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| Monday, May 16, 2005 11:56 PM |
| Thoughts on Another Concert |
 by Fëanor |
- I promised last night that I'd talk about the Built to Spill concert today, so I'd better hurry up and do that before I run out of time.
Built to Spill is a fantastic and rather obscure indie band composed of four amazing guitar players and a drummer. As I learned last time I saw them, they tend to play a lot of covers when they perform live, and they're usually covers of other obscure indie bands. I think that might actually be one of the reasons why I didn't really enjoy them that much the last time I saw them--I didn't recognize a lot of the songs they were playing. This time, I was prepared for a lot of covers, and for whatever reason, I found myself enjoying them even when I didn't recognize them.
All in all, it was another great show. They played many of their best songs, including a few of my personal favorites, and really nailed all the solos. It helped that the sound was absolutely fantastic. When they ripped into those amazing four-part guitar licks, I could feel it deep in my gut. This was a nice surprise, as pretty much every other time I've gone to a concert, something has gone wrong with the sound--either the lead singer's mike was too low, or the keyboard was too loud, or something. But these last two nights at the Electric Factory, I was perfectly happy with the sound. I could always hear the singers over the instruments, but the instruments were plenty loud, and it all sounded great. I could have just gotten lucky, I suppose, but I'm going to attribute the excellent sound to the venue, and I'm going to hope the next time a band I like comes through, they stop there.
- Speaking of the sound system, I was struck at the show--mainly because I happened to end up standing next to them--by the incredible complexity of the devices that are used to regulate all the stage equipment. There are these two huge tables in the center back of the Electric Factory, each with a guy sitting at them throughout the show, absolutely covered with knobs and buttons and dials and switches and sliders and readouts. It's really almost surreal, like that scene in Airplane! where the camera pans over the controls of the plane and they just seem to go on and on forever. I was really tempted to ask the guys what the hell all those controls did, and if they seriously needed to make all the adjustments (some almost imperceptibly tiny, and others huge and sweeping) that they were constantly making, and how they could keep track of it all without more and better labels. But I didn't, and instead just stared at them and their equipment on and off throughout the show.
- A couple of things I didn't like about the Electric Factory, though--the food and the smoking.
I have this thing about being late (this is getting back to the food and the smoking, I swear), which doesn't prevent me from being late, but does make me very unhappy when I don't get to things on time. And for some reason, this thing extends to concerts, even though I know that there's always at least one (inevitably crappy) opening act, and the real band doesn't end up going on until at least an hour and a half after showtime.
So, long story short (too late), an enjoyable family get-together ended up taking longer than I had expected, so I didn't stop for dinner on my way to the concert, and managed to make it into the Electric Factory soon after the start of the first opening band's act (yeah, there were two opening bands. Two!). This meant that I was forced to eat dinner at the Electric Factory. This ultimately cost me twelve dollars, and a bad stomach ache. It consisted of a slice of pizza, a pretzel (which was going to be another slice of pizza, until I realized that the first slice of pizza was merely a piece of bread with Ragu and mozzarella cheese smeared on it), a cookie, a Coke (which tasted suspiciously like Diet Coke), and a bottle of water.
I hadn't noticed the night before that the Electric Factory purports to be a non-smoking venue. It had been remarkably less smokey than previous recent concerts I'd been to, but I didn't really think much about it; I thought I just got lucky, or that Ben Folds fans were generally a non-smoking bunch. But this time I noticed there are No Smoking signs plastered up all over the Electric Factory. I also noticed a lot more people smoking. Seriously, they were lighting up all over the place. I moved away from a couple of smoking young women (besides everything else, second-hand smoke doesn't exactly help my allergies) only to find myself stationed next to four to eight other smokers. Blech. Occasionally the staff of the Electric Factory made a half-hearted attempt to stop this flagrant law-breaking (which I couldn't really fault the smokers for too much, as I hadn't even noticed all the no smoking signs the first two times I'd been to the place, and really, who expects a rock concert to be non-smoking?), but for every smoker they got to stamp out his cigarette, there were two more nearby who went on happily puffing away.
- Anyway, I have plenty more to post about, but once again I see that I've written way too much already, and the time in which I can fulfill my promise is running out quickly, so I'll stop now. I should probably sleep a bit before I go pick up my wife from the airport anyway. Good night all!
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