Concert Review & Story: Melissa Etheridge

Zack Hall is my Golden God of the Month for July.

Who is Zack Hall? I couldn't have told you that yesterday. He is the roommate of Liz Lyons, my friend Nate's girlfriend, who had her 21st birthday party yesterday. I went to the party, and he was talking about a friend of his who used to work at the Tweeter Center, and who is trying to set him up with this guy who works there now.

So Zack is talking about how this guy offered him comps (translation: Vouchers that you can exchange, with $10, for tickets to a concert) for tonight's Melissa Etheridge concert. I am a huge fan of hers, so it was like Bat-Hearing:

"Did someone say cheap Melissa Etheridge tickets?!"

I had really wanted to go to this concert, but for some reason Melissa likes to ridiculously overcharge for her tickets. With Ticketbastard service charges, one ticket would have come to about $93.00, and I had already paid something in that neighborhood for the "Live...and Alone" tour, so I couldn't really cough that up again.

Granted, she's good enough that it's worth every fucking penny, it's just that I didn't have 9300 spare pennies sitting around.

So I asked Zack if he was using the comps, and he said no, since he wasn't a real big fan, plus he was going drinking with Liz. So he asked if I wanted the comps. I was like, "FUCK YES!" and he gave me instructions on how to pick them up.

Because of the Six-Degrees-Of-Kevin-Bacon manner in which I had got these things, I didn't get my hopes up too much on whether this whole crazy scheme would work, but when me and my friends got to the theater, we picked 'em up, no problem at all.

We had to wait a while, since we got their early in hopes of getting the best seats possible. And they weren't spectacular seats, but they were fucking seats, and they were 10 bucks instead of 93. They had a band performing on the "Rising Talent Stage" by the gate.

Oh, what a misnomer that turned out to be. It was some fucking cover band, who covered two Melissa Etheridge songs. It was like, hello, Melissa herself is here. They were talented, and their drummer was the lead singer, but if you're playing on a rising talent stage, you better goddamn well play your own songs to get there.

The real opener, some chick calling herself Rosey, no last name, was also fairly lame, though to her credit, she did play her own songs. They sucked, but at least they were originals. She played for about half an hour, and the most applause she got was for the announcement, "This is my last song..."

Melissa....wow.

I've seen Melissa Etheridge live three times now, and I am constantly amazed by how unbelievably fucking good she is. 25 years of performing will do that for some people, but she is just....wow.

Her set was a good mix of older and newer stuff, though there were several omissions that kinda pissed me off (Lover Please, Your Little Secret, for example), but it's just amazing the back catalog of fucking incredible songs that she has to dig through.

There was one song she doesn't play live much (which of course I've forgotten the name of) where the traditional "band goes off on a tangent thing" happened, but instead of just letting them go, she went over to the guitar player, played his guitar, then they went over to the bassist, all played his bass, and they all climbed up on the drummer's kit and all four of them played together.

They were all having such a blast. That, I think, is the key to a great live show. The band has to be really attatched to the show. Even if the vibe isn't fun, it's intensity. And these guys were fucking great.

Melissa's drummer is a guy named Kenny Aronoff, who is probably the best drummer around today. I've seen him drum for the Smashing Pumpkins, too, and he's just insane. He's the anchor for that band, and he does a spectacular job of it. Even if his sunglasses (which came over his bald head and made him look like an alien) were kinda silly.

They even played a new song, called "Secret Agent," which is going to be the first single off her next album, I guarantee you. It's fucking great. It's funny as hell, too. The gist of it is about how nobody can figure out whether this girl is straight, or, well, not. The girl, it turns out, is now Melissa's girlfriend, so I guess we know the answer to that one...

I highly recommend Melissa's show to anyone who can cough up the money, which you should definitely do if you've never seen her. And if Melissa reads this, then hey! Lower your damn ticket prices! You'll make up for it in volume, trust me.

Zack Hall, I owe you big. I'll have to get you a thank-you cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.

Wow

Man Eats 50.5 Hot Dogs In 12 Minutes, Breaking His Own World Record.

This man, by the way, weighs 113 pounds.

Bastard.

Forgot...

...to mention the best part.

There was a guy at the Taste, dressed as Jesus, carrying a cross.

No sign, no explanation, no nothing. Just Jesus carrying the cross.

An excellent 4th

Ok, that kicked ass. Ridiculously hot ass, yes, but it still kicked ass.

Backing up a bit, I went to the Taste Of Chicago today because a) I hadn't been before and b) the Indigo Girls were playing for free.

It was supposed to cool down today, though it certainly felt approximately as hot as the surface of the sun when me and my friends were waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the Indigo Girls came on.

Minor peeve: Concert was stated as starting at 3pm, meaning the first opener went on at 3. Except nobody told us that both of the openers had really long sets. That was fine with the first opener, Marcia Ball, who fronts a pretty good blues band. They played for a bit less than an hour.

The second opener was Midnight Oil, a washed up 80's band who sings that "how can we sleep while our beds are burning" song, and several other songs I'd probably know if I had paid attention to music in the mid 80's, instead of being five.

They played for like an hour and a half. It was getting ridiculous by the time they finally got off the stage, but I guess some people seemed to like them. To each his own...but me and a couple of my friends had to seek refuge from the heat during their set.

It was at least 20 degrees cooler in the shade than in the sun. I drank about 3 liters of water over the whole day, which was fine when we were sitting in the sun, but when we moved to the shade, it was like..um...I'll be right back, guys...

The oddest part of the whole day was one of these incidents. I went into one of the port-o-lets (portable restrooms), only to discover that the person in there before me had apparently been hotboxing (smoking large amounts of marijuana in) the damn thing.

Jokes I made about this included: "Well, at least it's better than the normal smell." "I went in expecting to lose my appetite and now I'm suddenly hungrier..."

Anyway, the Indigo Girls were very, very good, despite the fact that their set was actually shorter than Midnight Oil's, despite the fact that Midnight Oil bites and the Indigos rock. But I can't complain, because they did excellent version of "Go," "Get Out The Map," "Closer To Fine," "Get Out The Map," and Amy Ray's "Laramie," among many others.

Anyway, we all made it back to Evanston just in time to catch the Ev,IL fireworks, which were really, really good. And surprisingly long. I was happy to see they were 40 minutes long, which is ridiculously long for a suburban fireworks show.

And I was amused to see that large portions of the universe still haven't figured out that Springsteen's Born in the USA is a protest song, because it was played as a way to raise patriotism. It's a great song, it just makes me giggle when people think it's all patriotic and shit, and have never actually bothered to read the lyrics.

But it was great, because I got to relive my childhood, watching the fireworks from the big park (not downtown in D.C.- these fireworks were an alternative to heading downtown with the hordes until the D.C. fire dept. figured out that it cost them a ton of money to keep an eye on all these independent independence celebrations, and banned all fireworks displays other than the main one).

I remember being so impressed with simple fireworks when I was a kid, mostly because of the concussive force that just smacked you in the chest. And occasionally set off car alarms, but whatever. When you're eight, it's fucking cool.

And I had a great flashback to that childlike sense of wonder, as all of us looked at these massive (expected and paid for) explosions going on above us, and made those "ooh" and "aah" sounds like a crowd on a sound effects disc. It was excellent.

And then, of course, when it was over, I came back with my friends, and we drank. Because what would Independence Day be without good, old-fashioned, American drunkenness?

Ah, weird shit in the news

Via Obscure Store: Boomerang thrower thrown off plane, featuring excellent headline created by really bored intern with thesaurus.

And from EOnline: Mike Ovitz loses it, accuses "Gay Mafia" of bringing him down. I don't even know where to start with that one...

Quote of the day

Courtesy of everyone's favorite resident of my mom's basement:

(Mark): Let's all retire and open a bikini waxing store in Guam.

Bad signs

I reached over to smack the snooze on my alarm clock this morning, and I noticed there was a chunk of plastic missing from the face of the clock.

I don't know when it got knocked off, but it's gotta be sometime in the last month or so.

This can't be good.

I love a parade

A few selected scenes from the big gay parade:

* A bemused (but quite good) tejano band on a float for a western-wear store.

* Numerous men hitting on Eddy. One guy giving out Mardi Gras-style beads was down to his last beads, and loads of people were reaching for them, including me and his girlfriend Cleo, but the guy goes, "Oh no, this is for the cutie!" and draped them around Eddy.

"Hey, that's my boyfriend!" Cleo said. I told her hey, Eddy could have had a shot at hittin' that, but then I ducked to avoid the imminent bitchslap.

* Fun contrast: The three dozen churches and other various houses of worship marching with at least a couple hundred people vs. the 6 Psycho Christian protesters ("you're all going to hell" etc. etc.). I always wonder what the real churches think of those assholes.

* Trying to get my friends Jon and Lexi to look over at me when they marched by. They couldn't hear me, Cleo, and Eddy screaming because of loud music (Klezmer in front, techno in back), so I had to scream at the top of my lungs to get them to turn around and be like "Hey! Why didn't you say hi before?"

* Eddy recognizing someone he interviewed for his psych research dressed in an outfit composed entirely of fringe.

* Q101, a station that's generally associated with cock rock and asinine assholes whining about how their bitch hates them, giving out pins declaring themselves "The Queer Alternative." I hope they realized the irony, but I doubt it.

* Two of the Dykes on Bykes (a gang of motorcycle-riding lesbians, for the uninitiated) getting into an accident going approximately four miles an hour, then getting in a mini-fight. I thought the audience was going to be like the Jerry Springer audience and start chanting "We love lesbians! We love lesbians!"

I'll post more if I can think of anything else, but those were some of the highlights.

The Empty Bottle Wasn't Half-Empty

I've come up with a new weight loss plan, because I've put back on a bit of the weight I lost while on the Soul-Crushing Stress Of College diet earlier this year.

The new plan: The Overcrowded Rock Club Sweat It Out plan.

This plan was developed this evening when I went to see the Chicago Kings, a drag king troupe doing their thing because the big gay parade is tomorrow.

They were playing at the Empty Bottle, an excellently sketchy club here in Chicago that's normally used by punk or rock bands, and not a massive herd of lesbians and about six gay men.

There were a whole lot of people there, quite a few more than I suspect the fire code allows, and the place is not air conditioned, so it was really goddamn hot.

This is something I don't get: Many, many places in Chicago have no air conditoning. I think a large part of it is the mindset that most people have that Chicago = cold.

But what people tend to forget is that in the summer, Chicago can get really fuckin' hot.

And you go into places, many of them cheapo restaurants like the infamous Mr. Beef down near work (referred to by the denziens of Post Effects as Mystery Beef) and the temperature inside is approximately the same as that on the surface of the sun. I can't imagine what it's like to work there.

Anyway, so it's really, really hot at the Empty Bottle because there were at least a couple hundred people there, and the place is just not built to hold that many, and I figured out that I was probably sweating out more calories than I had eaten that evening.

Certainly it was enough to make everyone stop caring what they looked or smelled like, because they knew everybody else looked and smelled just as bad, because we were all in this together, stinking and frizzing away.

Thus the new plan. Not as cheap as the S-CSOC diet, but a hell of a lot more fun.