Ever since I moved to this sexxy new blogging app, I’ve been wondering what to do about the song of the week. Well, I finally decided that a new blog was the right way to solve things. So go check out to the new Nick’s Song of the Week blog.
I must say, I’m captivated by the circus surrounding Bush’s judicial nominees. I’m watching Senator Kennedy’s speech right now; Byron Dorgan (D) of North Dakota was before him. Dorgan was great! “At least you’d think they’d laugh from time to time,” he said, of the Republicans’ incredible ability to forget their hypocrisy.
I’m giddy, and I feel a little bad about it. It’s unclear what’s going to happen, but I’m quite anxious to see how it goes down. I feel like I shouldn’t be so excited by this, since if all goes as planned by Frist & Co., a travesty is about to occur. And yet, I can’t help myself. I want to see the fireworks.
Mike went on a date last night with a girl who worked for a music promotion company. He said something about Bloc Party and she mentioned that they would be playing another, makeup show on the 31st of this month. And tickets weren’t on sale yet!
I was up and online yesterday night when Mike relayed the news to me. And it’s a good thing he did, because I got my two tickets this morning, but he forgot and didn’t get his set. Which is too bad; I was going to try to trade two of them for two others to the Fillmore show.
But, on the bright side, this will be the second time I’m going to get to see them in a month. Woohoo!
We arrived at about 2:30. We walked twenty minutes to the entrance, where we queued to have someone check our tickets and bags. Once inside, we grabbed some food ($7 for a hot dog!!!!) and headed straight for M83. Here’s the list of bands and times for Saturday.
So we saw M83. That was all right; a little repetative and boring. (Mike and I agreed that it was good music to listen to while coding, but not really concert-type music.) Then I headed over to see Snow Patrol. They were pretty good. They played a few new songs and a bunch of songs off Final Straw, but nothing from any of their other albums.
I stopped by The Kills next and was unimpressed, so Mike and I laid down for a bit in the shade. We got up in time to make a Bloc Party CD/poster signing. I got pictures with them too! :-)
The part of the Wilco set we saw consisted only of songs from the new album, which I hadn’t heard. One of them got jamming pretty good, but they were mostly only so-so. I took in Weezer next. They split their time between songs from the blue album and ones off their new album. Nothing from Pinkerton, sadly. Again, their set was all right, but nothing to write home about.
After them I headed over and caught the end of the Secret Machines set, and they were excellent! They were having a great time on stage, you could tell. And they tore it up. I’ve been meaning to put one of their songs on the SOW list since last year when Mike turned me onto it, and I’m going to do that as soon as we get back.
After Secret Machines, some people left and the rest of us tried to get as close to the stage as we could. Bloc Party showed up and kicked some serious ass. They played all the songs I hoped they would, and the crowd was really into it. I must admit, there were a couple times where I couldn’t understand what Kele was saying between songs, but it all worked out. The (completely psycho) drummer took off his shirt after the first song. This was the best set I caught all of the first day.
After Bloc Party I wandered over to the big stage and watched Coldplay. They were the exact opposite of Weezer, totally excited to be playing here, digging the huge crowd, putting on a great show. For one of the songs Chris asked us to all take pictures at one point. That was a pretty neat effect, to see all the flashes continuously.
I left Coldplay before the encore to hit up the last 15 minutes of Spoon. They were all right, but not anywhere as excited as the last two bands.
And that was it. We came back to Mike’s dad’s place. I read a fascinating and deeply disturbing article in The New Yorker about how climate change has effected civilizations before ours. (This article was the second in a three-part series. The first one is available online.) And then bed. We’ll be leaving for Day 2 shortly.
