Joe

From Season 1 – Episode 16: What is your favorite/most memorable concert?

Josh

From Season 1 – Episode 16: What is your favorite/most memorable concert?

My favorite show was one that was also attended by Joe, Beck wsg The Flaming Lips (10/21/2002). The Flaming Lips were the opening band as well as Beck’s live accompaniment. The show was at the Detroit Opera House so it was a little odd. There were ushers, assigned seating, and, of course, a bathroom attendant. Joe acquired the tickets through some non-standard method, eBay or something like that. I remember looking at the tickets and reading that we were in section AAA, which I assumed was pretty good. We handed our tickets to the usher and I remember him slowly leading us closer and closer and closer to the stage until we were in the orchestra pit. He gestured towards two vacant seats, 3rd row, on the aisle, center. We couldn’t believe it.

Before the show Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips came out and signed some autographs and stood up a Jesus statue approximately 12 inches tall on one of the amps. He told the audience that it was just given to him backstage by Jack White. This event was later chronicled in the Flaming Lips song “Thank You Jack White (For the Fiber-Optic Jesus That You Gave Me). I was relatively new to the music of The Flaming Lips and their opening set just blew me away. They played a lot of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin, two records I love to this day. Beck’s set was amazing as well. He played a lot of my favorites from Odelay, Mellow Gold, Mutations, and One Foot in the Grave. It was a great show. My jaw was on the floor the whole time. Amazing seats. Amazing acts. With an amazing friend.

John

From Season 1 – Episode 16: What is your favorite/most memorable concert?

Gonna cheat on this one and mishmash two different concerts that occurred a mere three months from each other: 5/4/2002 at the Metro in Chicago, and 8/8/2002 at Call The Office in beautiful London, Ontario to see the one and only (“the one and ugly”, as Jimbo would routinely introduce) Reverend…Horton…Heat (cue the theme to Peter Gunn).

This was the genesis of serious concert-going for me, setting out to see my A-1 go-to band at the time on my first real concert-driven road trip (~4 hours) of any serious length; while technically these weren’t my first shows, they were in fact my first where I was chasing down my favorite..and at at time where I wasn’t nearly as handcuffed to popular music; amazing what can happen when you reject what modern radio spoon-feeds you.

Tiger Army & Nashville Pussy were the bill openers for the Metro show; suffice to say that Josh and I missed most of Tiger Army’s set as we had opted to putz around the burbs of Chicago a bit longer to play softball with our resident Chicagoland cousins. Categorize this one under the “it’s the journey, not the destination” file; always fond of the area I was born into, and the kin that still resides there to this day. When the club lights came on for the Rev and the crowd roared to the opening riff to “Big Sky”, it clicked with me that this was something I wanted to replicate over and over.

The London, Ontario show was my first time out of the country, and Joe’s first time seeing the Rev overall. That was the first real roadtrip concert experience with all three of us , and I remember dorking for just leaving the states..then subsequently getting bored by the Canadian countryside and the metric system. There was a real funny Bon Jovi joke in there somewhere, which time has eroded (out of left field–must have been inspired by some of that aforementioned radio baby formula), followed by the sheer college-town beauty of London, Ontario. Still have the ticket stub to Call The Office, which looked like something I could have hand-made. The Matadors & Atomic 7 were openers on the bill. The latter would later become a surf-band favorite (Canadian’s best kept secret). It’s a blessing that Joey didn’t have more of a Brian Connelly education prior to that show, or else we would have been detained in a Canadian hoosegow as a direct result of him violating Connelly’s restraining order.