original movie, the only songs worth knowing in Aladdin are all from the movie. The magic carpet ride, however, was pretty fucking cool. Daughter was mostly “meh” throughout the first act, but when everything went dark and the carpet took off, she couldn’t lean forward enough.

The second concert we went to was Lake Street Dive in Boston. I’ll review it in my normal year-end post. Normal as in “every year up until 2019.” Pretty sure that’s the dictionary definition now. Normal (adj): occurring regularly prior to 2020.” We also spent a few days at the Great Wolf Lodge, an experience which will get its own addendum after I post these two New York writings, because I’ve got a LOT to say about that juvenile bacchanal.

But the first concert we saw was Billy Joel, performing his 80th “straight” show in his Madison Square Garde “residency.” I don’t know how it qualifies as a residency if it’s only one show a month. I also question the designation of “80 straight,” for which they raised a banner to the rafters next to those of the Knicks and Rangers. After all, we originally had tickets for a Billy Joel concert at the Garden in June, 2020 that didn’t happen. Perhaps “residency with 80 straight concerts” is just a fancy way for Billy Joel to say, “I ain’t coming to your town, you’ve got to come to mine.”Not that I’m knocking it. If I could just roll out of bed once a month for my job, sign me up. On second thought, Billy Joel is over 70. I sure as shit hope I’m not still teaching then, even if it’s only once a month.

Billy Joel is known for giving away his front row seats. He got tired of looking into the audience and only seeing super richies who didn’t give a shit about the concert. Next time you watch a baseball game, check out how many people behind home plate aren’t watching the game. So Billy Joel sends his band members and/or security out into the crowds before the concert starts and hands out front row upgrades. That way, not only does he get a “real fan” who was willing to see him from a half-mile away, but he also gets a real fan who is super excited to no longer be seeing him from a half-mile away.

Evidently, now that it’s a well known practice, many fans go to the shows looking for the undercover ticket people. Then they loudly talk about how excited they are to have these Row ZZZ tickets to see their FAVORITE artist of ALL TIME. With signs to boot.

I was not one of those people. I was just a dumbass tourist trying to figure out how to get up to the nosebleeds of an arena I’d never been in before. We were supposed to be on the fourth floor (which, oddly, is beneath the third floor) behind the stage. The fourth floor, or I suppose I should call it the 400s section, only exists in one area of the arena, only accessible by one set of stairs. It isn’t by any arena entrance and isn’t referenced on many of the signs showing people where to go to find their more plentiful sections.

“I think we’re up here,” I said to my family when we found a random staircase in the general section of the arena where I thought our seats were. I’m still not entirely sure the staircase was marked with the sections it led to.

I’m not entirely sure what the guy in the suit first said as Daughter barreled past him. It was something along the lines of “Why are you going up there?” Although it might’ve been more directed, like “You don’t wanna go up there” or “That’s the wrong direction.”

Still completely obtuse, I responded something like, “We’re in section 413,” showing him my phone.

“No, you don’t want those seats. Do you want to sit somewhere closer? “

At this point, I’m thinking the guy is trying to swindle us. Been to far too many ballgames where the “I need tickets” guy is 50 yards away from the “I’ve got tickets” guy. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I slowly realized that, wait a second, we’re already inside the arena. Not the smartest place to engage in ticket scalping when all your customers already have tickets. Like the T-Rex at the Natural History Museum waking up from a nap in the tar pits, I remember we are at a Billy Joel concert, and Billy Joel is famous for…

Fortunately, Wife was much quicker in the uptake. “We’d love better seats. We came all the way from California and it’s her-,” puts hands on Daughter’s head, “first concert. She loves Billy Joel.”

(Never mind that Daughter’s way more excited about Lake Street Dive in a couple of days and, while she does know most of his songs, is mainly just tagging along for this leg of the journey.)

“Are you okay with her being in the floor?” the guy asks.

Are you fucking kidding me? Of fucking course she’s fine sitting on the fucking floor and if she isn’t, then she best be shutting the fuck up about it right the fuck now. We paid $100 for these tickets and were about to be sitting in $1000 seats.

Remember that whole thing about wanting excited fans in the front row? I think my last comment is what he’s going for.

Of course, once we had the tickets, we had no fucking clue where to go. We returned to the spot at the bottom of the stairs to ask the guy, but he was gone. They’ve got to keep moving. As soon as attendees see other random attendees being handed tickets, the swarm is on. After our exchange, we heard other people muttering, “No, it’s usually a lady, but this time it’s a guy in a suit. Look for a guy in a black suit.”

Eventually, three elevators and four or five confused ushers (“Those are floor seats. What are you doing up here in the nose bleeds?”), we finally made our way to the floor. The last usher knew the score. “Hey, you’ve been upgraded!”

So anyway, on the left is a picture of where our original seats were. Third row, right above the Bud Light sign. The picture on the right is the view from our actual seats. Not bad for $110 on the secondary market, huh?

In the past, Billy Joel was criticized for having hot women in the front row. He explained that he gave the tickets to his band members and roadies to hand out to whoever they thought would be good for the front row and, well, guess who they want looking back at them? Not a couple approaching their fifties with an eight-year-old who kinda sorta knows some of the songs.

I assume Billy Joel has adjusted who gets to hand out tickets, and presumably now that he’s playing the same spot every month, he’s switching up who hands out the goods. That’s why the other fans expected a woman. And clearly the guy who gave us the tickets wasn’t going to be staring into our bosoms for the whole concert. Billy Joel now has a daughter close to my daughter’s age, so maybe there are general instructions to find families with kids. Or maybe it’s just to look for the numbnuts who clearly have no idea what they’re doing. That fit us to a T.

Either way, Daughter’s has a lifetime of concert disappointment in front of her after getting front row at Madison Square Garden for her first.

Hotel Bathroom

I’ve got to save a few column inches to discuss the bathroom at our hotel. Not that I have any clue what the fuck was going on in said bathroom. I assume it had something to do with New York being visited by many Europeans, so maybe it’s what happens when you translate bathroom into metric? I know it fucked up the Hubble Telescope. And I might’ve been able to see alien galaxies with the contraptions in there, if only I could figure out how to use them.

First up was Toilet 2.0. What’s that? You didn’t think toilets could grow sentient?

Of course, it had a bidet. That’s to be expected if you cater to foreigners. I’ve dealt with them before, and by “dealt with them,” I mean I’ve largely ignored them because, thankfully I’ve never used a toilet that was bidet only, like many bathrooms give you no paper towel option, only air dryers. How did Covid not do away with those germ spreaders? Every person leaving a dryer-only bathroom is still shaking water from their hands.

While I didn’t use this bidet, I did at least take note of it. It’s got your normal settings for back wash and front wash. The person requesting the front wash looks suspiciously female, which would seem to be a no-no these days. There’s also an option for soft or hard, which makes sense on the back end. Some visits require more aftermath, if you know what I mean. Although I don’t know how a bidet user knows which visit is which. I usually need to check the damage on the TP to know how the rest of the visit will go.

What strikes me most about this bidet is that you can program in two user profiles. What is there to do beyond front or back, hard or soft? I’m trying to think of the person who has a specific bidet method that requires a complex procession and progression through the four options, such that they must save the profile. Add to that the fact that this is a hotel, so you’re really only using this bidet for a few days. And he’s probably still wiping when he’s out and about. Oh, and he’s got someone else in this very hotel room that needs their own super secret, super special progression of H₂O up the Wazoo.

More unusual than the programmable bidet, however, was that it appeared to be a self-cleaning toilet. Not in the manner of a self-cleaning oven or coffee maker, where you can set it to a cycle. More like a Hal-9000, Terminator gaining sentience style of self-cleaning. Every time one of us walked in the room, we would hear the water running. Not like a full flush or anything, but a trickle of water, a sprinkling, like a pre-lubrication of the bowl.

At first we worried that it would run all night, but it seemed tied to movement. It ran even if we kept the light off. So now my toilet is taking notes of how often I’m visiting. Should I expect an introductory email from my friendly neighborhood proctologist by the time I return home?

Oh yeah, and the seat was warm. At first I thought I was imaging it, but Wife and Daughter confirmed. It was like the car seat warmers, except that those can be turned on and off. The toilet seat was on ALL the time. Sometimes when I’m back from walking Central Park on a muggy June day in New York, I might want to deposit funds in the porcelain bank without scalding my sack.

Considering the damn thing had AI and enough energy to power a nuclear power plant, it isn’t surprising that this toilet came with an extensive list of rules and regulations, a standard list of dos and don’ts to avoid liability when it leaves the hotel room to kill Sarah Connor.

The list took up the entire inside of the lid, and while I didn’t read all the terms and conditions before accepting (I had to pee, after all), I noted the first warning, which was “Don’t get water inside.” Um… it’s s toilet. Do… do they not know how toilets work? It takes some water to help alleviate the skid marks. Because even after an overnight of self cleaning, they were still noticeable.

Next to the toilet was a shower that had not two, nor three, but FOUR shower heads. None of which were a standard shower head. First up was a hand held wand, like an old game show microphone with the water coming out the sides. Then you had the overhead waterfall spigot. We’ve got one in our house and I don’t fucking get it. Who the hell wants the water to be dumping down on them from above? Such that, if any of your skin gets merely a splash of water, your entire body is also drenched. How does one lather up or apply shampoo?

The final two shower heads were in the wall, one about chest height and the other at my thigh. They were adjustable to a point, but their sprays were still only able to make it up to my chin and waist, respectively. The spray also maxed out maybe two feet from the wall, with a force equivalent to a water fountain. Not enough to rinse off my armpits or undercarriage, two spots I also couldn’t hit from the overhead. And the microphone came out with too much force for the giblets.

There was only one handle to control all four spigots. Turn it a little bit and you’ll have both microphone and wall. Go too far and you’ll cycle back around to the waterfall. Another handle controlled the temperature, but it didn’t matter, because all four started out frigid.

By day three I figured out how to conduct a masterpiece like I was a few blocks over at Carnegie Hall. Use the wall to get wet, use the microphone to rinse off. Try not to teabag the wall. Turn the microphone on to wet the hair, then off while I shampoo, then back on to rinse. Avoid the third rail of the waterfall faucet at all costs.

Do I get a doctorate at Columbia for figuring all that out?

Random Thoughts

1. Daughter doesn’t know what cigarettes are. Not sure if this is a sign that we’ve parented well or poorly. Maybe it says more about the times. She thinks she knows what cigarettes are, but what she’s actually smelling is marijuana. She doesn’t like the smell, and she doesn’t encounter it often, but now that I think of it, she probably encounters it a hell of a lot more often than cigarettes. I mean, who smokes tobacco anymore? Anyway, whenever she smelled weed (and trust me, it’s all over the place in New York, and that’s coming from a California guy), she’d plug her nose and whine, “Ugh, really? Why do people have to smoke cigarettes here, too?” I’ll be curious to see what she calls it if she ever smells a legitimate cigarette.

2. On our first day in New York, after checking into the 44th floor of our hotel, Daughter looked out the window at the 57th Street abomination. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but it looks like a damn pole. It only takes up maybe 100 feet by 100 feet of real estate, but then shoots up 90-odd floors. The top floors aren’t finished yet and are currently on the market for $180 million. What a bargain. Anyway, when she saw it, she asked, “Is that a skyscraper? I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one.” Bear in mind she’s visited her aunt in San Francisco no fewer than twenty times. And did I mention we were on the 44th floor of our own hotel? Not sure what them kids are calling skyscrapers these days.

3. She ended up being fine with the subway, but her only complaint was that it should be more like Disneyland. Shouldn’t everything? But what she was specifically looking for was the part of the Disneyland train where you go through the dinosaurs and Native American lands. I mean, what good is an underground train system that transports you miles closer to where you need to go for three dollars if it doesn’t also have some racist animatronics?

4. In my whole trip, three people jumped out at me that I needed to note. First was the lady wearing her Miller High Life t-shirt to see Aladdin. Look, I know it’s a show for kids and all, but it is a Broadway theater. She couldn’t upgraded to her nice MGD shirt? Second was the dude wearing a “Don’t California My Texas” t-shirt. At the Statue of Liberty. In New York, which is neither Texas nor California and probably doesn’t want us apply either of the latter two locations to their former.

Third was the guitar dude at the Imagine mosaic in Central Park near the Dakota building where Lennon lived and was shot. Seems it used to be a quiet, contemplative spot, but the last two times I’ve been, it’s a spot for selfies and self-important douchebags who bust out their accoustics for poor renditions of Beatles songs that nobody requested, as if two of them being dead wasn’t bad enough. Anyway, when we walked by this time, Dude was playing “Get Back,” which… um… is a Paul McCartney song? Under normal circumstances I might not critique a guy for not knowing that John had nothing to do with the writing or performance of that song, but Peter Jackson just made a nine-hour documentary, that anybody with the audacity to think they deserve to play their own instrument at a John Lennon memorial ought to have seen, which showed “Get Back” being created from scratch while John was still sleeping off a heroin hangover.

5. Last time I was in New York, I made sure to have pizza from Lombardi’s, the first pizzeria in America. This time I added a few more iconic food items: cheesecake from Junior’s and a hot dog from Nathan’s. I mistakenly thought Junior’s was the cheesecake referenced in Guys and Dolls, but apparently that’s Lindy’s, which has closed. Good thing, too, because the cheesecake was just kinda meh. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it didn’t have much flavor to it. It was sweeter than I expected, more cream than cheese. I’ve had plenty of better cheesecakes in my life.

The Nathan’s, on the other hand, was solid. I’ve had a ton of Nathan’s dogs at various establishments, but the ones at the original location are different. They grill the buns, which the ones in the mall don’t. They also seem longer and thinner than the ones you find in the store, and the griddling (not boiling or grilling) is uniform and thorough. My only regret was standing in the long line with the people who wanted burgers or who knew they served clams, before I realized there was a hot dog express lane where I could’ve got my dog and fries twenty minutes earlier.

6. I don’t mean to criticize these photo op guys in Times Square, but…
*Hulk needs to work out a bit. You wouldn’t like me when I get a beer belly.
*Spiderman, a secret identity does no good if you stand around with your mask off the whole time.
*Grodd is a DC property, not a Marvel property. Shouldn’t be hanging out with Avengers. Oh wait, is that supposed to be King Kong? Dude, he doesn’t even HAVE a comic book title.

7. I only found one sign to add to my collection. If you’ve followed my other travelbolg posts, you know I love signs that are a little too cutesy or on-the-nose. The sign on this particular trip that amused me was neither of those. In fact, the only thing I enjoyed about it was a missing letter.

Sure, I know it’s really just a room. But am I alone in thinking a luggage storage ‘roo would be much better? I mean, it already has a pouch. And then when I’m finally able to get in my room, it can just hop them up there for me instead of making me do the schlepping my own shit after hours of walking around Central Park after minimal sleep on a red-eye. Imagine my disappointment when it was only a closet manned by a human being. I guess I’ll swap the tip for a smaller bill.

I probably need to visit Sydney to find an actual Luggage Storage ‘Roo.

First Concert of the 2020s

A.B. Kelly · May 14, 2022 · Musings · concert review, concerts, COVID restrictions, live music, Mondo Cosmo, music · One Comment

After more than two years away, I ventured into a super-spreader event.

Sorry, I meant a concert. Damn you, autocorrect!

Trust me, I’ve been to plenty of super-spreaders. Most of them included forty-five hormonal teenagers thinking their masks are supposed to go on their chin, not live music.

Oddly enough, the hormonal teenagers are STILL wearing masks around their chins, even after the mask mandate expired. I guess it’s the new version of wearing conservative clothes when you leave the house then going full goth. Their parents think they’re wearing the masks. But if that’s the case, why not put it in your pocket when you get to school?

Sorry. Concert. Right. A friend of mine texted me on a Monday night, asking if I wanted to go to a concert two days later. Seeing as the ticket said 7:00 show, I thought that sounded like a capital idea. I should be home by, what, 9:30? 10:00 at the latest.

Midnight?!?

Turns out the doors opened at 7:00. And they had this thing called a, what was it, opening band? I guess I’m out of practice.

In addition to getting my sea legs back, this was a band I didn’t know many songs from. I had heard of them, and when I checked YouTube, I recognized a few of the songs, so it’s not like I was totally flying blind. But it turns out there’s a difference between being marginally aware of a band’s songs and knowing (and singing along to) every fucking lyric, which described roughly every other human being in the place. It felt really awkward when the lead singer pointed at us to finish the chorus and all I could do was mouth some bullshit. Reminded me of the Apostle’s Creed back in my Catholic days. Did I miss the week when Catechism covered the Airborne Toxic Event?

That was the name of the band we saw, by the way. The Airborne Toxic Event. With special guest Mondo Cozmo. In case you’ve forgotten, as I clearly had, “special guest” means opening act. That band goes on at 8:00, not the 7:00 printed on the ticket, and the band you’re there to see, or that your friend is dragging you to see, won’t be on for another ninety minutes.

My friend invited me because his son, who was the original owner of the extra ticket, had dutifully cleared a night in June of 2020, not April of 2022. He might have been able to make the makeup date March of 2021, but hat didn’t happen, either. In the intervening two years, he’d dropped out of college, had a kid, and started working construction. He (perhaps wisely) didn’t want to attend a late concert then wake up for work the next day. Instead, his twenty-year-old ass makes the two pushing-fifty guys do the late night thing. What am I missing here? Isn’t that what being twenty is all about? I remember overnight trips to Reno (without a hotel) that ended with me getting home just long enough to shower and head into work with no sleep.

Then again, I didn’t have a toddler till I was forty.

The concert was almost pushed off again. The week prior to our show, they had to cancel another thrice-rescheduled show in Southern California because somebody on their bus tested positive. Fortunately, he got the negative test before the Sacramento show.

Are the 2020s maybe not the best time for a band named “The Airborne Toxic Event?” If any new Covid cases are traced back to their concert, the headlines might become confusing.

The venue they were playing was one I’d always been curious to attend, which helped counteract my reluctance to miss sleep. It caters to bands that don’t cater to people my age. Bands with names like Goth After Dark or Dub Stars or Guadalupe Hidalgo. Or Gwar.

Holy shit, Gwar is playing there Memorial Day Weekend! I’m super curious about the clientele at a Gwar show. They were already an obscure joke back in 1990. So it’s got to be a slew of fifty-somethings that never really got the joke. I’m tempted to buy a ticket for crowd watching, but the bastards would probably expect me to sing along with their choruses.

The venue is tiny. And crowded. Hopefully Whitesnake never plays there, because any errant pyrotechnics and we weren’t getting out. As it stood, I couldn’t even leave my spot to grab another beer. I might not make it back. Not that I wanted any more beer, because it would be four hours before I left the confines, and who the hell goes to the bathroom during a concert? I might miss the lyrics.

Wait, are they saying, “Like gasoline”? That’s what it sounded like on maybe the fifth iteration. I guess that’s a cool lyric. I think the line referenced making out when they were seventeen. It rhymes. And, you know, gasoline is explosive. Fire equals passion. Just ask creepy elder statesman Bruce Springsteen and his “Hey little girl, is your daddy home?” Or Whitesnake.

Maybe this band isn’t too bad.

Two people in my close vicinity passed out. We’re all out of practice.

Oddly enough, the pass outs happened not during the concert while people were jumping around, but in between the opening band and the main event. The first lady to pass out was one of the only ones wearing a mask.

Did I mention super-spreader event?

Not too surprising. It was stuffy as hell and people were jockeying for position, despite the fact that nobody in the entire venue was more than twenty feet from the stage. And I know we’re only supposed to mock people who claim that it’s harder to breathe while wearing a mask, but I imagine that when five hundred people are jostling around you, the mask can’t be doing wonders. It was hard enough for me to catch a full breath, and my nose and mouth were wide open. Each inhalation contained about 85% body odor. Plus 15% Covid.

Her mask fluxed in and out heavily a couple times, then her eyes fluttered and she did the standard pirouette before being caught by her companion, also wearing a mask. The crowd was nice enough to part to let him pull her out. As long as you’re going away from the stage, you’re golden. Five people moved into the spot she vacated.

I suppose I should thank this particular canary for reminding me I was in a coalmine. After she went down, I remembered to bend my knees more often. Flex those calf muscles! But after four hours of standing in more or less the same spot, my feet still felt like they’d gone 25,000 steps. You know what’s nice about seeing Classic Rockers in arenas and stadiums? Assigned seating!

The second fainter fell a couple minutes before the band came on. His pass-out was the more pedestrian, self-inflicted style. No mask near his mouth, but he did have a beer, and it clearly wasn’t his first. And “near his mouth” was the closest he came. He couldn’t quite find it. When he faceplanted toward the back of the woman’s head, somebody else grabbed him and stood him back up. At first I thought they were together, but second dude might’ve just been a good Samaritan. Drunkie then sways backward, toward said Samaritan.

When security came around, Samaritan held his hand up, signalling toward the drunkard like a plane’s flying over his deserted island for the first time in a decade. Security was already looking for the drunkard, which was impressive because as far as I knew, the guy had just shown up. Maybe they’ve got us all under strict surveillance. We didn’t have to show our vaccination card because they’re already monitoring our biorhythms from the 5g DNA sequencing that Bill Gates put into our bodies!

Sir Sways-a-Lot didn’t put up a fight. I don’t even think he knew they were ushering him away, nor whether he was at a concert in the first place. Security used the “hey buddy” approach instead of “Respect my Authori-TAY!” and dude was easily led toward the back. For good measure, he took one more sip from the IPA while following along. Not so much rebellion as inertia.

Good Samaritan immediately took two steps forward to take the vacated spot.

How was the band? Not sure. You might want to check with someone who knew what they were seeing. They had a viola player. Or maybe it was a violin. Perhaps even a fiddle. When she wasn’t on the strings, she played the keyboard. But then when she was playing violin, other members of the band stopped playing guitar and went over to play the lonely keyboards. By the end of the concert, that thing had more people tickling its ivory than your mom.

The opening act was also impressive. Much like Jethro Tull, I don’t know if Mondo Cosmo was a person or the whole band. Unlike Jethro Tull, nobody named Mondo Cosmo invented a seed drill. The guitar player was great. Drummer, too. But in looking at this guy’s/band’s videos online, it’s clear that, Mondo Cosmo or not, Mondo Cosmo is the only guy who gets camera time.

He’s pretty hard core. Every bit the Mondo. Seemed way more comfortable on the songs he was jumping around the stage than on the songs he had to sit still and play rhythm guitar. I feel like he’s either going to make it big or flame out very, very hard. I’m rooting for the former.

The drawback of the band was that they had way too much pre-recorded backing tracks. It took me a number of songs to figure out where the hell the bass was coming from. Was he behind the curtain? Was the lead guitar busting out low notes on the thick strings when he wasn’t in solo mode. Once I realized the bass was still going while he was soloing, I realized it was all a ruse.

Then they did a cover of “Bittersweet Symphony.” I knew for a FACT there was no string section in the three-man band.

Did you know you could jump around the stage and headbang to “Bittersweet Symphony”? Although, as a general rule, you shouldn’t get more into another band’s songs than your own.

I don’t want to give away too much, because for the first time sine 2019, I can have a year-end concert review. I’ve got tickets bought for at least one more, with potential plans for as many as three more. When it rains, it pours.

I just had to make sure I got that “your mom” joke in before I forgot it.

2020 Virtual Concert Review

A.B. Kelly · January 5, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · 2020, concert review, concerts, live music, music, Nathaniel Rateliff, New Orleans, Red Rocks, technology · One Comment

Last week I wrote about the two aborted concerts that I hoped to attend in 2020. One was from Billy Joel, a tried-and-true entertainer I saw once before when I was in college. The other was Vampire Weekend, a band I wasn’t even aware of a year ago. For obvious reasons, neither concert happened.

But 2020 wasn’t completely devoid of live music. As long as you were willing to watch it on a screen.

So although I didn’t see the two concerts I intended to see, I did manage to watch two concerts in their entirety. Again, one featured old performers that I’ve already been throwing money at for decades, while the other came from a newish band that I’ve always been curious about seeing live.

Preservation Hall.

I couldn’t make it to New Orleans to watch Vampire Weekend, but at least I could watch a streamed version of a concert for the New Orleans Jazz Preservation Hall. Or maybe it was on PBS. I can’t remember.

Seeing as New Orleans is one of my favorite cities to visit, I’ve watched a few concerts at Preservation Hall. It’s fun to stop in on an afternoon jaunt down Bourbon Street to hear jazz combos similar to my high school jazz band That’s not knock. My high school jazz band was pretty kick-ass. I love me some saxophone, trumpet, and trombone combos. Play me a simplified arrangement of a Count Basie tune, and I’ll happily put off my next hand grenade for twenty minutes or so.

At least I thought it was Preservation Hall I’d frequented on those trips down Bourbon. But now that I looked it up on Google Maps, it might actually be Maison Bourbon, a half-block away from the actual Preservation Hall. Oops.

Regardless, I was happy when they had a benefit concert online, with some really big names. I’m talking Dave Matthews, Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, it was in typical telethon fashion, where they wasted twenty minutes in between each song with interviews and “call in now” and shit. At least I could pause and skip ahead, something my grandparents could’ve only dreamed of back in the Jerry Lewis Labor Day snoozefests.

Those big-name benefit songs had a very, very pre-recorded feel to them. There were a few, like Dave Grohl and Nathaniel Rateliff, who seemed to take it more seriously, picking their jazzier numbers and talking about the importance of either live music or of preserving olde tyme music. Others seemed to send in whatever promo song they had recorded for charity write-offs. I was looking forward to Elvis Costello and was disappointed when he just played some “songs off his newest album,” aka the part of the concert containing the Great Restroom Exodus.

Everybody on the comment box was pining away for McCartney. Where’s Paul? When will Paul be here? Clearly they haven’t sat through proper telethons. It was obvious he was going to be last, and it was obvious to be as non-specifically for Preservation Hall as it gets. He might’ve done “Hey, Jude.” I don’t remember. And he might or might not have looked two decades younger. At least Elvis had the decency to half-ass a newer song so we knew it was recorded this decade.

I ended up liking the actual jazz band, who played an occasional song in between the big acts, better than the names that brought me there in the first place. Even so, I didn’t donate.

I’ll drop some money at Maison Bourbon next time I’m in NOLA and we’ll call it good.

Nathaniel Rateliff.

Later in the pandemic, Red Rocks in Colorado did an online fundraising concert, as well. Again, a place I’ve been to and enjoyed. And a band I like, as well. Tune me in.

And this was legitimately live. They were literally playing on the stage in front of an empty Red Rocks Amphitheater. You could switch cameras to watch the rocks instead, something I found myself doing when I went there, too. Although I didn’t have to switch cams then, I only had to pivot my neck.

Nathaniel Rateliff has been on my short list for some time. He wasn’t some unknown to top ten skyrocket like those Vampire Weekend upstarts.

Of course, my first introduction to him was “S.O.B.,” the best drinking song this side of “Tubthumping.” Although neither of those songs should be considered happy drinking song. Maybe thinking enough about booze to want to write a song about it predicates a certain bipolar dependency. But then just when you’re about to commiserate with the artist, right there on the precipice of singing the blues, they bang the door down with a grandiose “fuck it, let’s get blotto.”

With a first song like that, one could understand my hesitation against full-throated bandwagon-jumping. If your initial hit is reminiscent of “Tubthumping,” you’ve gotta worry about being the next Chumbawumba. And how many other Chumbawumba songs have you ever heard? Unfortunately, I’ve heard others, and they need a drink. Holy crap, that’s a bad album.

At least Rateliff seemed to have some musical talent going for him, which was always missing from even the acceptable Chumbawumba song. Something similar could be said about Fun., which you must properly pronounce as “Fun period,” another band with a song that, at first, sounds like a fun (period) song about hanging out with your friends at the bar, something I did the majority of my twenties (and thirties). But on closer listen, it’s closer to a creepy “Every Breath You Take,” with the dude hoping to swoop in on an ex (whom he beat) when she’s drunk at the end of the night. At least Fun. had some good musical talent, but it was all based on something approaching ten-part harmony. Rateliff gets there by himself. With apologies to the Night Sweats.

But still, if you take one look at him, you don’t think rockstar. Or at least not young, eager, carpe-diem rock star. In his first music video, he looked like someone who’s been touring for forty years. Tore up from the floor up. Rode hard and put away wet. Whatever phrase you wanna use, he was no Justin Timberlake.

So somewhat gimmicky song about drinking and looking like he might be dead by the end of the week. I spent most of the last decade on the fringes of fandom. Perhaps appreciation would be the best descriptor. I heard some of his other songs and they all showed promise. What I was waiting for was the staying power. It’s so much easier when the band already has four full albums before I discover them.

Similar to Vampire Weekend, Nathaniel Rateliff’s most recent album (actually his third album, not his second as I originally believed) came out shortly before the pandemic, so I was able to hear the songs as they received copious amounts of radio play. I enjoyed “Baby It’s Alright.” Very bluesy. A ballad. Some vibrato in the voice. Polar opposite of “SOB,” although not really, because you’ve still got the mournful voice, the hurt. There’s a lot lying there underneath the surface. This was no Chumbawumba. This wasn’t even a repeat of Fun. (Am I supposed to put another period if Fun. is at the end of a sentence?).

The final hurdle I needed to pass (aside from buying his albums because that’s what YouTube is for) was to see him live. He definitely seemed to have the vibe of a good live act. I tend to like the acts whose songs are equal parts emotion and talent. Those tend to make the best shows as opposed to, say, a band that’s more concerned with choreography or pyrotechnics. In all honesty, I’m a little worried my current fascination with Vampire Weekend might wane after seeing them live. They seem a wee bit aloof, a sconce “we wrote good songs, so we don’t need to put any emphasis into it. Sing along if you must.”

So the last thing I needed to become a proper Nathaniel Rateliff fan, to finally determine if he’s talent or hack, was to see him live. And if I can see him for free, all the better.

Oops, was I supposed to donate to Red Rocks while watching the free concert?

And yeah, the dude is solid. He feels every song. He emotes. And he’s no slouch on the guitar, either. I could see him being the kind of guy who would play for three or four hours if the crowd and venue allowed it. With “S.O.B.” it’s clear he’s got some inner demons. It feels like the stage is where he exorcizes them, and he’s all too aware of it.

One oddity was that he appeared to be playing through his entire new album, track by track. I tuned in late, so I don’t know if this was explained or if the first half of the concert was some old stuff. So he never played “S.O.B.”

I bet a lot of artists wish they could do that. After all, the new songs are the ones that mean the most to them. It’s our fault that they keep having to bust out “Freebird.” If we aren’t in the crowd then we can go fuck ourselves if we’re only tuning in for his one hit six years ago.

The weirdest part of the whole concert was that he DIDN’T come out for an encore. What the fuck? Were we not cheering loudly enough at our homes thousands of miles away? What do you want us to do? Pay to get you to…

Oh…

Oh, I think I get it now.

My bad.

2020 Aborted Concert Reviews

A.B. Kelly · December 29, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · 2020, Billy Joel, concert review, concerts, music, Vampire Weekend · One Comment

This is the time of year I usually review the concerts I attended over the past twelve months. I don’t see why this year should be any different.

Except for the fact that every concert on the face of the earth was canceled in 2020. Along with the movies and holidays and amusement parks. We literally had Disneyland booked for about five days after it shit down. You didn’t get that post, so I might as well tell you about a couple of great concerts that almost happened.

Billy Joel. This one wasn’t as imminent as Disneyland, but tickets were bought, timeshare was booked, and flights were very seriously vetted.

My daughter’s favorite musician is Billy Joel. Her favorite days of the year, in no particular order, are 1) her birthday, 2) Christmas, and 3) the day Billy Joel Radio returns to SiriusXM. It makes her so much fun to hang out with amongst all her other first-grade companions.

The temporary SiriusXM station was the first one we could play in the car to break the monotony of those Fisher Price CDs that formed the soundtrack to her third year on the planet. Which was far more exciting for Mom and Dad than it was for Daughter. Compared to “Wheels on the Bus” for the hundredth time, even “When in Rome” shines.

I don’t have anything against “When in Rome.” It’s Billy Joel who hates it. He claims he throws a couple shitty songs on each album because he’s tapped out after ten or eleven new songs, but the record labels require thirteen. If you wanna have a hit, you gotta make it fit.

Then again, Billy Joel also thinks “Piano Man” is just a silly limerick, so what does he know? (Even if he’s right)

Daughter’s favorite song is “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” but not for any nascent desire to warp forward twelve years so she can leave her own Mama Leoni peace-out note for her parents. Nope, she likes the motorcycle sound in the final chorus. Right after one of the final “I’m movin’ outs,” there’s a few revs and then a squeal for emphasis. So maybe she hasn’t made it far from “Wheels on the Bus,” after all.

I think it was the variety that her young ears and mind enjoyed the most. Billy Joel’s got a great catalog if you aren’t in the mood to listen to one style. If we tell Alexa to play Mumford and Sons or Jimmy Buffett or even the Beatles, artists she knows plenty of songs from, it starts to get redundant a lot sooner than if we tell her to play some Billy.

Yes, she knows a few modern songs, too, but with no school this year, she’s still stuck in 2019. Aren’t we all? Still, the songs that really get the “Ooo, I know this one” going are “Piano Man” and “You May Be Right” and “Only the Good Die Young.” Good thing I’m not raising her Catholic.

So we figured what better first concert for her than Billy Joel? If we wait too long, we might be waiting too long, if you know what I mean. The same could be said for Jimmy Buffett, but a) it doesn’t look like Jimmy Buffett’s going to stop touring anytime soon, and b) we might get arrested when half of her blood is second-hand ganja. Maybe when she’s a teenager I’ll make her my designated driver to a Mumford concert. Is sixteen too young to have the super important “British and Aussies don’t consider cunt offensive” talk? Because last time I saw Mumford, that word came out a lot. So it’s either when she listens to Mumford or watches “The Boys.”

The added benefit of taking her to see Billy Joel was the locale. He doesn’t really tour anymore, maxing out at one big stadiums every month or so. This year, the plan was Notre Dame, Detroit, and Fenway Park, none of which are within a couple time zones of us West Coasters. I know he had a really lousy experience when he lived in LA, but c’mon Billy, that was fifty years ago.

Other than that, he has a “residency” at Madison Square Gardens. I put that word in quotes because most of the residencies I know of are in Vegas, where you play every fucking night and twice on Saturday. His residency at MSG is one show a month. Sounds more like a “recurring guest star” than anything involving the word “reside.”

When we came back from New York a couple years ago, Daughter was enamored with New York, commenting every time it popped up on anything. That’s waned a bit, but she’s still fascinated by the Statue of Liberty, something we intentionally avoided when it was just the two of us. We opted for the 9/11 museum instead, since I wouldn’t call it the most kid friendly spot in New York.

So let’s see, daughter’s “favorite” musician (one I haven’t seen live since 1993, and who Wife has never seen) playing in New York. Add in some timeshare points that were going to expire and our Summer Vacation was set. We had tickets right behind the stage which, if nothing’s changed since 1993, is a great place to see Billy Joel, as he puts synthesizers on the back and plays a few songs to the nosebleeds.

Of course, assuming everything works the same as it did in 1993 isn’t always a sure bet. Just ask my back.

I still don’t know what’s happening with those expiring timeshare points. Back in April or May, they sent us a notice about extending all deadlines by three months to account for that “short” shutdown. Haven’t heard anything since said shutdown is at LEAST into “medium” length, right?

So yeah, in some alternate universe, that July 25 concert was great! Daughter loved “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Theme)” and sang along heartily to “Piano Man” when he magically returned to the stage AFTER the concert was over ONLY because our raucous applause convinced his stone-cold, New York heart that he just couldn’t finish yet.

When she’s a teenager, I’ll explain the whole pre-planned encore thing.

Vampire Weekend.

Earlier this year I made a list of my ten definitive albums. Not necessarily the best albums, not the dreaded desert island discs, but the albums that best defined my musical development. In the “also deserving recognition” addendum, I mentioned my newest find, Vampire Weekend. They were kinda disqualified from the album list based on the fact that I didn’t actually own any of their albums. Hard to call it one of my definitive records, or even one of my favorite bands, if I’ve never given them a penny of my money. Unless they get ad money from YouTube.

Note: Wife bought me some of their CDs for Christmas, so I suppose I can call myself a fan now.

Regardless, bands don’t make shit off of albums anymore, which makes 2020 a particularly brutal year for recording artists. The father of my daughter’s best friend is in a band and they are reeling this year. Their European tour was canceled. He went to Nashville for two months where the band could quarantine and record a new album. I commented that at least they would have some income. He only laughed, and it wasn’t a funny kind of laugh.

What did elicit a funny laugh, at least from me, was when Daughter was on Zoom with her bestie. They play Roblox and Animal Crossing and other various games while talking on a computer screen to each other. It’s the 2020 equivalent of that quaint, outdated “going over to a friend’s house.” During one of their conversations, Daughter referenced holding a guitar, then said, in that six-year-old way, “You might not know how to hold a guitar, but my Daddy has one.”

That’s right. Explaining to the daughter of the bass player in a band with multiple top-20 hits and a Grammy that HER Daddy owns an acoustic guitar he hasn’t played regularly since college. Maybe I can talk to her daddy about the complexities of the A-chord.

Anyway, Vampire Weekend is one of my new faves. It turns out they’ve been around for more than a decade, with four albums, but I’m in my mid-forties and can’t be bothered with this newfangled shit. Like Douglas Adams said about technology, any music that comes out after you’re thirty years old is devil-spawned racket that wouldn’t know talent if it bit them in the ass. But when it’s a pandemic year and I can listen to music for the eight hours a day I’m usually in front of and amongst students, I might discover some music this side of the Foo Fighters.

I actually heard Vampire Weekend before everything shut down. After hearing “This Life” on the radio a few times, I had to track down who they were and the name of the song so I could play it for Wife. Better to frontload the spouse with the fact that the song currently stuck in my head has the refrain “You’ve been cheating on, cheating on me; I’ve been cheating on, cheating on you.” That’s not a phrase you want to absentmindedly be muttering to yourself without forewarning.

And of course, once I’ve played that song on YouTube, I get suggested toward their back catalog. Uplifting, catchy guitar riffs, bouncy tempo. Pretty sure I remember hearing some of those early songs a decade ago, most prominently “A-Punk,” but they didn’t distinguish themselves from a bevvy of bands like the Lumineers or Of Mice and Men.

Their lyrics are great, too. Intellectual, extended metaphors, not the normal rhyming riff-raff. One would thing I’d be predisposed to disapprove of them, starting off one of their hits with the line, “Who gives a fuck about the oxford comma?” How dare they! You know who gives a fuck about the oxford comma? Me! You know who else? Adolf Hitler, my grandfather and the man who invented internet pornography.

“This Life” wasn’t actually the first single off of their newest album. First came “Harmony Hall,” which, despite being released in 2019, contains quite possibly the definitive lyric for 2020 – “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.” I hear ya, Ezra.

So once I find a new band, and knowing that I gotta see them live to support them, I checked out their tour schedule. And what’s this? They’re going to be in one of my favorite cities, New Orleans? During my school district’s Fall Break? People with a fancy vocabulary like Vampire Weekend might call that serendipity.

Doubt I would’ve taken Wife to this one, seeing as October is the start of her busy season at work and New Orleans isn’t as high on her list as it is on mine. Definitely not taking Daughter to NOLA until I’ve practiced that whole “cunt” speech more. In April, when we were told “three weeks to flatten the curve,” I broached the subject with a couple fellow teachers, since they’d also be off that week. Their responses ranged from “Who the fuck are Vampire Weekend?” to… “Who the fuck are Vampire Weekend?”

So I countered with hand grenades, the wondrous grain alcohol & melon concoction from the Tropical Isle on Bourbon Street. They grew intrigued. So maybe I would’ve had two people accompany me on the trip but still gone to the concert alone.

The band canceled their May and June dates. Then July and August. I stopped checking. For all I know, Vampire Weekend ended up playing a wonderful show to a sold-out crowd, tens of thousands of fans crooning about oxford commas and cheating on, cheating on you.

Although Vampire Weekend are younger than me. Do kids still sing along at concerts? I’ve been told I can use my cellphone instead of a lighter on ballads these days.

While I’m at it, can we do something about that 8:00 p.m. start time? That’s usually my bed time.

But it wasn’t all cancellations and catshit. I actually managed to see some concerts in 2020! If you can’t get both “live and in person,” you might as well settle for one. Again, one featured artists I saw when I was a much younger man, and another from a band I’m new to. Check out my virtual concert reviews.

Best Buffett in Vegas

A.B. Kelly · November 19, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · concert review, concerts, gambling, Jimmy Buffett, las vegas, nevada, tourism, travel · No Comments

Just hopped down to Vegas for the weekend to catch a Jimmy Buffett show.

Not sure I’ll do a concert review this year. I’ve only seen two shows , and they’re both bands I’ve seen and written about before.

But we traveled to see both bands, so I guess I can write about the travels and the concert together.

I saw Mumford & Sons in South Carolina in March. Did I forget to write about that? Hmm…

South Carolina was very Caroliney. Lots of barbecue places, although most were mediocre until we found an excellent one in Columbia. Also, Columbia is the home of the University of South Carolina. Home of the Cocks. I guaran-fucking-tee I’ve written about my love of the Cocks before.

Wait a second. That came out wrong.

And the concert was awesome. I think I’ve written about Mumford at least twice before. They are spectacular in concert. In fact, I’m seeing them again in a couple months. This time nearer to my home.

But enough about Mumford and the Carolinas. Let’s talk about Jimmy Buffett in Vegas.

Phil Collins was also in Vegas that night. We thought about trying to fit them both in, but their concerts started within a half-hour of each other. Really, Aging White Dudes? Are you not aware that some of your fans might want to double dip?

Oh well, I can’t tell you anything about Phil Collins. But boy, if you’ve ever wondered if there are any places that might make Buffett fans more Buffett, well, I found it for you.

Parrotheads Descend Upon Sin City.

I’ve been to Jimmy Buffett concerts before. I’ve been to Vegas before. Both are experiences in their own regard. So when I saw that Jimmy would be playing in Vegas, well, I just had to go.

Evidently I wasn’t the only one.

Holy shit!

You wouldn’t think a single fan base could make a dent on the Vegas ambiance. Vegas has a few hundred thousand visitors on a normal weekend, right? Some people are there to see Reba or the Jonas Brothers or Barry Manilow or, occasionally, Phil Collins. Heck, I’m guessing the mummified corpse of Frank Sinatra is performing somewhere. Not to mention the sporting events, be they NBA All-Star Games or Ritualistic Ear-Biting.

In addition there are, allegedly, other recreational activities that might draw people to the middle of a fucking desert.

Normally, any one set of those travelers don’t make much of an impact. The Air Supply fans and the Drake fans each orbit around amongst each other without affecting the overall gravitational pull that is Vegas. I bet when Tupac got shot, he was right next to some drunk frat dude with an ironic trucker hat.

So I didn’t expect to see the neon footprint of Parrotheads wherever I went. In fact, it was so far out of my mind, that when there were four people dressed like pirates when we took the monorail (MONORAIL!) to the Flamingo area for brunch, I didn’t even think they might be there for the concert that was still nine hours away. I just thought, “Huh. Pirates.” It’s Vegas. What’re you gonna do?

But as we took the skybridge from the Monorail (MONORAIL!) station into the Flamingo, we saw a giant banner for a “Son of a Son of a Pool Party,” to be held from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Now, you might think this is just a great cross-promotion. Get all the people that are heading your way for the concert later tonight to show up early, spend some extra money. And, yeah, to a certain extent, that’s what was going on.

Except not entirely. Because the concert was at the MGM Grand, not the Flamingo. Granted, I’m never really sure which casinos are currently affiliated with which other casinos. But when I was in the Flamingo, I could use my Caesar’s loyalty card. Then again, when we told the aggressive timeshare salesguy that we were staying at Hilton, he said, “That’s our competitor. How about I give you a deal to stay here next time?” This despite the fact that it’s always been known as the Flamingo Hilton and there was still a sign at the Uber drop-off that referenced “Flamingo by Hilton.”

Regardless of if it’s a Hilton or a Caesar’s, I don’t think either of those are affiliated with MGM Grand. So while this was an attempt to get the Parrotheads out early to spend some extra cash, it was not an attempt by the property where the concert was actually happening. It’s counter-promotion, like the Puppy Bowl at halftime of the Super Bowl. Except instead of half-time, it’s beforehand. And instead of cute puppies, it’s drunks who should have stopped wearing swimwear like that about thirty years ago. Present company included.

I never found out which pool had a Phil Collins pre-party. It might be tough with all of the bald heads.

Then again, the Flamingo does have the Vegas Margaritaville restaurant. So the symbiosis did make a certain amount of sense. In fact, it’s a bit of brilliance. There’s a reason Jimmy Buffett is one of the most valuable musicians despite never having a number one hit. He knows that his fans are in town, he knows they like to drink, and he knows they tend to run older and higher on the socio-economic scale than the average fan base. And they can’t all fit inside the Margaritaville restaurant. So how about a pool party?

Oh yeah, he also opened a weed dispensary in town with the same name as his band, the Coral Reefers. Its grand opening was the weekend of the concert. Not bad for a dumb redneck from Alabama who just sings stupid party songs.

But the Parrotheads weren’t just at the pool party. We went across the street to Bobby Flay’s restaurant, Mesa, and wouldn’t you know it, Parrotheads everywhere. We went to see Potted Potter, a show at Bally’s, at 2:00 in the afternoon, and there were Hawaiian shirts everywhere. And hey, dude in front of me? Do you mind taking off your foam shark hat so that I can see the Ron Weasley wig?

To be fair, there might’ve been a lot of Phil Collins fans traipsing around the Strip as well. But they’re not as easy to spot.

I actually felt under-dressed. Or maybe I was overdressed, seeing as I had socks. But my major faux-pas was my lack of a Hawaiian.

I packed a Hawaiian, of course. I think of you show up to a Jimmy Buffett show without a Hawaiian shirt, there’s a good chance you’ll end up in Parrotjail.

And heck, half my wardrobe is Hawaiian. The Tommy Bahama outlet store is my own personal, inexpensive Disneyland.

But my Hawaiian (with parrots, natch) was still back in the hotel room. Because the concert was still over nine hours away. And I was going to be eating and drinking in between now and then.

These people… were they going to stay out all day? Were they going to start drinking heavily and still make the concert at 8:00? This is Vegas, can I bet the over/under on how many of them aren’t going to make it to the show? Also, any chance I can figure out what seat the dude with the balloon-flamingo hat and the “pet” foam shark on the pipe cleaner-esque “leash” has? Because I’ve kinda got nosebleed seats and would like to know where there’s likely to be an empty seat tonight.

Did I mention it’s easy to spot the Parrotheads?

But here’s another cool thing about Jimmy Buffett. This wasn’t the last I saw of the pirates from the monorail (MONORAIL! ) or flamingo-balloon-hat lady or Pet Shark Dude. They showed up at the show. Just maybe not in person.

If you’ve never seen a Jimmy Buffett show before, he usually plays in front of a giant HD screen that shows pictures and videos that go with whatever song he’s singing. Lots of tropical beaches, bucolic mountain vistas, and fun-in-the-sunners. “License to Chill” featured a video selfie of Jimmy Buffett kayaking. “He Went to Paris” had shots of the Eiffel Tower.

“It’s Five o’ Clock Somewhere” started with a clock with a whole bunch of fives. Then it showed some boat drinks. Then a pool. The pool totally looked familiar… Holy crap! I know that pirate!

What followed was three minutes of footage from the pool party that day. The pool party at a competitor’s hotel. How cool is that? All you have to do is spend money for his concert and at the pool party put on by his restaurant, and maybe his pot dispensary, and you can see yourself up on stage at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Shit, to do that at a Bruce Springsteen concert, you have to be Courtney Cox.

One more kinda cool thing. There was no opening band. Tickets said 8:00 and by 8:17, Jimmy was out on stage. He’s gotta be considerate of all of the old fogeys he made drink for ten straight hours.

He played for two hours, with only a 6-minute break to go grab a drink or a what have you.

I know the break was about six minutes because he played a video to keep us entertained. The video featured a ukulele player playing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” complete with lyrics so that we could all sing along. And sing along we did. You haven’t heard horror tinged with comedy tinged with “aww, that was sweet” until you’ve heard 20,000 people try to time “Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!) Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.”

Why did Jimmy have this random video of a random ukulele player playing a Queen song? Because the guy had opened for him in Dublin. How cool is that? Buffett liked the guy and liked the performance, so he gave him free exposure to this crowd. And sure, that’s often the point of an opening band, but who the hell pays attention to the opening band? That’s just background music for getting frisked by security, right? And those assholes usually end up playing way too long. Some even get surly that we aren’t there to see them and are only paying marginal attention to get a clue as to how much longer their asses are going to be wasting our earspace.

But this guy, Jake Shimabukuro, is playing right in the middle of the show, when we’re all in our seats. And he’s only playing one song, so we don’t get tired of him. And it’s a song we all know and can sing along to. And even better, he didn’t even have to show up! That’s the fucking trifecta of expanding an audience right there.

If only I could get Jimmy Buffett to promote my blog.

Mid-Eighties Circus.

We usually stay at the south end of the Strip, but this time we were on the north end. So I was able to check out the Sahara, which has been refurbished since the corpse of Frank Sinatra played there. And Circus Circus, which most assuredly has not.

I’ve been coming to Vegas since the early eighties, when my age was still in single-digits. And we always stopped or stayed at Circus Circus. Back then, my mom could give me $10 in quarters and I’d go full Latchkey for HOURS on the upper floor. Carnival games, arcade, circus acts. What’s not to love? I remember feeling sorry for my poor mom, who had to be downstairs in the boring casino, missing all the fun up there.

Back then, Circus Circus was actually a destination, a worthy anchor of the northern end of the Strip. There were maybe only ten casinos, most of which had been there long enough to have streets named after them. Circus Circus didn’t have its own street, but it was an anchor, nonetheless.

Boy, its hallowed days are gone.

Unfortunately, this affects their business model, as well. Because there wasn’t shit going on on the Saturday morning we went there.

Those who have followed my travels before know we sometimes bring our daughter’s stuffed animal on our trips, so they can “take pictures” and “report back to her.” Except on this short weekend away, where we went straight from work to the airport, oops!, we left Giraffey at home. No problem, we figure, we’re staying by Circus Circus. Let’s go get her a new friend.

Except the upstairs wasn’t open until 10:00 AM.

WHAT? Sure, maybe the circus acts aren’t going to run 24 hours, but the carnival games? And I know they need employees to run those games. But at least the video arcade should be open, right?

Wait, they don’t do video arcades anymore? Is Pac-Man no longer chic? Boy, where have I been? Downstairs in the boring casino, I guess.

Speaking of the casino, we figured maybe we could just gamble for a little bit until the upstairs opens. I just needed to get a rewards card and… never mind. The reward card center doesn’t open until 10:00 AM, either.

So much for being the city that doesn’t sleep. At least one end of the Strip not only sleeps, but sleeps in as well.

I just threw five bucks in a machine while Wife visited the bathroom. Without the benefit of Big Brother tracking me.

When she returned, I had it back up to five bucks. So yay! I broke even. Although if I had been using a rewards card, I would’ve made a point or two. Whatever, I just pushed the button to collect my winnings.

Then something crazy happened. Instead of the familiar dinging sound I’ve come to expect when the ticket prints, there was a strange whirring. Then something shot out the bottom of the slot machine.

Holy Shit! Those are quarters! Coming OUT of a slot machine. It really IS 1986 in here!

When I realized what was happening, the things went through my mind in rapid succession:

1. What the hell is happening? Where is my fucking ticket? Is this thing possessed? It’s, like, spewing out its innards!

2. OMG! Those are quarters. How fucking cool is that? It’s so retro. Like I’m a fresh- faced 21 year old again (at least according to my i.d. at the time). Tonight were going to party like it’s 1999, baby!

3. What the fuck am I supposed to do with 20 quarters? How fucking annoying is that? I hate coins. If I have a dollar bill, it’s worth a dollar to me. If I have 99 cents, I might as well have nothing. In my world, ten dollars in coins is worth less than a single dollar bill. Because the coins in my pocket at the end of the day just go on the nightstand to die. Or they stay in my pockets where the laundry fairy takes them as compensation for cleaning the sacrificial dirty pants I left in her hamper-shaped altar. Back in the old days, when my i.d. said I was 21, I used to hold onto coins until I came to Nevada, but now slots don’t take coins anymore, so the one value coins had is now gone. Wait a second. If these slots pay out quarters, maybe they’ll… Nope. No coin slots. They take in paper money and pay out coins. Even when you win, you lose.

So I grabbed one of those buckets next to the machine. Remember those? Not that I needed it for a whopping twenty coins, but dammit, they done pissed me off with their coin bullshit. They’ll be lucky if they get this bucket back without my DNA in it.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea behind the retro slot machine is a good one. Think of all the all of the old video game consoles on the market these days. But a ticket-or-coin option would’ve been appreciated. Or maybe at least a warning sign.

Unfortunately it still wasn’t 10:00, so after cashing (coining) in my winnings, we headed for the Monorail (MONORAIL!). Still had to get a new stuffed animal. So we high-tailed it to Margaritaville to buy a couple of plush parrots. I’m sure Jimmy Buffett appreciates our business.

Daughter ended up naming the parrots Jimmy and Buffett. She then took them to show-and-tell at school. CPS, I await your call.

People. A couple shorties to finish off. Two people who stuck out. Maybe not for the best of reasons. Unless you are entertained by idiots, in which case, they stood out for the BEST reasons!

First was the guy sitting next to me at Mesa. He had clearly watched a fair amount of Food Network in whatever podunk area of the country he came from. And being at Bobby Flay’s restaurant gave him carte blanche, or rather creme freche, to make random requests out of his ass.

His wife ordered some pink concoction. Maybe it was a Cosmo, but it looked foofier. He tried it to see if he liked it before ordering a drink of his own. Of course, the server had to stand there for the experiment. Diner decided it was a bit too sweet and wondered if there was something a little less sugary.

Boy, that’s a tough one. Are there any drinks less sweet than a Cosmo? Can’t think of a single one. Sorry. We all know that cosmos are the driest drinks around, right? Certainly not Martinis or Old Fashoneds. A straight shot of scotch whiskey might as well be a swizzle stick when compared to the stifling bitterness of the Cosmopolitan. The mummified corpse of Dean Martin drank cosmos all the time.

He then asked if they could take a drink like that and add some bitters. I wanted to jump out of my seat to assist the server’s explanation that bitters aren’t actually bitter. But whatever. Dude probably heard it on a Bobby Flay show once, so who are we to question his culinary knowledge.

I didn’t pay attention long enough to hear what he ordered. The next time he caught my attention was when his burger was delivered. Tight before he asked if they had any “straight mayonnaise.”

Straight mayonnaise? I didn’t even know condiments had sexual proclivities. Sure, mayonnaise might look like semen, but I’m sure these Vegas condiments are only creaming meat, as God intended, and not some other condiment. Then again, I don’t partake in mayonnaise much, so maybe I’m just out of the loop on the Mayonnaise Agenda. Or is it a War on Mayo-mas?

But what do you expect from someone who orders mayonnaise? No mayo deserves to be anywhere near a well-cooked burger, regardless of whose bread it likes to butter.

It turns out, of course, that this guy wanted regular, unadulterated mayonnaise. None of that garlic aioli crap. Unflavored. If he’s going to dip or smother his food in sweet lard, he wants the pure stuff. Black tar heroin.

I only hope he didn’t want the mayo for those fries on his plate. If I end up yacking in my Irish Coffee, I’m adding it to his tab.

But no, the server explains, they don’t have straight mayonnaise. The closest they have is a subtle aioli.

Food connoisseur passed, disappointed.

Umm… not to side with Patron Guy in this endeavor, but if you have garlic aioli, how do you not have mayonnaise? What’s the base of the aioli? I hope Bobby Flay isn’t shipping his dips in from far away.

Go ahead, Server, double-check on that mayonnaise. It might be listed as creme fraiche.

Dude number two came running up to our Uber driver as we were heading to the airport Sunday morning. Where, he wanted to know, might he watch an NFL game.

Uber Driver feigned ignorance. “No hablo ingles.” Pretty convincing, too, as Wife and I were worried we might have trouble communicating with him. Not that you need to communicate with your Uber driver. That’s what Google Maps is for. But still, sometimes it’s more convenient to explain where we’re going.

Turns out he knew enough English to say and hear what he needed to say and hear. And I’m pretty sure he could understand “TV” and “Futbol.” Even if he pointed to where one could watch soccer, he’d be doing Dude a solid.

But that’s not his fucking job. He doesn’t need to tell Dude where to watch an NFL game on a Sunday morning in Las Vegas. Even if the answer is “Literally Anywhere.”

Seriously Dude, you see that high-rise buildings? Or that one? Right, the ones with the neon. They’re called “Casinos.” And in these “Casinos” are things called “Sports Books.” The “Sports Books” take “Bets” on “Games” and then have giant “TV’s” where you can “Watch.” So if you’re looking for a particular game, pick a direction, any direction, and go into a high rise, any high rise. Then look for the wall with twenty giant screens on it.

They have NFL Sunday Ticket, too, so you can even watch obscure teams like… what’s that? You want to watch the Raiders? You mean the team that’s going to be the Las Vegas Raiders next year?

Yeah, I’m guessing you could watch them on local TV.

Maybe even at Circus Circus.