Spooning

"Coming soon ... all the details from Spoon & Coldplay concerts, including hours spent waiting, songs played and emotions experienced."

Wow - I wrote that a month ago, and have been too daunted to fill in the post. Allen has already commented without hearing any of the juicy details. (Make that "sweaty" details.) I'm going to take the Hester Park post model and simply list appropriate words without worrying about complete sentences ... yet. A connect the dots event.


SpoonX3 concert in Austin. Three nights. Kyle went Friday, I took Saturday. Stubb's BBQ in Austin. Outdoor amphitheater. Hot = inadequate word. There are no words for the level of humidity and suffering.

I drove to Austin on Saturday afternoon. Got in line a little after 6 p.m. Waited outside the venue til 7 p.m. Waited inside the venue from 7-8 p.m. Strange Boys played at 8 p.m. (Yes, strange in that the lead vocalist was 90% unintelligible. But good songs otherwise!) Atlas Sound played at 9 p.m. Very cool & trippy. Spoon came on at 10 p.m. Talk about an energy infusion!

I will admit to some vanity. Before leaving Bryan, I took care with my cosmetics and ironed my clothes.
Within the first ten minutes outside Stubb's, all my effort had wilted away. Make up gone. Clothes wrinkled and covered in dirt and dust. I used my shirt to wipe the hot desert sands from my face. It turned from white to streaky brown. Another fan still looked good two hours in. We chatted a bit, and I mentioned that all my make up was gone. What was her secret? "It depends what kind of make up you put on!" Ah. I want some of that concert-proof stuff, ma'am!

Because I arrived early, I made it to the third human line/row, very near the stage. But I was by myself with no one to hold my place. After an hour standing by the stage but before the bands came on, I felt a bit shaky. The guards kept shouting for people to drink water, but I didn't want to lose my place. I made friendly eye contact with a couple near me so that they would recognize me later when I had to claw my way back, then ran to the beverage stand & bought some water. The rest of the time I just stood there imagining waterfalls and soda fountains.

Spoon on stage = highlight of my summer.

The music was yes. Crisp, beautiful, perfect, manic, passionate. One criticism of Spoon is that they don't vary much from their recordings in live performance. To me, this shows their musical abilities. Those records aren't just doctored up in the studio. The guys really can play.

Britt Daniel is, as Allen says, cool embodied. He's modest and demure yet totally hot and magnetic. This is an unsual & appealing combination. I didn't even try to remember the set list order because I knew someone would post it the next day on flickr, and I was not disappointed. I took a few lowgrade phone photos but also trusted that others with better cameras would help me out. I tried, in the words of Annie's preschool teacher who chided parents for worrying more about the photo than the moments, to "write it on my heart."

They played from most of their albums plus new material. I loved "Me and the Bean" (from "Girls Can Tell"), "The Beast & Dragon, Adored" (from "Gimme Fiction"), "Black Like Me" (from "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga") and everything else. "Car Radio" from "A Series of Sneaks". "Rocks Off" by the Rolling Stones was an amazing encore.

Also, there were two intoxicated sorority buffoons who kept pushing & shoving. Annoying! We banded against them, those of us in the front who had actually waited. But the girls kept at it. Did I elbow them once or twice? Of course. Shove! Get out of my view, ladies! One of them kept shouting to Britt Daniel, and it annoyed me. Mr. Daniel should not be shouted at! Mr. Daniel should be spoken to respectfully. Mr. Daniel is not an object or a prop in your beer drama, hussy! Mr. Daniel is my hero.


They played until midnight, and I was hopping (yes, hopping. Bouncing on my feet, etc.) til the last moment, waiting for my Courteney Cox/Bruce Springsteen moment. (Didn't happen.) It was awesome, worth it, life giving (though life draining). It was now!

Then the coach turned back into a pumpkin and the show ended. Immediately it was if a contagious airborn blister disease reached my feet. (Bad move wearing my brand new, unbroken-in Chuck Taylors to a hard-packed earth amphitheater for 6 hours.) I literally hobbled my way out to my van. Can I just say that a hobbling, sweat-streaked woman in her late thirties, hobbling alone, mind you, to her mini van from a youth-filled live music event in Austin, just a throw from 6th Street, is a NOT the image the Austin Chamber of Commerce wants to circulate.

I suppose the evening is what is meant by exquisite pain.

I found a drive-thru off the highway and purchased two large icy beverages filled with a chemical designed to keep me awake. Despite the 100 ounces of of icy adrenaline, however, my eyes were swimming on the drive home. I had all the windows down and the radio blaring. I pinched my arms over and over. No time to stop, for I had to accompany the ward choir at 8:30 a.m.

I am glad I don't have a picture of me at church the next morning. Black wrinkle-free dress. Bare legs. Sparkly flip flops with some of the sparkles missing. They are my dressiest flip flops but they're four years old. Unpainted toes. No make up. Hair smelling of smoke. Old glasses used as a "disguise" for my puffy face. But heart full of music. Lovely!