Considering DeVotchKa

This is cool.

NPR's All Songs Considered has the DevotchKa show we saw available here. You can also get it as a free podcast through itunes, which is only slightly less expensive that an actual ticket to the show was.

And, if you want to hear the first White Stripes show we went to, they have it here. If you want to hear the second one we saw, I have a crappy bootleg of it, which I actually appreciated listening to more than actually being at the show. (It's weird, as much as I didn't enjoy that show - stupid Patriot Center - it turned me on to Bob Dylan's "One More Cup Of Coffee" and was therefore worth it.)

Happy listening.

Late Concert for Old Michael

So, we had tickets for DeVotchKa and Basia Bulat at the 930 Club in DC last Friday. I was kind of concerned, bing old, that according to the tickets the doors would be opening at 9:00. On Friday they posted the stage times for each performer. They'd added a second opener who would be going on at 9:45. Basia Bulat wouldn't be going on until 10:30.

DeVotchKa would hit the stage at quarter til midnight.

Did I mention that I am old? And that that was really frickin' late?

So, I decided to suck it up and not worry about the time. I already had the tickets anyway and we had friends coming up from Hampton on Friday to see the show. So, in the spirit of not worrying about the time. Here's a rundown of Friday night:

I decided that I wanted to be at the 930 Club by 10:00 because I did not want to miss Basia Bulat. Her album's been in constant rotation on the computer and the ipod for the couple of weeks. It takes about an hour and a half to get there from my house if you factor in walkign and the metro arriving at the best possible time.

Kevin and Marie (the Hampton friends) were leaving there around 4:00, which should put them at our place around 8:00. If we leave then we should be able to get to 930 around, well, 9:30 and everything should be great.

It did not happen this way.

Around 7:00 I called Kevin to see about where they were. Richmond. There were delays and they would be getting to our house around 9:30, which meant we wouldn't be getting to DC in time to see Basia Bulat.

Change of plan - we'll meet at the Shady Grove Metro stop. We''ll pick'em up and then drop them off at the car on the way back. They get there at 8:30. We're there at 8:40. There are ten minutes of shenanigans wherein we eventually determine that Kevin and Marie are on the opposite side of the station than Jamee and I. I never learn where they actually parked.

So, by 8:50 we're on the road. At this point I realize I have to pee.

I call Emily. She and some friends are at a restaurant near the Columbia Heights Metro, which is one stop away from the U Street Station, which is a two minute walk from the at this point fabled 930 Club. We are to meet them at the station. We get to Emily's at somewhere around 9:40 and hike the four blocks to the Columbia Heights metro. We get there at the same time as Emily and her friends. We now have enough people to go search for the One Ring, assuming one of us gets to be Bill the Pony.

We get to the station. One of our two SmartCards finally craps out. A train departs. Another comes. We get on it at 9:55 and are immediately informed that there will be a three minute delay due to trackwork or some such thing. Fifteen minutes later the train leaves. One minute after that we arrive at U Street.

And I really have to fucking pee.

We get to the 930 Club at 10:15 and get to wait in line for ten minutes to pick up my will-call tickets that I probably should have tried to get when Emily and I came to see Colin Meloy back in April. At 10:25 we're inside. And I make it to the restroom. And there was much rejoicing.

Five minutes after that Basia Bulat comes on. She and her band play for about forty-five minutes and it's a good show. They played almost all of her album with a couple of covers adn a newer song that may or may not still be called "Untitled." I bought Jamee an "Oh My Darling" shirt and she enjoyed vodka. I bought myself a DeVotchKa shirt, but they only had up to size Large for the designs I liked. It nearly fits and I've now got another reason to keep going to the gym.

At 11:45, as promised, DeVotchKa hits the stage. It is, a damn good show, though they did not play their cover of "Venus in Furs," which I've heard is just awesome live. But I cannot complain. And they had an acrobat during the encore.

So around 1:30 we leave. Through the entire time we were actually in the club, it never felt as late as it actually was. But the moment I stepped foot outside it felt like everything hit me. We go to the Metro and although it is apparently running until 3:00, there are no trains that appear to be coming for the forseeable future.

So we walk back to Emily's. At around 2:00 we stop at a late night McDonalds. I get a quarter pounder with cheese. First one I've had in years. It tasted incredible. No way that it should have tasted as good as it did. Maybe they're nocturnal. Or maybe it was the overuse of mustard.

By 2:15 or so we're at Emily's. We head back to Brunswick and after about ten minutes everyone's asleep but me. Or at least they're reeeeally quiet. We get to Shady Grove to drop off Kevin and Marie at their car and end up circling the place and heading back towards 270 because we're not sure where they parked. I ended up dropping them off where I originally found them and headed out. I made it most of the way back to Brunswick without falling asleep and by 4:00 we were home.

At this point I had been awake for twenty-three hours. We went inside and went to bed. I slept for four hours.

And then I woke up.

Curiosity

Until last night The Cure was the last band that I was majorly obsessed with in high school that I still cared to see live (sorry, REM) that I had never seen in concert. U2 - check, Morrissey - check, Pixes - check, check. I missed seeing them in high school on the Wish tour and they never played anywhere near where I went to college. And after Wild Mood Swings I just kind of lost interest.

But when I was in high school...

When I was in high school I was an obsessive collector of the things I was interested in. Still am, but to a lesser degree. I got into The Cure in the period between Disintegration (technically Mixed Up) and Wish. I snagged all the albums (on tape!) and then found out about b-sides from a friend at work who was obsessed with The Cure and the cassette-only extra songs on Standing on a Beach and Concert & Curiosity. So I bought all the Disintegration singles. Bought all the Wish singles. Bought The Crow soundtrack for "Burn." But I could never get the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me singles. Because they were too goddamn expensive. I wanted some sort of boxed set with all of the non-album stuff that I just couldn't track down. Tracking the stuff down was fun, but I wasn't about to buy a four-disc box set of Electra artists just for one stinking Cure song. At least not after thinking about it.

Which brings me around to getting back into The Cure. A few years ago I saw in the Best Buy circular that there was a Cure box set coming out called Join The Dots, which was exactly the collection that I wanted in high school. I hadn't listed to them in years, but I wanted the damn thing. And I got it. And it's good. There's some weak stuff on there (it is a b-sides collection) but overall it's worth getting if you like the band. And I was hooked again.

And then they started putting out remastered versions of the early albums. And then there was a new album that wasn't that great. They toured for that, but I didn't go because I didn't want to pay for the festival thing they did and risk only seeing them play for an hour.

But they announced a show at The Patriot Center last September. The tickets were a little pricey (about $60 - which is more than most of the acts I like to go to) It got postponed until last night, which was good because it allowed Jamee to get me tickets for Christmas.

So, after nearly 18 years of liking this band, I got to see them live.

Here's the setlist:

Plainsong, Prayers For Rain, A Strange Day, alt.end, The Walk, The End of the World, Lovesong, To Wish Impossible Things, Pictures of You, Lullaby, The Perfect Boy, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, Hot Hot Hot!!!, The Only One, Push, Friday I'm In Love, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Primary, Shake Dog Shake, Never Enough, Wrong Number, One Hundred Years, Disintegration

1st encore: At Night, M, Play For Today, A Forest
2nd encore: Lovecats, Let's Go To Bed, Freakshow, Close To Me, Why Can't I Be You
3rd encore: Boys Don't Cry, Jumping Someone Else's Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing An Arab.

Yeah, That's 38 songs. Three hours and one minute of show. Let's break that down a little by album.

Three Imaginary Boys - 2 songs
Seventeen Seconds - 4 songs
Faith - 1 song
Pornography - 2 songs
The Top - 1 song
The Head on the Door - 3 songs
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - 3 songs
Disintegration - 6 songs
Wish - 3 songs
Wild Mood Swings - 0 songs
Bloodflowers - 0 songs
The Cure - 2 songs
the new album - 3 songs
Singles - 8 songs

So half of the show came from their pre-Kiss Me catalog. I think that's pretty impressive. When I saw U2 on the Achtung Baby tour they only played maybe three songs that predated The Joshua Tree. And we're talking about a band that was touring for an album that was only two albums after Joshua Tree. When we saw The Flaming Lips, there wasn't a whole lot of anything prior to The Soft Bulletin that got played. And that was still a damn good show. The U2 one was, too. Pixies opened on that one.

But what impressed me about The Cure show is that they working with thirty years worth of songs and they managed to fit in stuff from just about every period and every album (with the exception of the album that made me give up on them and Bloodflowers, which I didn't pick up until later). And out of thirty-eight songs, they only played two that I don't really care for (verdict's still out on the new ones), and those were back-to-back near the end of the main set, but right after those they played "One Hundred Years," and I got a new appreciation for that one. It's a dark song from a great album (Pornography - which you should put on if you want to feel really bad), but I didn't really get just how dark it was until they showed news photos in teh background of atrocities from the past century.

This was offset by the large woman who was twirling and dancing like a hippy in teh aisle next to Jamee. I'll let her talk about that one.

But think about the number 38. How many concerts have you been to where they played 38 songs. I mean, these guys played for two solid hours before the first encore break. I've never seen a show by a single artist where their set goes past two hours including encore.

So, this is arguably the best show I've ever seen, especially based on lowish expectations going in (It was the Patriot Center). But based on the sheer number of songs, length of the show and enthusiasm of the band (Robert Smith never once seemed bored playing these songs that you know he's done thousands of times) it was well worth the ticket price.

The t-shirts, however, were not worth the price. But I still have three left from high school and they fit. And that makes me happy.

Next Week - DeVotchKa