OhmBlog - Concert Week

Monday, August 22, 2005

Concert Week

This has been concert week for Sheri and I. After not having seen a "mega-concert" in a few years, we saw two in one week - Coldplay at the White River Amphitheater and Dave Matthews at the Gorge. Both venues are enormous - the capacity is around 20K for the Gorge and the WRA isn't small either.

Coldplay was a pretty good show - not inspired but you can tell they try hard. Chris Martin prances around the stage like a mountain goat and does a good Bono impersonation, and their camera guys do a great job capturing live video of the band from multiple cameras, doing real-time automated splicing of all that footage, and projecting it onto the WRA's 2 massive screens. They played all their hits and the crowd went home happy. Of course it wasn't all that happy getting there - there was miles and miles of standstill traffic - took us 2.5 hours to get there, and only one hour to get back, thanks to the premiere parking. Even the band was late to their own show... putting a big music venue in the middle of nowhere only works if you have the highway infrastructure to support it.

Dave Matthews was a better show but unfortunately didn't live up to my expectations. Part of it was the fact that my expectation was to be sitting in the seated section (I thought I bought the premium tickets), only to discover that we were actually sitting on the lawn - bummer. So there wasn't a whole lot of "seeing" to do. But the nice thing about the Gorge is that they have another set of speakers for the folks who are sitting on the lawn, and the music quality was still very good. As for the band, they still have alot of fun out there and make every song into a 10-15min improvisation clinic - that part was enjoyable. But Dave Matthews himself didn't seem like his vintage form - he hardly said a word to the audience between songs, and didn't seem to have the energy of old.

Finally, I got to see the Dinosaur Jr "reunion" show at the Showbox last night. Now that was an amazing show. Lou Barlow and J Mascis somehow managed to bury the hatchet and the band seemed to be tighter and have more vitality than the last time I saw them for the Green Mind tour (without Lou), some 15 years ago. In fact, that was probably the loudest show I've ever seen. Most of their set came from their seminal album You're Living All over Me, with a few songs from their debut "Dinosaur". The only bummer about the show was they played nothing at all from Green Mind - I guess Lou only wants to play the stuff they all wrote together before he left... still, seeing Dino J again in prime form was awesome. I was worried that the show was going to be like the other indie rock legend reunions - where the band was just a shadow of what they once was (prime example being the Pixies show at Bumbershoot last year), but these guys delivered.

Going to see live music is habit-forming - this morning I was starting to think about going to see Rebecca Gates at the Tractor this Tuesday, but Sheri reminded me that I have a family. Oh well, 3 shows in one week ain't bad :-)

Music
Monday, August 22, 2005 12:24:27 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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