The 9:30 club is a really great venue. It's about the same size as the TLA in Philly and about three or four times bigger than Bill's Bar in Boston. The stage is about three feet high, with a metal barricade the same height, about two feet from the stage. Even tho' we're late we manage to get right to the front along the barricade, where I'm delighted to meet Naomi. Steve is down the way a bit and I only meet him briefly at the end of the show, and Alan didn't end up coming after all. I didn't meet anyone else from the henhouse. I think I was anticipating being able to recognise them immediately. You know, like maybe we all would share some kind of computer screen glow... I dunno.
So, Naomi. Cute as a button. Tres petite. I'm pushing 5'8 and had chosen
to wear 2" platform shoes as well, sacrificing stability for height.
It worked well. Except that Naomi then came up to my elbow. Tracy is 6'4,
or something. Julie is somewhere between Naomi and me, height-wise :) and
beautiful. The boys to my left notice her immediately.
Hmmm... the lovely boys to my left. Toronto Maple Leaf-sporting boys.
OK here's my take on Canadian boys at Hip concerts (info. culled from
four concerts now). You identify the potential troublemakers early on.
You introduce yourself. If they're students, you pull rank. You cajole.
You charm. You seduce. Presto, they're forming a wall behind you to watch
your
back.
(Hint: Being a grrrrl helps here. Being a blonde girl with blue eyes
helps. Having Julie helps :) Having a petite sweetie pie like Naomi down
in front brings out the protectorate in them :) Work with it.)
Then at some point before the show starts, as one of the lovely boys
mentions that they drove down through Buffalo, you catch their eyes, take
a breath, and you all scream in a chorus:
ItwouldseemtomeIremembereveryfuckingthingIknow!!!
You all laugh.
No problems.
Now to the show:
The Damnations. Awesome. That bass player has cheekbones that I'd kill for and when she cracks a smile, mmm. All the boys and girls smile back. They play a really tight set. There are banjos.
And then the lull. Followed by the mad scramble of Hip roadies.
And at this point Naomi teaches me a thing or two about the breadth of attractions awaiting those Hip fans appreciative of boys. Check out that one roadie, Billy Ray, she says. Ohmigod. Why had I not noticed this cowboy-hat-wearing hunk of man before? I decide, FUCK Gord Downie, THIS is the guy for me. And I proceed to take about 700 pictures of him. I have pics of him plugging things in, standing around doing that roadie scan of the stage, strumming guitars, bending over...
(Note to self: you'll regret this photo shoot later once Gord's on stage and you're running out of film.)
So now it's 11:00. And you know. I'm getting tired. And I always go
in with plans to stick around as long as it takes to meet the fucking band,
and then at some point the weirdness of it, and the exhaustion, set in,
and after the show I get grumpy and I say well FUCK them, I don't want
to suck
up to them anyway whothefuckdotheythinktheyare (all sour grapes and
all :) and I head home.
Now Naomi, on the other hand, is a study in perseverance. In exchange for the considerable charms offered by her omnipresence at their shows (16X? this tour alone) she has been rewarded with recognition of the sort we all dream of, when we're not stopping to think why it's so weird that we dream of this. Just to jump ahead in the narrative a bit, after the show, Johnny Fay looks right at her and motions to her to come back stage. She grabs me, and I can't hear what she's saying, but I think it's something like "Come on, we're all going to go backstage and have sex!" This sounds too good to be true. But, hey, she seems to know what she's doing. Ok. So apparently that's NOT what she said :) And off she goes back stage alone (tho' she did take Steve with her...hmmm...) and we never saw her again. So Naomi, we expect a full report from you tomorrow. And it was great meeting you :)
OK, back to the show. Out comes Gord. Tall. Lanky. Healthy-looking.
Great brown suede shoes. Ok FUCK the roadie. I was wrong.
Sigh.
So he waves hello, and does a little dance and immediately his shirt
is completely untucked and the whole pants fiasco starts. I mean immediately.
And he grabs at his pants and launches in to
Fireworks.
(I should say first that between three adults with more graduate degrees
than are really helpful or necessary for normal human functioning, we could
not remember the entire fucking set list, for love nor money. But here's
what Tracy, me and Julie came up with, after the show, in the Ford Festiva
-- with some songs we're not sure of the order -- but I think we got
all the songs in there.)
So next, comes Fully, Completely.
At the end of FC, Gord mutters about "this wonderful embrace. How she just wouldn't let go. We just held each other so tightly, and the embrace wouldn't stop. She wouldn't let go. And then at some point I had to say, hey baby, I gotta go. And I board the train and all I see is (he makes waving motions) and the smoke from the train curls around and I can only see the whites of her eyes..."
Then Grace, too. Which he intros by commenting on two of Johnny's amourous guests up in the balcony to his right "hey do you two want to be alone?" We all laugh. "This is a song about two war-torn lovers..."
"He said 'I'm Tragically Hip...'"
The lovely boys next door are right behind me now, and they go insane
at Grace. I'm next to Julie and we're leaning our arms casually against
the barrier, asses sticking out behind, taking up way more space than we
deserve. The one boy assigned to watch my back is awfully close. I can
feel
his breath against my neck and if he brushes up against my ass one
more time I'm going to grab him and pull him tight, except that he's so
young and would freak out and so I just stay focused on Gord, while that
lovely boy breathes on my skin...
Membership. "You folks seem like the kind of audience that would appreciate a river song. This song is on K-Tel's 18 River Songs."
And then, around about then, anyway,...Pigeon Camera. Amazing. Gord says something about "Learning something new" and how "Washington DC is failsafe in that respect -- you can't help but learn something new when you visit Washington DC."
(And from me: today, walking through the Mall, on my way to the Air
and Space Museum, I'm struck by my oblivion to the fact that RIGHT OVER
THERE, across the Mall, is where Bill and Hilary LIVE. In the the White
House.)
(This house it has its politics. Over there. That's my room.)
Between songs #6 and #14, the order is unclear but you get:
ABAC
700 ft. Ceiling
Vapour Trails
Poets
Rules
(nice to hear -- traffic's not about to stop, for the first casualty
of
thought)
Around this point, I'm slipping in and out of awareness. You know? Like
I'm caught up in the moment. I'm not paying attention to the fact that
I'm finally here. That seeing these five men play together so well
is why I'm here. Why I signed up to this list. Why I've met so many wonderful
people. I need to stop and take notice and remember every detail...But
I slip in and out.
Again, in no particular order...
Greasy Jungle
NOIS
(right in the middle Gord launches into quite a long segment from Bruce
Coburn's "Tokyo" -- did you have to show me that accident scene? Didn't
I get enough shaking up?)
Thugs
(featuring insomniacs of the world, unite)
The 15 song set ends with Little Bones. Gord growls about buttering his cue finger up and I just about lose it ;)
For the first encore, the first thing I notice when they come back out is that Gord's pants are unzipped. He launches into 100th Meridian, I think (and me and the lovely boys sing together meaningfully). At some point Gord stops to do up his zipper and then raves...
"I almost wiggled right out of my pants just wiggled right out of my
pants.
wiggled
right out
of my
PANTS."
Too much.
Then Chagrin Falls (I'm pretty sure of the order at this point...) which marks my ONLY personal encounter with anyone from the band. Here goes: it's late, and I'm getting tired. And at some point, just as I'm about to YAWN the biggest, no disguising it as singing, YAWN, Gord moves to the side and puts me in full view of Johnny, who sees the yawn and has the presence of mind, while still drumming, to fake a look of shock and then laugh at me.
Oh wait -- I think I also got Paul to sort of smile at me -- you know
if you smile at him, charmingly, right at him, so that he can't mistake
it, then he kinda loses his stage-persona grimace and gives a smile back.
Or maybe it was a wince. But I think he smiled. And it looked like
Bobby was
playing up to a gang of folks close to him stage right. That was nice.
But of course the boys just wanted Gord D. "Gordy, Gordy, Gordy" They chanted. Naomi and Julie are now both as convinced as I of the homoerotic thing.
For the second encore, we got Nautical Disaster, at some point.
And then the final song of the evening was 50 Mission Cap. Which all the TO boys loved 'cos they had to leave the hockey game when it was still tied, and they were all hyped about their team. (How cool to hear later that Toronto won.)
And then that was it.
And they were gone.
And the lights come up.
And the crew kicks everyone out.
And it's cold outside.
And we head home.
Our faces sore from smiling.
Our throats sore from singing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review by Mark Rosner via e-mail
Hey Rory,
Thought I would let you know how the Sat. show in Wash
DC was. I drove down from Buffalo Friday nite so I missed that show
but went to Saturday's. The 9:30 club is a great place to see a show w/
a good size stage and a balcony around 3 sides w/ a balcony/
bar stool area in the rear of the place. The sound there is quite
good and you have a great line of sight. It's pretty amazing that
at the Buffalo show we were about two sections and half way up the arena
from the stage but I was 20 feet from the stage in DC. They put on
a great show opening w/ Fireworks and jumping around from Nautical, NO
Sinking, 100 Mer, Little Bones, Vapor, Poets, etc...W/ 50 Mission ending
the night. I will be waiting to see the list of when you get this
in to get it from you cause I had a great timee.
On a side note a met about
20 other poeple from Buffalo there so if you listen to the tape and here
the Sabre chants we really were just trying to get on the Leaf fans there
:)... I guess Fridays show the Leaf fans were more vocal.
I took pictures and tommorow I will see how they came out
and scan them in. If you want them (if they come out) let me
know and I"ll send them to you.
Thanks again,
Mark Rosner
Buffalo