Saturday, as we were bringing August back from Newton, I realized that it was seven years (to the day) since the first concert I went to.  Which got me reminiscing about concerts, and I thought that would be something interesting to put in my blog.  So here are the concerts I’ve been to that stand out the most (in no particular order):

The Smashing Pumpkins - August 6, 1998 - Oven’s Auditorium, Charlotte:  I was sixteen and this was my first concert.  It was cool that we got fourth row seats, even if they were off to a side.  If it had happened today I don’t know if I would have thought it was such an awesome show, since I am not quite as infatuated with any band as much as I was with The Smashing Pumpkins when I was a teenager (and I doubt I ever will be).

The Smashing Pumpkins - May 2, 2000 - War Memorial Auditorium, Greensboro:  I’m mentioning the two Smashing Pumpkins shows first only because they are the first to come to mind.  And no, I didn’t need to dig up my t-shirts to remember when and where these shows were.  This show was better than the other SP show, but we had much worse seats and the ushers were jerks (they told us to sit down--at a rock show!).  They closed the show with my favorite song (Mayonaise).

Our Lady Peace with American Hi-Fi - April(?), 2001 - Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill:  This show really stands out in my mind because I had one of those moments where it felt like Raine Maida was speaking directly to me.  It was during “Are You Sad?” actually..  it was during one of those relationship-turning-bad times..

Athenaeum - 2000-2004 - Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Winston-Salem/Charlotte:  We saw Athenaeum dozens of times during college.. those shows will always have a special place in my memories.  If any single show stands out in my mind, it was the one at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, sometime during Christmas break of 2003-2004 I think.  I believe that was also the bass player’s last show with the band.

Thursday - late July/early August, 2004 - The Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh (I think):  One of the best shows I’ve been to, hands down.  I don’t remember any one thing that made it so great.. there was just lots of energy.  My inability to describe how awesome it was is really downplaying it.. so just trust me, it was awesome.

Blink 182 - ? - Alltel Pavilion, Raleigh:  We saw Blink twice here (or maybe one show was in Charlotte?), once during the “Take Off Your Pants And Jacket” tour, with New Found Glory, Midtown, and Mest; and once during the “MTV Pop Disaster” tour (or something like that), with Green Day and Jimmy Eat World.  Both times they put on great shows.  Definitely the funniest concerts I’ve ever been to.  Nothing beats a giant flaming F-word for pure comedic value.  If you’ve ever heard any of their live CD, you’ll know what I mean.  Unfortunately, New Found Glory was the only one of the other bands with them that was any good.  Not that I don’t like Green Day and Jimmy Eat World.  But I didn’t like either of them live.  And the guy in Mest took off his pants and walked around in his underwear.  That wasn’t so cool.

SR-71 - October, 2002 - Dorton Arena, Raleigh:  Almost forgot one of the best!  This show was at the State Fair, in a pretty small arena.  Everyone was sitting on floor seats, but there were about as many people there as you usually have in a club show, so Mitch very quickly told everyone to just come up closer and stand in front of the stage.  So we had the intimacy of a club with the acoustics of an arena, which worked very well.  It was just SR-71, no crappy opening band to sit through.  You could tell the band was enjoying the show, which made it even better.  I remember Mitch saying it was the longest set they had played in years, I think over two hours long.  If I really had to rank the concerts I’ve been to, I think I might give this one the number one spot.

Jimi Hendrix - August, 1969 - Woodstock, NY:  Just making sure you’re awake.

This has turned into quite a long post.  I’ve been working on it during spare moments at work since yesterday.  If you actually read all of this, congratulations.  Originally I was going to list some concerts that I felt most let down by, but I think I’ll save that for another post.

Ah, nostalgia

When I’m driving to and from work there’s not really much point in putting in a CD, since I’ll be home after about one to two songs.  So I usually listen to the radio.  But even the alt-rock (or emo or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays) station plays primarily the same ten or fifteen songs, with about every fourth or fifth song being something from my era.  But when I’m tired of hearing Velvet Revolver whine about falling to pieces I’ll turn over to “Kiss,” the station that proudly ascribes unto itself the title “number one hit music station”--as if that is a good thing--so that I can get an idea of what ten or fifteen songs the cool kids are listening too.  This is not because I believe that this will somehow make me cool.  Long ago I discarded any desire for “coolness” and accepted--nay, embraced!--my geek status.  No friends, I listen to Kiss so that I have new material to make fun of.  Because I can only make jokes about the lyric “fo shizzle my nizzle” for so long (and I think my time for that ran out about three or four years ago).

While listening to the song “Don’t Cha,” it wasn’t just the dumb lyrics that caught my attention.  What really makes this craptastic song extra funny is the background vocals.  They are just echoes of the dumb lyrics, but in an even more annoying voice.

I present for you Exhibit A: the chorus (with background vocals shown in italics):

      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?   like me
      Don’t cha, don’t cha baby
      Don’t cha
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend raw like me?   raw
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend fun like me?   big fun

The funniest part of this is when the background singer says “raawwww.”  Listen for it the next time you are exposed to this musical interpretation of a train wreck!

Now, I present for you Exhibit B:  the funniest lines in this song in my opinion:

      Maybe next lifetime   maybe next lifetime
      Possibly   possibly

The only reason this sentence was split into two lines is because someone couldn’t think of any better lyric.  The awesome hilariousness of this lyric probably doesn’t come through when you read it here.  But trust me.  If you listen for this lyric (it’s near the end), the background vocals in particular sound so terribly forced and out-of-place that it is hilarious.

If you are forced to suffer through this song, train your ears to pick up the background vocals amidst the din.  You will at least get something entertaining from the song.

I know we’d have a good time
I’m your friend, I’m fun, and I’m fine
I ain’t lying

I just got in from the The Turnstiles show.. I work with two members of the band!  I had been given a warning about the venue.  Let’s just say it’s not the kind of place you’d want to wear a New York Yankees hat to.  I mean the place is called “Puckett’s Farm Equipment.”  But it wasn’t quite what I had pictured.  I expected a mechanical bull, people getting into brawls over who the best NASCAR driver was, and a cage in front of the band so that people could throw beer bottles at them.  As it turned out, it contained none of those things, and was actually kinda cozy except for all the cigarette smoke.  This was my first time hearing the band, and they were pretty good, especially since they were missing two of six members, and Jon was playing bass for the first time in like ten years.  I wonder how many other bands there are out there made up of computer programmers and MBA’s?  I’m not sure what genre the music would be classified in--Michael once described it as “Americana”.  Not country, and not quite southern rock, but it seemed to fit in at a place with “farm equipment” in the name of it.  I never quite know how to end my blog posts when I’ve run out of things to say..

Okay so last night Garrison came down and we went to the Something Corporate show which was pretty awesome.  The lead singer plays the piano, and he takes this beat up, old, blue piano (like, a real piano, not a keyboard) everywhere the band goes, which is pretty unique.  He plays with one microphone in front of him for when he’s facing the piano, and one for when he turns left and faces the audience.  And when he’s facing the audience he’s moving and jumping around just like someone with a guitar would be, except he’s got one hand still playing the piano so it looks kinda like someone who is handcuffed to a pole trying to get away or something.  Then he got up and jumped on the keys (literally).  I’d think that would mess up your tuning, but it seemed to sound fine the rest of the show.

I also finally got around to finishing Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within last week, after putting it off for a week and a half because I was tired of playing it.  Gabe and Tycho had a comic about it that is pretty funny, and the accompanying news post/review can be read here.  The game pretty much was crappy.  It was full of bugs, at least on the Game Cube.  The graphics were much worse than the first game, and the plot was stupid.  The difficulty varied greatly.  It started out easy, then there were rediculously hard parts, then when I was greatly frustrated I got to the much easier and more fun part of the game where your energy drains constantly (until it’s almost gone, then it stops) and your sand tanks refill constantly.  Of course that didn’t last too very long until I got to the final boss, which was a stupid fight.  The game seemed like it was very rushed and no attention was made to quality control until the very end of the development cycle (which I can say, being a Software Engineer myself, is a very bad project management decision).  It really was on par with the game that I helped write my last semester of school.  If we were working with the Prince of Persia engine rather than the Unreal engine, I think we could have made Warrior Within ourselves in just one semester.  I wrote a much better sound mixing algorithm than they used (and it wasn’t like I had to invent a new programming language or anything complicated).  And for some reason as I was playing the game I kept thinking “I need to join the Navy!”