Zen & The Art Of Not Freezing To Death Outside The Venue
Blood On The Walls/Yeah Yeah Yeahs//Bowery Ballroom//2/24/06
It was Friday the 13th and I was in a weird mood probably due to the buzz and anticipation of a new year wearing off and realizing that a new year is just another opportunity for me to continue screwing up my life. For some reason I happened to check Ticketweb, even though the new tix usually go on sale on Wednesday. And there it was. And I wanted to go. But I also had to go to the bank. And I was going to my mom's after work. And the tickets would not last, that I knew. Deliberation. Not only that, it's $20 and I mean it's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Do I wait on the bank? Pass on the show? Go after work? So of course I walked over to 23rd & 6th after the bank, hopped the F, and went to the Mercury Lounge. Risky. I felt like a sneak. My stomach was killing me. At the Merc, the was a note on the table that said 2 ticket limit and their computer was already on Ticketweb's Bowery Ballroom page. The girl on the phone said, "Only two tickets...they're going pretty quick." Walking down E. Houston, I realized that doors were 9PM. And it's an 18+ show. Great, all the college kids will be on line from the time class ends. And I don't want to do the work. I mean, this is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But when I got back, I saw that both shows were 18+, both 9PM doors, and who better to cover this than me? Maybe this means something, since I just happened to see the tix onsale. Maybe it's proof that I should keep doing what I'm doing. By 4PM, both shows were sold out. I should've gotten another ticket. I could've sold it for a lot of money. But I never do because with my luck I'll get busted. Right, I could've hocked it on eBay. I guess it shows you how old I am if the eBay option doesn't occur to me 1st.
I was really dreading doing the work for this. Not only is it the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it was a $20 ticket, it's cold, I have a cold, my computer, etc. I can make myself miserable at the drop of a hat. I got there @ 6, walking past the Citibank ad on the side of a payphone on Delancey whose slogan is something like, Becoming immature is important, too. I knew I wasn't going to be the 1st on line....but I settled for 2nd. The girl in front of me was one who tried to get last minute Hard-Fi tix. She was having a hushed convo on her cell about Interpol. I sat down to read and freeze. What the hell is wrong with me, it's gotta be like 25 degrees. It's so bad that homeless people actually seek shelter in this weather. My cough was deep, the cough of a poor person who doesn't seek medical attention right away because afterall it's just a routine cold. Sounds like me. My chest hurt when I coughed and hurt when I didn't. I wasn't dressed nearly warm enough. My toes were numb and my fingernails burned. I put up my hood and fastened it over my mouth. I stretched out my legs so that my coat could cover my legs because if I sat cross-legged, it bunched up my coat. Maybe since this is the YYYS I'd be able to concentrate on my book since I wouldn't be all hopped up about the show. An Asian woman in a red skirt, black tights, white cowboy boots, a denim jacket, and fur stole came by and asked what we were waiting for. I couldn't tell if she was just a passerby or she wanted to go to the show. She had a Diesel messenger bag and her clear vinyl tote said I Tokyo all over it. Inside was a pair of white wires. A shuffle hung from her neck. I said we were waiting for a show and she held out a page from the Voice and asked, "Eez theez th' Yah Yah Yahs?" Yah. Other people looking for a last-minute ticket explained to her that they didn't know if they could still get in. Two guys get on line behind me. They aren't in coats and one doesn't have gloves, one is in a Beatles hoodie. I try to exert myself by eavesdropping on their banter about how cold they are and could've taken a later train, hoping to take my mind off of the cold. One said The Magic Numbers is good; he stole the CD from the CW Post radio station. (3. Oh, yes, it's a magic number.) A girl in a floor-length skirt over jeans and hoodie and her bomber jacket-wearing boyfriend show up and I realize something strange. Nobody there looked like a hipster. They all look alt.rock and generic. Weren't the Ys supposed to be so cutting edge? Weren't they all post-punk and trendsetters? Weren't they the harbingers of the future of music? Of the "NYC scene"? What is going on here? The guy in the bomber jacket noticed the poster for The Subways and got all excited. "March 7! Remember that!" He then started calling friends and told them that they should get tickets. Uh, nope. They should've gotten tickets. Because that's sold out. Then we realize that even tho it's 7:00, 9PM doors means that they're not gonna open the downstairs bar area for another hour. The guy in the bomber jacket has dark blue hair and he looks like an asshole. The girl is doing the whole I'm such a rebel! My boyfriend has blue hair! thing and they hovered toward the front of the line, hanging out next to me, so they could "accidentally" cut everybody. Oh, were you standing here? There's a line? I didn't notice. Wow, sucks to be you. After the girl got done smoking and he called friends about The Subways (I'm sorry, but British bands can't call themselves The Subways. Call yerselves The Underground or something. You've just taken a good name from a NYC band. 'Course, no NYC bands have taken it before they did, but someone would've been smart enough to come up with that name. Eventually.) they fell into line behind the kids who've been freezing all this time and in front of others who were waiting.
A woman with a roll of silver material arrived and demanded to be let in. "Who are you?" they asked at the door. "I'm their costume designer." As if we should've known all along. Then the asshole guard comes out and I do my best to ignore him, purposefully eavesdropping on the guys' convo behind me, about how he was harrassed when he went to buy spray paint to paint something. Oh, yes, funny story, gee, if you were going to huff, would the colors matter? just so I wouldn't catch the guard's attention. See, I'm just hanging out with these guys, my new best friends, while we wait. Look at me minding my own business! They separated ticket buyers from holders, making them line up by the subway station, set up the ropes, and checked the IDs of the buyers. And then let them in. It's nice that they treat potential customers better than customers that have already paid. "Move back!" barks the asshole guard. Then another guard goes to the end of the line and starts checking IDs, working his way up to the end, to me. "She's good," he says.
"She's never good," says the a-hole. "She never follows directions."
What? You said move back and I did, aside from the fact that you did not say please. What directions have I failed to follow? But before I could attempt to make sense of this exchange, I head downstairs. I take my place in front of the double doors and people crowd behind me. Great, no going to the bathroom til the show's over. Then the asshole comes down.
"Do you have problems following directions?" Huh? What brought this on? Did I not step back when asked? He mentions my failure to follow directions again and I quickly decide that my tactics will be to ignore him, instead of snapping, being sarcastic/nasty, and mentioning how many years I've been going there w/o problem. I look at him blankly and he takes my silence as an admission that I'm not all there, or unable to comprehend. Then again, I was standing outside in 20-degree weather for 2 hrs for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Maybe there is something wrong with me after all. "I'm just askin' you, because you come here all the time and you're a regular. Why can't you follow directions? I'm not picking on you, I'm just bein real wit'choo." He goes on to explain that if someone is loading in equipment and I get hurt, his boss will be mad at him. All through his monologue I keep up the blank face. Wow, in the 8 years that I've been going to the Bowery Ballroom and being at the front of the line, and I've never been hit w/equipment. I am truly fortuate. He concludes with asking me again if I have problems following directions. I assure him that I don't. All this time, I'm standing in front of the double doors...like someone who can follow directions, and a regular who knows that we don't go upstairs until someone opens the doors from the other side. I try not to dwell and let it ruin the show. But come on. Like I'm not going to notice someone loading in gear and move back? And even if I do get hit, this is me. It'll be Coolest. Moment. Ever. Funny that they care if we get hurt before we even get into the place, but then I'd be standing in a mosh pit if it were a punk show. You don't care what happens to patrons then?
He leaves and I think again about how lucky I've been in the past 8 years. Then I watch them set up merch and listen to the Eurotrash boy behind me regaling the crowd with stories of the Reading Festival and Babyshambles. There's a discussion of Bands and some guy pipes up that his friend is a guitarist in an up-and-coming band, eager to get attention from The Guy With The Accent. He boasts how the band really isn't that good yet but he lies and tells the guitarist that they are.
See, if I were capable of doing that I'd be able to be friends with Guys In Bands.
To further illustrate how I'm capable of following directions at the Bowery Ballroom, the guy who opens the double doors had a door in his hand and then turned around to speak to someone at the merch table, letting the door slip closed again. Did I storm the gate? No. Then he opens it and tell us to wait a minute. I did. Even though he said that we have to stop at the merch table on the way up, we all ran and people started crowding in behind me. No going to the bathroom until after the show.
Blood On The Walls (see, you knew there was a point to this after all--maybe I should figure out how to jump to things w/in your own post and I can make a link so peeps who don't want to read the whole thing can go straight to the band parts.) has a drum kit with a unicorn and a rainbow painted on the front. The drummer was wearing a sweatshirt that had a teddy bear on it and it said something like Basketball Playing Grandma. They were like Sonic Yoot on ritalin--more danceable, even though no one did.
I honestly didn't know what to expect out of the YYYs. Maybe nobody really does, but I only saw them once, at the Merc in their about-to-blow-up state. And if I were blogging back then, I bet I'd be working for a music mag by now. Anyway, I only have their EP because I was hearing so much about them but wasn't able to catch a show and I was like, ok, now this I gotta hear. Never got the album because I wasn't that impressed w/them live. (y...eah, and I still think I can be a rawk crit. There goes that, but maybe it's a good thing that nobody reads this.) The one thing I did like about the show, though, was that I felt old. And I liked that a band could make me feel that way. If that makes sense. And I don't sit around reading music mags in order to get some soundbites about bands to repeat as my own, so I really knew nothing about what the Ys are like now. Which is why I thought I'd be the perfect objective person to review them.
It was gonna involve disco balls. Two were stacked by the drum kit and a few placed by the monitors. Nick and Brian came onstage and started playing in the dark as the light given off by the disco balls swam all around them. Something was coming. It was brewing. Karen O came out in a silver bodysuit decorated with purple, green, and gold plastic jewels and the same gems striped her tights. Her makeup was in the same colors, done up so her face resembled those porcelain masks that 13-yr-old girls hang on their walls. Gone is the esctatic club kid in fishnets who jerked around to the music, spilling beer all over the place--whether it was biting the feathers from her costume, rolling on the floor, or pacing around, carrying the disco balls--and in her place is a jester. All her moves were graceful and seemed thought out, her glitter lipstick never smudged. Watching her perform now, on the big-kid stage, I wondered if the reason I found her antics so annoying in the past is because I saw myself in her: the girl up front jumping around, without a care in the world who she was soaking and pushing, and pushing her way onstage to sing with the band, claiming her place in the show. I'd take the Yeah Yeah Yeahs over all those bands with their eyeliner and synths and trying too hard. Except...nobody danced. Nobody moved. Everyone just stood there with rapt attention. It was an unsettling phenomenon given the rave-up I saw from them at the Merc, given who the band is. At one point Karen had us all sing Happy Birthday to her mom in the balcony and a guard came over to me and told me to take the flash off my camera. I wasn't even using my camera at that point, not to mention that the flash doesn't come off, and of course he said nothing to those with flashes next to me, but for some reason, I thought, You think I can't follow directions? Watch me follow them. I didn't use my camera for a bit. I love how my taking a roll and a half of pix with a flash is ok, but all of a sudden it wasn't. (Kevin is at the Merc now. Said he's been demoted. Something about putting a guy through a wall who had it coming. I don't know; he speaks in sentence fragments anyway. And threw pickles at the club next door. Which I heard was bought buy the Bowery crew for 5 mil. And the parking lot on the right side is undergoing construction. What, another club?) But since everybody else used their flash, I did as well. And the band did. The most reaction Karen got out of the crowd was during the encore, when she mentioned moving to LA. Everyone booed and she said that she used to be a hater, too. So maybe that explains it.
As I stood there putting on my coat, I heard another woman complaining because she was yelled at over her camera being too professional. "Show's over, everybody has to leave!" another guy yelled. Uh, that's why I'm putting my coat on. Duh. What the hell is it with this place all of a sudden? Downstairs, after I was able to push my way down, they were playing X-Ray Spex. That seems about right.
It was Friday the 13th and I was in a weird mood probably due to the buzz and anticipation of a new year wearing off and realizing that a new year is just another opportunity for me to continue screwing up my life. For some reason I happened to check Ticketweb, even though the new tix usually go on sale on Wednesday. And there it was. And I wanted to go. But I also had to go to the bank. And I was going to my mom's after work. And the tickets would not last, that I knew. Deliberation. Not only that, it's $20 and I mean it's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Do I wait on the bank? Pass on the show? Go after work? So of course I walked over to 23rd & 6th after the bank, hopped the F, and went to the Mercury Lounge. Risky. I felt like a sneak. My stomach was killing me. At the Merc, the was a note on the table that said 2 ticket limit and their computer was already on Ticketweb's Bowery Ballroom page. The girl on the phone said, "Only two tickets...they're going pretty quick." Walking down E. Houston, I realized that doors were 9PM. And it's an 18+ show. Great, all the college kids will be on line from the time class ends. And I don't want to do the work. I mean, this is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But when I got back, I saw that both shows were 18+, both 9PM doors, and who better to cover this than me? Maybe this means something, since I just happened to see the tix onsale. Maybe it's proof that I should keep doing what I'm doing. By 4PM, both shows were sold out. I should've gotten another ticket. I could've sold it for a lot of money. But I never do because with my luck I'll get busted. Right, I could've hocked it on eBay. I guess it shows you how old I am if the eBay option doesn't occur to me 1st.
I was really dreading doing the work for this. Not only is it the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it was a $20 ticket, it's cold, I have a cold, my computer, etc. I can make myself miserable at the drop of a hat. I got there @ 6, walking past the Citibank ad on the side of a payphone on Delancey whose slogan is something like, Becoming immature is important, too. I knew I wasn't going to be the 1st on line....but I settled for 2nd. The girl in front of me was one who tried to get last minute Hard-Fi tix. She was having a hushed convo on her cell about Interpol. I sat down to read and freeze. What the hell is wrong with me, it's gotta be like 25 degrees. It's so bad that homeless people actually seek shelter in this weather. My cough was deep, the cough of a poor person who doesn't seek medical attention right away because afterall it's just a routine cold. Sounds like me. My chest hurt when I coughed and hurt when I didn't. I wasn't dressed nearly warm enough. My toes were numb and my fingernails burned. I put up my hood and fastened it over my mouth. I stretched out my legs so that my coat could cover my legs because if I sat cross-legged, it bunched up my coat. Maybe since this is the YYYS I'd be able to concentrate on my book since I wouldn't be all hopped up about the show. An Asian woman in a red skirt, black tights, white cowboy boots, a denim jacket, and fur stole came by and asked what we were waiting for. I couldn't tell if she was just a passerby or she wanted to go to the show. She had a Diesel messenger bag and her clear vinyl tote said I
A woman with a roll of silver material arrived and demanded to be let in. "Who are you?" they asked at the door. "I'm their costume designer." As if we should've known all along. Then the asshole guard comes out and I do my best to ignore him, purposefully eavesdropping on the guys' convo behind me, about how he was harrassed when he went to buy spray paint to paint something. Oh, yes, funny story, gee, if you were going to huff, would the colors matter? just so I wouldn't catch the guard's attention. See, I'm just hanging out with these guys, my new best friends, while we wait. Look at me minding my own business! They separated ticket buyers from holders, making them line up by the subway station, set up the ropes, and checked the IDs of the buyers. And then let them in. It's nice that they treat potential customers better than customers that have already paid. "Move back!" barks the asshole guard. Then another guard goes to the end of the line and starts checking IDs, working his way up to the end, to me. "She's good," he says.
"She's never good," says the a-hole. "She never follows directions."
What? You said move back and I did, aside from the fact that you did not say please. What directions have I failed to follow? But before I could attempt to make sense of this exchange, I head downstairs. I take my place in front of the double doors and people crowd behind me. Great, no going to the bathroom til the show's over. Then the asshole comes down.
"Do you have problems following directions?" Huh? What brought this on? Did I not step back when asked? He mentions my failure to follow directions again and I quickly decide that my tactics will be to ignore him, instead of snapping, being sarcastic/nasty, and mentioning how many years I've been going there w/o problem. I look at him blankly and he takes my silence as an admission that I'm not all there, or unable to comprehend. Then again, I was standing outside in 20-degree weather for 2 hrs for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Maybe there is something wrong with me after all. "I'm just askin' you, because you come here all the time and you're a regular. Why can't you follow directions? I'm not picking on you, I'm just bein real wit'choo." He goes on to explain that if someone is loading in equipment and I get hurt, his boss will be mad at him. All through his monologue I keep up the blank face. Wow, in the 8 years that I've been going to the Bowery Ballroom and being at the front of the line, and I've never been hit w/equipment. I am truly fortuate. He concludes with asking me again if I have problems following directions. I assure him that I don't. All this time, I'm standing in front of the double doors...like someone who can follow directions, and a regular who knows that we don't go upstairs until someone opens the doors from the other side. I try not to dwell and let it ruin the show. But come on. Like I'm not going to notice someone loading in gear and move back? And even if I do get hit, this is me. It'll be Coolest. Moment. Ever. Funny that they care if we get hurt before we even get into the place, but then I'd be standing in a mosh pit if it were a punk show. You don't care what happens to patrons then?
He leaves and I think again about how lucky I've been in the past 8 years. Then I watch them set up merch and listen to the Eurotrash boy behind me regaling the crowd with stories of the Reading Festival and Babyshambles. There's a discussion of Bands and some guy pipes up that his friend is a guitarist in an up-and-coming band, eager to get attention from The Guy With The Accent. He boasts how the band really isn't that good yet but he lies and tells the guitarist that they are.
See, if I were capable of doing that I'd be able to be friends with Guys In Bands.
To further illustrate how I'm capable of following directions at the Bowery Ballroom, the guy who opens the double doors had a door in his hand and then turned around to speak to someone at the merch table, letting the door slip closed again. Did I storm the gate? No. Then he opens it and tell us to wait a minute. I did. Even though he said that we have to stop at the merch table on the way up, we all ran and people started crowding in behind me. No going to the bathroom until after the show.
Blood On The Walls (see, you knew there was a point to this after all--maybe I should figure out how to jump to things w/in your own post and I can make a link so peeps who don't want to read the whole thing can go straight to the band parts.) has a drum kit with a unicorn and a rainbow painted on the front. The drummer was wearing a sweatshirt that had a teddy bear on it and it said something like Basketball Playing Grandma. They were like Sonic Yoot on ritalin--more danceable, even though no one did.
I honestly didn't know what to expect out of the YYYs. Maybe nobody really does, but I only saw them once, at the Merc in their about-to-blow-up state. And if I were blogging back then, I bet I'd be working for a music mag by now. Anyway, I only have their EP because I was hearing so much about them but wasn't able to catch a show and I was like, ok, now this I gotta hear. Never got the album because I wasn't that impressed w/them live. (y...eah, and I still think I can be a rawk crit. There goes that, but maybe it's a good thing that nobody reads this.) The one thing I did like about the show, though, was that I felt old. And I liked that a band could make me feel that way. If that makes sense. And I don't sit around reading music mags in order to get some soundbites about bands to repeat as my own, so I really knew nothing about what the Ys are like now. Which is why I thought I'd be the perfect objective person to review them.
It was gonna involve disco balls. Two were stacked by the drum kit and a few placed by the monitors. Nick and Brian came onstage and started playing in the dark as the light given off by the disco balls swam all around them. Something was coming. It was brewing. Karen O came out in a silver bodysuit decorated with purple, green, and gold plastic jewels and the same gems striped her tights. Her makeup was in the same colors, done up so her face resembled those porcelain masks that 13-yr-old girls hang on their walls. Gone is the esctatic club kid in fishnets who jerked around to the music, spilling beer all over the place--whether it was biting the feathers from her costume, rolling on the floor, or pacing around, carrying the disco balls--and in her place is a jester. All her moves were graceful and seemed thought out, her glitter lipstick never smudged. Watching her perform now, on the big-kid stage, I wondered if the reason I found her antics so annoying in the past is because I saw myself in her: the girl up front jumping around, without a care in the world who she was soaking and pushing, and pushing her way onstage to sing with the band, claiming her place in the show. I'd take the Yeah Yeah Yeahs over all those bands with their eyeliner and synths and trying too hard. Except...nobody danced. Nobody moved. Everyone just stood there with rapt attention. It was an unsettling phenomenon given the rave-up I saw from them at the Merc, given who the band is. At one point Karen had us all sing Happy Birthday to her mom in the balcony and a guard came over to me and told me to take the flash off my camera. I wasn't even using my camera at that point, not to mention that the flash doesn't come off, and of course he said nothing to those with flashes next to me, but for some reason, I thought, You think I can't follow directions? Watch me follow them. I didn't use my camera for a bit. I love how my taking a roll and a half of pix with a flash is ok, but all of a sudden it wasn't. (Kevin is at the Merc now. Said he's been demoted. Something about putting a guy through a wall who had it coming. I don't know; he speaks in sentence fragments anyway. And threw pickles at the club next door. Which I heard was bought buy the Bowery crew for 5 mil. And the parking lot on the right side is undergoing construction. What, another club?) But since everybody else used their flash, I did as well. And the band did. The most reaction Karen got out of the crowd was during the encore, when she mentioned moving to LA. Everyone booed and she said that she used to be a hater, too. So maybe that explains it.
As I stood there putting on my coat, I heard another woman complaining because she was yelled at over her camera being too professional. "Show's over, everybody has to leave!" another guy yelled. Uh, that's why I'm putting my coat on. Duh. What the hell is it with this place all of a sudden? Downstairs, after I was able to push my way down, they were playing X-Ray Spex. That seems about right.
posted by heather @ 2:00 PM
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