Wading in the Velvet Sea

OK, now that that’s over and done with…

I drove down to Mansfield, Massachusetts, starting around 6:30 pm. We were supposed to leave at 6, but my friend’s co-worker, so near as we could tell, was AWOL. And by ‘AWOL’ I mean, ‘sitting just out of view outside with her cell phone off’. So that started things off on the right foot. In the car: myself, my brother Casey, my friend Sara, my friend Sarah, and Sarah’s friend Tara. Wish this were the set-up for a joke, but no, this really happened.

There are only two roads that lead you to Mansfield, and both are major highways that are choked up with normal post-work traffic. Long story short, 2 hours to go 30 miles. We drove about 45 minutes to Route 16, stopping to meet up with Casey’s friend Gina. A quick Chinese fireman’s drill later, Casey’s driving Gina’s car, and Sara’s up front with me, and for fun, we picked up a girl named Lara and her cousin Laura. Ostensibly, we stopped so the six of us would drive down together, park together, and go into the show together.

So why Casey blew by me .00001th of a mile later, not to be seen again until the concert gates, is a fair mystery to me.

OK, ‘blew by’ is a bit of an overstatement, in that we averaged 10 miles an hour on a major highway. His car, however, like the amp from Spinal Tap, went to 11. So we lost them right out. Luckily, I have all of Radiohead’s CDs in the car, so we at least have good background music. Got into a major tussle over the lyric, ‘I'm teetering on the brink’ from ‘Backdrifters’, fourth track on ‘Hail to the Thief’. Sarah was convinced that the line actually was, ‘I’m cheating on a breakup’, which is, sadly, a much cooler line than the one Thom Yorke wrote.

(So, another topic of discussion: what would ‘cheating on a breakup’ actually entail? I’ve asked four people, and gotten four interesting responses. It’s such a cool phrase. Laura, Lara, Maura, and Cara all agreed as well.)

So, we got to the show around 8:20 pm. I was a bit freaked out on the way down, since I was 99.99% sure there was an opening act for the 7:30 pm show, but still, with my luck, that .01% would have slapped me like a red-headed step-child. But lo, all was good, and we established a foothold on the grassy knoll, replete will arty clad-in-black types, who co-mingled with hippie freaks who were about 3 weeks late for the Dead show, and a lot of frat guys taking gravity bong hits from the hippies. Ten minutes later, the lights went down, and the show began. Perfect timing.

The following is the set list. Thoughts about the show/songs are sprinkled in.

01 2+2=5

First song off the new album, and a great opening number. It’s got this great tension-release thing that they are so good at. It’s an Orwellian-type number, one of many on the new record written while IRAQ II: Electric Boogaloo, was forming. The song starts off kinda quiet, then explodes into a cry of ‘You have not been paying attention!’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you just started, of course I’m paying attention. Like, back off.’

02 sit down. stand up.

Second song on the new album. Has a gorgeous piano line. At this point, the back wall of LED strips came alive, forming this really sweet wave pattern. To me, the song kinda craps out once is goes fast, but this song highlighted what I already knew about the band: their almost slavish desire to reproduce the album’s blips and squawks exactly. Their guitarist, Johnny, has a Circuit City’s worth of equipment near his place on stage. Can recreate just about anything, mostly from his Apple laptop. As the night went on, the band used these technologies to augment, not simply re-enact, but they hadn’t gotten there just yet.

03 paranoid android

OK, Cue Beavis: ‘YES YES YES!’ Love this song. They played it passionately. At this point, I’ll note one great thing about their live production: no spotlights. Thom was largely indistinguishable from the rest of the band in terms of the lighting. Their lighting reflects the wall of sound approach they take to their music: the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.

04 kid a

OK, I hate this flippin’ song. The only redeeming feature of this track was Thom randomly playing a key here and there on a small keyboard near his microphone. Sorta like when the dude from Flock of Seagulls would play one key at a time in his old videos. That always killed me.

05 backdrifts

There went Thom, cheatin’ on a breakup. This song, like most, featured drum loops, but this was the only one in which the drummer stood up and recreated the Strong Bad jig.

06 morning bell

OK, they played the GOOD version of this one, not the crap ‘Amnesiac’ version, which I tried to like, but gave up on when I realized, sigh, ‘Amnesiac’ is kinda crap. Oh well. I tried, I really tried, to like this album. Can't. Alas. Sorta like when you realize your supermodel-girlfriend is dumber than a salad bar. You're in denial, and then, one day, you realize that "Knives Out" is the only good thing about her. OK, I'm moving on now.

07 my iron lung

OK, possibly my least favorite song on ‘The Bends’, and it’s the only one they played all night from this album. I have nada nice to say about this, except the three-guitar attack was fun to watch. Much more visceral than ‘drum machine, bass, two dudes twiddling knobs to produce whale-like sounds, and Thom twitching’. Will get more into the ‘arena rock’ versus ‘art rock’ dynamic throughout. Oh, and stupid ass, fat hippie-chick near us was dancing to this song like she did to every song: like it was a Sean Paul ditty, and she needed to defecate. Just frickin’ wrong. That’s all I have to say about that.

08 where i end and you begin

OK, I’ll get into it a bit now. This is one of the more ‘straightforward’ tracks on ‘Hail to the Thief’. I’m not advocating that Radiohead dumb themselves down, God forbid. Hell, they convinced 20,000 people to basically see an art show. More props to them. Thing is, the band seems completely embarrassed by the fact that they, at a basic level, right really catchy pop songs. So they do their best to hide the fact they do so by adding layers of production, burying melody, and making people work for the benefits of their music. ‘Where I End’ is one of many songs that would benefit from being played in a smaller venue. Clubs, more than arenas.

09 the gloaming

Another club song. Although even if I were in a club I’d take a bathroom break at this point. (OK, random funny moment of the night: my brother and I reworking 50 Cent to match our dinners: "You can buy me turkey club! Mama I got pita, it ain't a sub!" O, I'm done now.) Continuing what I said early…when you hit an arena level, you have to be able to reach every single person in that place. It’s really, really hard work. If you’ve got a swing-for-the-fences band like U2, or a crowd-pleaser like Aerosmith or Dave Matthews, you can play your arenas and play them well. When you take a fundamentally introspective band, such as Radiohead, who are the best concert to ever hit your headphones…well… Since ‘OK Computer’, they’ve gone increasingly towards a less epic, more intimate, more challenging sound. To hear 4/4 time is like getting water in the desert from them, at time. Now, they can pull it off, but you have to work at it. I love that I have to work at it, since I feel the work will pay off. But with 20,000 people, I don’t wanna work. I worked to get into the concert; I want guitars, please, not iTunes.

10 sail to the moon

OK, this was THE moment for me. A slow, dirge-like song, with the first line, ‘I sucked the moon’. At that moment, we noticed the moon, on fire, seemingly, rising above the arena roof. Just…wow. Mindblowing. I used to listen to Roger Daltry interviews, talking about how the sun came up at Woodstock at the ‘See Me, Feel Me’ part of ‘Tommy’ and used to think, ‘Man, I want a moment like that.’ The red-orange rising moon may be as close to that as I’ll ever get.

OK, I’ve got carpal tunnel from all of this. If there’s a real demand, I’ll finish the review, but for now, I’ll just finish the set list.

11 climbing up the walls
12 creep
13 like spinning plates
14 go to sleep
15 scatterbrain
16 the national anthem
17 there there

(OK, ‘There There’ was the musical highlight. Three drummers. Unreal percussion. Best song on the new album, in the top 5 of all-time Radiohead songs. Blew my mind how good this was.)

encore #1:
18 lucky
19 a punch-up at a wedding
20 airbag
21 everything in its right place

encore #2:
22 no surprises
23 idioteque

So, after the show, I promptly get lost, and think my car has been stolen. Luckily, Dara is by my car, and using smoke signals, Morse code, and the sacrifice of a virgin, we find our way back to the car.

And sit there for 2 hours. Look, it’s not like this is a new arena. But this is the bottleneck of all bottlenecks. In my one lot, one of roughly ten, we had eight lanes of traffic bottlenecking into one lane that would barely fit a Mini Cooper. Ever tried to play chicken with 7 SUVs? I hadn’t, and really, I could have lived without the life experience.

Finally, we get spit out onto the highway, and have an uneventful drive home. At 2 am, I hit Inman Square to drop off Tara. At 2:15 am, I hit the bridge over the Charles River to get to Brookline. And at 2:25 am, an egg hit my backwindshield.

Now, this came as quite a shock. I was hardly falling asleep at the wheel, but I was entering my 21st consecutive hour in a conscious state, and as such was not bringing my A game to the driving. And who knew an egg could sound like a gunshot? Well, I didn’t, and I honestly thought someone has popped a cap into my Camry. And lo, I saw egg smearing itself along the back of my car, being pulled inexorably by gravity towards my trunk.

Now, I am assuming these were MIT frat dudes. Firstly, we were on Frat Row, just before Beacon Street. Secondly, roughly eight seconds before we were attacked, Sara said, ‘Ah, look at all these frats.’ Thirdly, the egg said, ‘Suck this, Love, MIT Frat Boys’. OK, the last part I made up. But it was fun to type.

Thus, the last stage of my journey consisted of cleaning my car off at a Sunoco at 2:45 am, making sure my poor car was not encrusted with egg. Hardly a rock and roll moment. Even if I had a iMac, it couldn’t have helped me. Oh well. That night, ain’t nuttin’ was gonna break-a my stride. Nobody was gonna hold me down. Oh no, I had to keep on movin’.