Before I left town, I did my usual routine of checking my email, reading the news I care about, and checking in on my friends' blogs. On the blog of an ex-girlfriend who now lives in DC, she had posted some pictures of some friends of hers who live in Richmond. As soon as I saw the first picture, I instantly recognized a guy who used to live directly upstairs from me. Apparently she had just met Matt, or didn't know that we knew one another. Strange.
So I was standing in the beer line at Wilco, and I hear my name being said. Not yelled. Standing directly beside me is the girl who used to live right beside me in the other downstairs apartment. I haven't seen either of these people in many months, and I saw them both in the same day, both in out of town places.
Anyway, about the show.
There were little films projected behind the band all night long. Most of them were vaguely sexual in nature. Not porn, you sick bastards! There was one of birds mating, one of bees mating, another of some pollination process, and some others that were vaguely sexual. During "I am Trying to Break Your Heart", there was a film that I recognized. I hate to bring this up again, because it makes me sound a bit pompous, but I recognized it from when I attended the 2002 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (How many times do you think I'll mention that?). Yo La Tengo was there performing their The Sounds of the Sounds of Science album, which is a group of songs written for the express purpose of accompanying the underwater films of Frenchman Jean Painleve, who was sort of a pioneer of science films, and more so of underwater films. There were 8 films in this series, each about 10 minutes in length. The one in question, for the record was "The Love Life of the Octopus".
When Wilco played "Kingpin" , they sort of Zeppelin-ed it up, sounding an awful lot like "When the Levee Breaks".
There's no need to discuss the fact that the Wilco song "I'm a Wheel" sounds a lot like it should be a Pavement song.
Finally, the last comparison, one that I'm quite surprised that I was able to make on the fly. They were playing some silly song I didn't recognize. A song about how everyone hates the US, so we should bomb them anyway. I turned to my friends and asked, "Is this a Randy Newman song?", to which they both shrugged, indicating they had no idea what I was talking about. When I got home, I looked it up, and indeed it was a cover of "Political Science" by Randy Newman.
The drive home is 90 minutes from where the show was. After we got off the interstate, heading back to my house, we were stopped at a red light. I looked over to the car beside us, and there was my friend and neighbor from the beer line.
That's about all I have for now.
Now playing:
Badly Drawn Boy Have You Fed the Fish?
1 comment:
Wilco were on "Talk Of the Nation" this afternoon. They talked quite bit about the woman who did all the film work. It was pretty interesting.
Any band that will cover a Randy Newman song is aces in my book.
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