I took my daughter to her second ever concert yesterday. I talked about her first one, Halestorm and Evanescence, on a previous post if you want to check that out.
This time around, we went to see Death Cab For Cutie. At work, every time I told people who I was going to see they either said, "No idea who that is," or "Oh, yeah, I kind of remember that band. Couldn't tell you any of their songs, but the name sounds vaguely familiar."
Truthfully, the name is not one you would forget easily. It's pretty horribly nonsensical. It makes me think of this old Onion article I saw years ago. Probably the only name that's more obscure and less wise to choose is The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine.
Anyway, this time around we made it in plenty of time to see the opening act, called Mini Trees.
At first, I thought they'd be pretty good. They had all the elements of a good band, but in the end, they didn't do it for me. First of all, their show was really static and boring. The band members barely moved. They just stood there at their mic stands and played. The girl on the left at one point was even standing beside her keyboards holding her hands together in front of her like a kind of military at-ease pose like she was waiting in line at the bank or something.
Secondly, despite having a lot of varied background music, the melodies that the singer did were all morose and mournful as could be. At first, I thought it was cool, but when every song turned out to be that way, it got annoying. The singers voice went from pleasant to droning by the end of their set.
The best part about the band was their drummer, who looked like a computer programmer building the first MacIntosh in the late seventies or something. I tried to get a close up of him, but I don't have one of those cameras with the zoom lens yet, so it's just a digital zoom, and therefore shit.
But yeah, seventies hair, glasses, seventies mustache, and he was constantly making crazy faces as he pounded the skins (that's a phrase people still use for playing the drums, right? Or is it as up to date as this guy's look?).
Anyway, Mini Trees went away, and after twenty minutes or so, Death Cab hit the stage.
They were amazing from the word go. They had so much energy in their performance. It was like they had some kind of mad scientist machine backstage that stripped all the youthful energy from the much younger Mini Trees and transferred it to them.
I mean, Ben Gibbard is 45 years old. Almost as old as me, and he was moving up there like he was on drugs or something...which I guess he might have been, who knows. I was feeling super tired just from having to stand around for twenty minutes waiting for Death Cab to start their show, and he was dancing constantly and roaming all over the stage like crazy. It was great.
Death Cab is not particular known as a rocking band. They have songs that are sort of fast paced and all, but not particularly. They're known more for contemplative, slow songs, so I was really surprised by how intense and rocking the show was.
When they finished their first song, my daughter turned to me and said, "That was SO GOOD!"
Looked like she was liking her second concert as much as her first.
I tried not to be one of those douches that is always holding up their phones to record a concert, blocking everyone behind them's view, but I did want to get one song as a sort of souvenir. Also, my phone was really low on battery, so I didn't want it to die on me and leave me unable to get pictures of me and my daughter.
The one song I figured I'd record was "I'll Follow You Into The Dark." I perfectly predicted when they would play it. When I saw the stagehand bring Gibbard out an acoustic guitar, I knew it was time for it, so I started recording, and I got the song from the very beginning.
Didn't get it to the end, though. My phone ran out of battery right in the middle. I wish I'd realized the phone was low on battery today, because I was sitting right next to a computer with a charging cable in it the entire day. I could have easily topped it off. I guess that's something to remember for the next concert I go to.
My daughter offered her phone to me to record the rest of the song, but I demurred. I didn't want the song broken into chunks with a missing part in the middle. I got what I got, and that was going to have to do.
The show rocked on, and they played all of our favorite songs. Eventually, it came to an end, and the lights came up. Before walking out, I looked down at the ground and noticed a white guitar pick sitting on the ground. I stepped on it, to cover it with my foot before somebody else grabbed it, then bent down and retrieved it from under my shoe.
During the show, my daughter had commented to me about how she was sad when she saw Gibbard throw a pick into the crowd and it had sailed far away from where we were standing, so I knew she would be excited.
"Here you go," I said, holding it up and presenting it to her.
"Oh my gosh, you found one?" she said, a big smile on her face.
Some women near us saw me hand the pick to her and came over, "Wow! You have to frame that! That is so great! He is the greatest, isn't he? We're from Seattle, and we love him so much! You are lucky! You have to frame that!"
We laughed, and smiled, and my daughter said that she would, and we started walking away. That's when I noticed a second pick on the floor, and I bent down and picked it up as well. I immediately thought of the two women who had just been gushing over the other pick.
"You have to give that to those girls," my daughter said. She was on the same wavelength as me.
"Where did they go?" I said, looking around. They weren't near us anymore. Then I saw them over near the stage. They were milling around with the rest of the crowd that was hoping to find a pick that had fallen to the ground during the show. They'd all gone to the front, where you would expect a pick to land.
We walked over and I held the pick out to them. Their eyes went wide.
"No," they said, "you have to keep it. It's yours."
We laughed. My daughter held up her pick. "We found a second one," she said.
"What? Oh my God, thank you!" they said. "Now we can both frame it!"
After that, we went out to the parking lot, and headed for home, very satisfied with our concert adventure for the day.
I think we already know who we're going to see next. My daughter absolutely loves Incubus, and they are coming to town in August, so we're going to have to get tickets for that one. Should be fun.
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