Tag Archives: concert

A trip back in time…

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The Labor Day weekend has come and gone, which moves us squarely into the direction of the onrushing conclusion of 2024. I’m struggling to come to terms with it being September “already.” As always, time flies and doesn’t give one single fuck whether you’re having fun or not.

I extended this long weekend a bit so I could schlep over to New Jersey last Thursday to see Avril Lavigne, a long-time pop punk emo girl favorite, joined with opener Simple Plan, in a show that would have killed me dead 20 years ago. Honestly, it was everything I’d hoped for. It’s not often I have no regrets about having to wade into a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands, but this was one of those rare exceptions. 

I had some hesitation after reading some negative reviews of the performance online but found all the issues raised to be completely overblown or nonexistent. I spent the entire night with a smile on my face – no easy feat when I’ve been kept up well past my bedtime. It felt very much like a trip back to the early 2000s… and I guess that was really the goal. It was nice to spend a couple of hours in my 20s again.

Freedom Mortgage Pavilion was a surprisingly nice venue. No issues with the food and beverage options. Clean facilities overall. Everything was well organized. The only flaw in the evening was the physical location of the venue. It’s how I imagine the Green Zone in Baghdad must have been – a safe haven surrounded by high walls, fences, and armed patrols. Once I was inside the bubble, all was well… getting to the bubble, letting Waze direct me through the side streets of Camden, NJ felt like a very questionable decision. Obviously, nothing unfortunate happened, but it wasn’t a good look and marred the experience being the first and last impression of the evening.

In any case, if anyone is on the fence about going to see the show, I can’t recommend it highly enough. All in, it was a hell of a good time, and I’d go again tomorrow if they came back to play an encore. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Self doubt. I’ve never considered myself plagued by self doubt. My ego has always been big enough to generally just assume I’ve made the right decisions. Every now and then, though, I’m intensely bothered by the “what if” of things. It’s not especially helpful way to spend any significant amount of time. I’d very much like to get back as quickly as possible to implicitly trusting my brain to make the right bloody calls. It’s another once of those situations where patience is probably a virtue… and that being the case is always vaguely annoying all on its own.

2. The social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, X, or whatever we’ve collectively decided to call it now is becoming increasingly unusable due to the amplification of right-wing advertisers, conspiracy theorists, “entertainers” pretending at journalism, and flat out misinformation being propagated has definitive truth. I’m finding I have to increasingly curate my list of “follows” to weed out nonsense and even then the algorithm seems determined to deliver content I have no interest in and refuse to engage with beyond smashing the “block” button… for all the good that does. 

3. Concerts. I have a concert coming up at the end of the month. It’s an artist I’ve been looking forward to seeing for a long time, but I’m troubled by one thing. The timing. I just happened to notice that the openers aren’t scheduled to kick off until about the time I’d usually be thinking about heading to bed. That quickly brought about a dissatisfied sigh. Look, I’m absolutely going to be there, barring unforeseen issues between now and then… but knowing that when the show ends and the lights come up, I’m going to be two states and at least 90 minutes from bed already has me feeling entirely worn out. If Broadway shows can put on Sunday matinees at a reasonable hour in the afternoon, maybe aging rock stars should take a page out of that book.

Hella Mega…

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Aging comes with some penalties. Sometimes body parts hurt for no apparent reason. There’s the indignity of bifocals and waking up in the middle of the night to take a wiz. Electronics are getting to be just a little too complicated. 

Whatever. In addition to the penalties, aging also comes with a few underrated perks. Twenty-year-old me usually couldn’t scape together the $20 or $30 for nose bleed tickets let alone the gas money to drive to wherever the concert was happening. Now, though, I’ve arrived at the age where I can finally see many of the bands I wanted desperately to see 20 years ago… and now I can get really good seats.

Even in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime plague, the chance to see Green Day and Weezer on the same bill proved too tempting to resist. I’m awfully mindful that this will be my first trip out into the plague lands into anything that could be remotely considered crowded. I’ve been bitching these last eighteen months about people who refuse to believe in science, so I suppose it’s a case of walking the talk. We’re outside, I’m vaccinated, and my risk of severe illness or death as a result of showing up here is low. Still, crowds make me vaguely uncomfortable to begin with. The plague adds several extra layers to that.

Once the music starts, though, I’m relatively confident I’ll be able to silence that little nagging voice in my head. So much of these band’s “best of” catalog plays out as the background music of my teens and twenties. I’m not one to say high school and college were the best years of my life, but I do have an awful lot of fond memories from back there and back then. These guys were playing the music that underlayers so many of those good times. 

So here I sit, eighth row, slightly left of center, behind the pit (because I’m damned well too old for trading sharp elbows for position and I like to have a tolerably comfortable place to sit down to rest my aching feet between sets).

It’s going to be a very rare late night for me – certainly the first time I’ll be awake to see one day change to the next in at least two years. If the weather holds (and I don’t end up with the damned plague), it’ll be worth it… though you might not want to ask me about it tomorrow when I inevitably wake up at 4:30 in the morning no matter what time I finally crawl into bed.

Change of plans…

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It turns out I’ve reached a point in my curmudgeonlyness, where I’m just not willing to stand around baking for six hours in hundred-degree weather, likely getting rained on, and surrounded by 30,000 potential plague carriers, even when the reward is seeing two of the bands I consider absolute pillars of rock music in the last three decades. 

Ten degrees cooler, not as likely to be soaked to the skin, or maybe even just a little less plague-y, and I’d have probably made different decisions. There were a lot of strikes working against the original plan for today. As it is, I seem to have woken up in a mood this morning that would only be exacerbated by any of those three factors. It’s all an almost iron clad guarantee that I wouldn’t have in any way enjoyed the experience. So yeah, I’m taking a pass on the Hella Mega Tour despite the two year wait and general excitement of the last few days.

I’m a little sad at letting this opportunity slide past, but there will be other, hopefully more favorable opportunities. In an effort to even the scales, I snuck off this afternoon to one of my very favorite used book shops and brought home a few choice bits by way of compensation. It’s not the full rock concert experience I was planning to have today, but it wasn’t a bad trade off as far as I’m concerned.

The fanboy experience…

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I guess you can say I got to have the real fanboy experience this past Friday. Now, I can sit comfortably and interact with generals, political appointees, and elected officials all day long without being the least bit impressed, but put me in front of seven random guys from California and I’m a mumble mouthed mess who can barely bring himself to make eye contact with the god of his own making. It’s good to know that I can still feel over-awed by something, I suppose.

A quick photo op and a few mumbled words would have been plenty enough to make my day, but with my 40th just passed, I wanted to do something a little more out of the ordinary. I’ll say without reservation that sitting fifteen feet above the stage watching your favorite band belt out the songs that have become the staple soundtrack to your life was really one one those thrill of a lifetime moments. I’m still trying to get the dumb grin off my face.

Sitting behind the main speakers, the sound is a little muddled and some of the site-lines are better from the front row, but for seeing the “whole picture” there’s really nothing better. You get to see the organized chaos of on the fly equipment swaps when earpieces stop working and the interplay between shadowed band mates when someone else is taking their moment under the spotlight. You get to see the massive human effort involved in making the seven guys on stage look like they don’t have a care in the world beyond being there making music.

I wanted an experience, bought my ticket, and saw the show. It would have been an absolute steal at twice the price.

If you think you need to go…

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I’m going to see my favorite band again in concert on Friday night. This will be the 5th or 6th time I’ve seen them over the last decade, although the music of Counting Crows has been stuck in my head far longer than that. I knew their songs in high school, but it took a girl with a guitar on the 5th floor of Cambridge Hall to secure their place permanently at the apex of just about every playlist I’ve ever made. Most music seems to wash past me like a stream, but these guys, well, they get in my head and just rattle around.

I wish I could tell you exactly what it is that makes this band speak to me particularly, but I’m sure it isn’t just one thing. Their music is sweet and sad and funny and has this timeless quality that I can’t quite explain. I’m also going to just sit here and pretend it’s in absolutely no way an effort to stay in touch with the version of me that’s still half my age. It’s definitely not that.

So off I’ll go again to willingly wade into a crowd that under just about any other circumstance would agitate every single nerve I have. For this one night only I’ll not just endure it, but embrace it. I suppose that’s how you know I’m a real fan. Of course it also helps knowing you have a seat away from the rabble and there’s a very comfortable shuttle waiting to expedite your exit from the venue and back to a delightful old hotel. Just because you’re going out into the crowd doesn’t mean you have to be part of them, after all.

Sigh. These next three days are going to be interminable.