Last night Mr. Katie and I went to a concert to see the band Wilco. I didn’t know most of the songs that they played last night but I still had a pretty great time. I bought the tickets back in early March for my and Mr. Katie’s anniversary.
Most of the Wilco songs I have a relationship with are from the Wilco and Billy Bragg album that people played at parties during my environmental instructor days. According to Mr. Katie, Wilco hates Billy Bragg now so I didn’t expect them to play any of those songs, but they did play “California Stars” last night.
The concert was nice though. Possibly it was too cool for me. I am not sure that I am that cool. Luckily, I took some CD’s out of the library to prepare. Unfortunately, I didn’t really listen to most of them before the concert. I listened to a YouTube channel with live performances. It helped some. Plus, I knew a few songs from Mr. Katie playing them in our house.
In my preparations for the concert, I started listening to a Youtube playlist called Mix-Wilco and I really had been digging their performance of “California Stars” from the Farm Aid in 1998. The only other Wilco songs that I remember knowing before my brushing up before the concert are “What Light” and “Impossible Germany”.
Now that the concert is over, I want to listen to the CD’s that I borrowed from the library. I am going to renew them when I go to work on Saturday and listen while I do chores around the house. I even finally figured out how to change the batteries in the remote control for the Bose CD player that I got from my Dad after he passed. I have been trying to figure out how to use the Bose stereo for about 2.5 years and it feels like fate that today is the day that I decided to take another look, and I figured out how to make it work.
I straightened my hair for the occasion of the concert. I noticed once that I was at the concert that it wasn’t the kind of concert that people straighten their hair for. I noticed that it was the kind of concert with lot of people with natural grey hair. My hair is only a little grey, but I think that I fit in fine. Brendan guessed, perhaps correctly, that we might be on the younger end of people attending the concert. I was worried that I was dressed a little “basic” for the type of the people attending this concert, but I decided that I felt nice and I kind of did not care. It seemed like people were wearing what they wanted to wear without a need to impress.
Anyway, the concert felt like a cool kid’s concert but not an unapproachable cool kid’s concert. The band played two sets with no opening act. They did a pretty good amount of jamming and some of the songs lasted a while. I felt like I could enjoy the music without knowing all the songs. I don’t really like the album version of “Impossible Germany”, but I really enjoyed it last night, it felt like an extended jam that made me understand the song better.
Jeff Tweedy kept commenting about how a great summer evening was. There was a breeze in the air, and the temperature was in the 70’s, it was glorious. He commented on how he had never been to the venue before, which was outside and surrounded by the ghosts of steel mills and former industrial buildings, but it reminded him of where they were from, Chicago. The smell of pot in the air was very noticeable but also remarkable because many of the people in attendance were on the older side.
As we got later into the evening, I began to think about the experience of attending this concert to be an Artist’s Date. The Artist’s Date is one of the central concepts in the book that I read a few days ago about creativity called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The thing about The Artist’s Date though is that it is to be done solo and I was on an actual date with my husband. Still, I found it creatively fueling to observe and enjoy this experience.
Mr. Katie pointed out that a man who was standing slightly in front of us at the concert looked exactly like Bobby Moynihan. I Googled Bobby Moynihan and Bethlehem, PA and it looks like he has participated in some comedy shows with ArtsQuest, the organization that sponsored the concert, in the past. So maybe he was there. Who knows?
We saw some children at the show, some of them very young, and they seemed to be having a good time dancing with their parents. This show had only general admission tickets for everyone and there was a small amount of seating, so I think that was limiting for some people. However, I felt like the fact that everyone was essentially the same at this show was nice, kind of socialistic. It made everyone feel equal.
One interesting thing of note was that this was probably one of the few experiences in my life when the line for the women’s bathroom was much shorter than the line for the men’s bathroom. After coming out of the bathroom, I noticed that all the men kind of resembled each other. They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts or checked button-up shirts and dark framed glasses.
We ended up leaving before the concert ended because it was 10:40pm and we only had our babysitter until 11:00 pm. They still had not played “What Light”, and I thought it might be the encore at the end of the night, but we needed to get home.
In any case, we had a great time, and I was glad that I bought the tickets.
