Post by HereIsGone on Jul 24, 2010 16:05:42 GMT -5
Well, here it is — the usual ridiculously verbose write-up of things that happened. If you didn’t think I’d share then shame on you. 
Fortunately for me, the ride up to Buffalo was pretty stress-free. Although it did rain a bit for about a 15 minute-stretch while I was still in Canada, it cleared up pretty much by the time I got to the city near the border (Fort Erie). From past experience, I knew that it would be a boring drive on the Canadian side so I used my iPod car adapter to play my songs on shuffle with the plan being to use it for as long as possible before it would become too much of a hassle trying to find the right station for it. Because I hadn’t uploaded anything new that day, my iPod resumed where I had stopped it last which was the Live in Buffalo version of Dizzy when I left. Considering the place I was headed and the weather forecast for that night, I thought it was appropriate alongside making me think, ‘OMG this is what I get to look forward to!’ And no, that was not sarcasm. I was thinking about the kick-ass performance, not the rain.
Weirdly enough, directly after that, Our Lady Peace and Default came up on shuffle. I thought that was kind of eerie considering those are the two bands I saw for my other two concerts in reverse chronological order. Then again, I find patterns in everything like the dork I am. So yeah.
So other than that, shuffle seemed to be heavier than usual on the Replacements and some of Paul Westerberg’s solo material which was definitely alright with me. Weirdly enough, other than LIB Dizzy, which really doesn’t count since I knew it’d play when I first left, the only other Goo Goo Dolls song that popped up before unplugging the adapter close to the border was Give A Little Bit. I found that strangely amusing for some reason.
Anyways, moving along from this tangent, the rest of the trip wasn’t very eventful like I said before although I think this tweet eloquently sums up the only real nuisance that cropped up—
‘Peace bridge line up.....ffffffff.’
Well, that and pants was a bad idea. Thank fucking God I packed shorts just in case.
Anyway, fast forwarding to the time I got to Darien, I parked my sorry ass in the furthermost right corner of first parking lot I found instead of bothering with the concert parking lot figuring that,
A – It’ll probably be about an hour before I can exit said parking lot, therefore, walking can kill a small bit of time.
B – I’m not crippled so walking a little further will not kill me.
C – It will be less packed so less of a chance of any misfortune of any kind happening.
Turns out that I’d made the right call on that. Go me.
In any case, I walked over to the line/box office area and aimlessly wandered around until I met up with Nicole to wait in line. We talked about stuff and eventually we started talking to a mother and son who were behind us as well and killed an hour that way. Oh and yes, there were also people from the other side of the fence from Jack-FM using t-shirt guns so we had fun avoiding getting nailed by errant flying t-shirts. Their aim sucked on some of shots so some t-shirts didn’t make it over and died for the cause. It made for some good and cheap entertainment because there’s nothing as awesome as free stuff, or so I’ve been told.
Since Nicole and I had Fast Lane passes, we were allowed to go to past the barricades they had up and to the main gates before anyone else. It was kind of awkward seeing as we were the only ones who had these and because they had small dividers between each chain-link door, I felt like a pony in a starting gate. Ironically enough, that comparison turned out to be very apt because the passes gave us about, oh, ten seconds before everyone behind us started running once they opened the gates. As many of you already knew via Twitter, we still managed to get to the rail, slightly left of the center of the stage.
So after waiting a bit, the Spill Canvas unceremoniously walked on stage at 7:30. There was no backdrop for them, no nothing to indicate they were the Spill Canvas aside from their trolleys set to the far side of the stage to people who might have not been aware of their existence on the bill. Hell, they didn’t even introduce themselves until right before the second last song of their set when they told people of their EP on sale from their upcoming album and the single they were gonna play from it (Our Song).
Because of the way they were set up, I couldn’t hear what the fuck the guy was singing most of the time but they were pretty cool and I dug the fact that they were aware that they were the opener and didn’t have any illusions of grandeur. This was made obvious when the singer asks,
“You guys excited for Switchfoot and the Goo Goo Dolls?” He pauses for a second or two while people scream out their approval and quickly adds, “-As you should be.”
So after them and changing the set-up, Switchfoot comes on and I find myself terribly excited as they do a little musical intro and open with Needle and Haystack Life and even more so when they break into Mess of Me, which I fucking love. With only 9 songs, they were really heavy on the material from Hello Hurricane but since I love those songs, had great interaction with the crowds and they were really fantastic live overall, I can’t complain in the slightest. Before I go on, this was their set list for the night:
Needle and Haystack Life
Mess of Me
Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty cover)
This Is Your Life
The Sound
Your Love Is a Song
Nothing Is Sound (intro part)/Free
Dare You to Move
Meant to Live
When they played This Is Your Life, Jon went into the crowd akin to what I’ve read Esther describe about her shows and effectively disappeared out of sight from where I was standing. I felt like I was playing Where’s Waldo and for some reason I told Nicole he’s like fucking Batman. Looking back, I don’t know why I said Batman since...well, he usually isn’t invisible. Oh well. It’s not the first time I’ve said something weird and it definitely won’t be the last either.
Once Jon had resurfaced back to stage, someone put up an extra big sparkly orange drum right in from of their drum kit. Before they set it down I naturally wondered if the drummer had broken a drum head or something and when I realized that the drum was just going to be in front of there, my thoughts naturally meandered to, ‘what the fuck is that extra drum for?’
The answer to that was for Jon to pound the ever-living shit out of it towards the end of playing The Sound which added a lot of intensity to it. I honestly thought one of his mallets was going to fly up as he was whacking it silly. It didn’t so that was a plus, seeing I had enough of a fun time dodging flying t-shirts already.
So the rest of the set was great and of course they couldn’t leave the stage before doing the pair of their biggest hits from The Beautiful Letdown — Dare You To Move and Meant to Live. I knew they were gonna end their set this way but I still enjoyed them very much so. They were done at 9:00 and it was at this point (or maybe a little earlier, I can’t quite remember) where it dawned on me that it did not rain or thunderstorm. Still humid but I’m glad we didn’t get Cleveland’s weather.
After the stuff gets set up for Goo amid getting randomly teased with fog machines for no real apparent reason and making fun bets on what John would be wearing that night (hell, who wouldn’t make fun bets with roughly a 33% chance of getting it right?), they came on at 9:30. And it was glorious. It didn’t matter that I’d seen that grey shirt John was wearing like a bajillion times (Nicole won that one. I stupidly chose the star shirt) or that, for all intents and purposes, Mike was invisible (and not Batman invisible) as the stage was so fucking high I couldn’t see him, they were there and they were real.
I know it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but if you take a step back and really think about it, a lot of long-time fans, obviously myself included, have never seen them at a concert or at another kind of event. You see their pictures, performances and you listen to their songs, interviews or what have you but there’s always that slight disconnect in a way because it’s all indirect mediums. The moment they opened with Sweetest Lie, I was jumping up and down, holding the rail and not caring about jotting down the set list and using my camera to capture the moment instead of living in it.
For that reason, after having such a hard time with that one Here Is Gone video I decided not to bother with any more because the logistics made things difficult and I wanted to watch them play their songs instead of focusing my energy on the camera. It’s a big catch-22 I find – you’ll have your footage and ripped audio forever but you don’t get to enjoy it while you’re actually there. Taking photos isn’t that bad but it’s the same thing with taking the set list too (which is why I’m not bothering with that at Toronto – I’ll remember if anything different was played there). Speaking of which, here’s the set list (exactly the same as Detroit):
Sweetest Lie
Big Machine
Slide
Dizzy
Here Is Gone
Another Second Time Around
Smash
Can’t Let It Go
Black Balloon
Home
Better Days
Stay With You
Now I Hear
Tucked Away
Name
Let Love In
As I Am
All Eyes on Me
Acoustic #3
Iris
Encore:
Notbroken
Broadway
For the show as a whole, John and Robby weren’t very chatty but they were smiling an awful lot and they played really well aside from a few minor lyric substitutes like the one I captured on film and on Another Second Time Around if I’m remembering right. No retarded guitar show and tell and no fucking up Iris or Acoustic #3 – the latter of which surprised the hell out of me and on the former John actually sang most of it save for the end and one chorus so it’s all good.
All throughout the thing, I was trying not to start singing randomly or yelling while Nicole was recording a few songs and I was trying to get Robby’s attention with the telephone gesture. I think I finally managed to catch his attention once because he looked at me from his side of the stage, made a face and walked into his mic before talking to Korel for a sec. I might be delusional here but I just hope he remembered what he asked me to do during that call two weeks ago or else I just made myself look like a cheap ho.
Regardless, I got tons of pictures of John and Robby (plus a few of Brad, a semi-retarded pic of Mike and Korel blowing...his saxophone) and had myself a good laugh at the end when John was introducing Korel and when he walked up to Brad, stopped and told the crowd he was from Paris, France and dubbed him François.
After the show, I picked up a shirt but they sold out of the EP so I’ll have to pick that up in Toronto with maybe another shirt and stuff. I still have not heard of any of the EP so I guess there’s a perverse accomplishment there. It’ll be like, 2 am or so after the Toronto show before I get to listen so I’m looking forward to that.
Getting home was no problem and neither was waiting in the parking lot. I was so busy just leafing through and deleting bad pictures that it killed a lot of time (going from 144 to 99 and then some) on top of walking to my car and going to the merch booth. Oh and tweeting too. That helped.
Interestingly enough, the last song on my shuffle before I parked the car at home was Switchfoot’s Stars, also the only time they popped up on shuffle during my trip. It felt like a very appropriate end to things, I thought. I'm just glad I'm not aching as bad as I thought I would today.
Pics will follow soon, I have to pick and choose right now.
Fortunately for me, the ride up to Buffalo was pretty stress-free. Although it did rain a bit for about a 15 minute-stretch while I was still in Canada, it cleared up pretty much by the time I got to the city near the border (Fort Erie). From past experience, I knew that it would be a boring drive on the Canadian side so I used my iPod car adapter to play my songs on shuffle with the plan being to use it for as long as possible before it would become too much of a hassle trying to find the right station for it. Because I hadn’t uploaded anything new that day, my iPod resumed where I had stopped it last which was the Live in Buffalo version of Dizzy when I left. Considering the place I was headed and the weather forecast for that night, I thought it was appropriate alongside making me think, ‘OMG this is what I get to look forward to!’ And no, that was not sarcasm. I was thinking about the kick-ass performance, not the rain.
Weirdly enough, directly after that, Our Lady Peace and Default came up on shuffle. I thought that was kind of eerie considering those are the two bands I saw for my other two concerts in reverse chronological order. Then again, I find patterns in everything like the dork I am. So yeah.
So other than that, shuffle seemed to be heavier than usual on the Replacements and some of Paul Westerberg’s solo material which was definitely alright with me. Weirdly enough, other than LIB Dizzy, which really doesn’t count since I knew it’d play when I first left, the only other Goo Goo Dolls song that popped up before unplugging the adapter close to the border was Give A Little Bit. I found that strangely amusing for some reason.
Anyways, moving along from this tangent, the rest of the trip wasn’t very eventful like I said before although I think this tweet eloquently sums up the only real nuisance that cropped up—
‘Peace bridge line up.....ffffffff.’
Well, that and pants was a bad idea. Thank fucking God I packed shorts just in case.
Anyway, fast forwarding to the time I got to Darien, I parked my sorry ass in the furthermost right corner of first parking lot I found instead of bothering with the concert parking lot figuring that,
A – It’ll probably be about an hour before I can exit said parking lot, therefore, walking can kill a small bit of time.
B – I’m not crippled so walking a little further will not kill me.
C – It will be less packed so less of a chance of any misfortune of any kind happening.
Turns out that I’d made the right call on that. Go me.
In any case, I walked over to the line/box office area and aimlessly wandered around until I met up with Nicole to wait in line. We talked about stuff and eventually we started talking to a mother and son who were behind us as well and killed an hour that way. Oh and yes, there were also people from the other side of the fence from Jack-FM using t-shirt guns so we had fun avoiding getting nailed by errant flying t-shirts. Their aim sucked on some of shots so some t-shirts didn’t make it over and died for the cause. It made for some good and cheap entertainment because there’s nothing as awesome as free stuff, or so I’ve been told.
Since Nicole and I had Fast Lane passes, we were allowed to go to past the barricades they had up and to the main gates before anyone else. It was kind of awkward seeing as we were the only ones who had these and because they had small dividers between each chain-link door, I felt like a pony in a starting gate. Ironically enough, that comparison turned out to be very apt because the passes gave us about, oh, ten seconds before everyone behind us started running once they opened the gates. As many of you already knew via Twitter, we still managed to get to the rail, slightly left of the center of the stage.
So after waiting a bit, the Spill Canvas unceremoniously walked on stage at 7:30. There was no backdrop for them, no nothing to indicate they were the Spill Canvas aside from their trolleys set to the far side of the stage to people who might have not been aware of their existence on the bill. Hell, they didn’t even introduce themselves until right before the second last song of their set when they told people of their EP on sale from their upcoming album and the single they were gonna play from it (Our Song).
Because of the way they were set up, I couldn’t hear what the fuck the guy was singing most of the time but they were pretty cool and I dug the fact that they were aware that they were the opener and didn’t have any illusions of grandeur. This was made obvious when the singer asks,
“You guys excited for Switchfoot and the Goo Goo Dolls?” He pauses for a second or two while people scream out their approval and quickly adds, “-As you should be.”
So after them and changing the set-up, Switchfoot comes on and I find myself terribly excited as they do a little musical intro and open with Needle and Haystack Life and even more so when they break into Mess of Me, which I fucking love. With only 9 songs, they were really heavy on the material from Hello Hurricane but since I love those songs, had great interaction with the crowds and they were really fantastic live overall, I can’t complain in the slightest. Before I go on, this was their set list for the night:
Needle and Haystack Life
Mess of Me
Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty cover)
This Is Your Life
The Sound
Your Love Is a Song
Nothing Is Sound (intro part)/Free
Dare You to Move
Meant to Live
When they played This Is Your Life, Jon went into the crowd akin to what I’ve read Esther describe about her shows and effectively disappeared out of sight from where I was standing. I felt like I was playing Where’s Waldo and for some reason I told Nicole he’s like fucking Batman. Looking back, I don’t know why I said Batman since...well, he usually isn’t invisible. Oh well. It’s not the first time I’ve said something weird and it definitely won’t be the last either.
Once Jon had resurfaced back to stage, someone put up an extra big sparkly orange drum right in from of their drum kit. Before they set it down I naturally wondered if the drummer had broken a drum head or something and when I realized that the drum was just going to be in front of there, my thoughts naturally meandered to, ‘what the fuck is that extra drum for?’
The answer to that was for Jon to pound the ever-living shit out of it towards the end of playing The Sound which added a lot of intensity to it. I honestly thought one of his mallets was going to fly up as he was whacking it silly. It didn’t so that was a plus, seeing I had enough of a fun time dodging flying t-shirts already.
So the rest of the set was great and of course they couldn’t leave the stage before doing the pair of their biggest hits from The Beautiful Letdown — Dare You To Move and Meant to Live. I knew they were gonna end their set this way but I still enjoyed them very much so. They were done at 9:00 and it was at this point (or maybe a little earlier, I can’t quite remember) where it dawned on me that it did not rain or thunderstorm. Still humid but I’m glad we didn’t get Cleveland’s weather.
After the stuff gets set up for Goo amid getting randomly teased with fog machines for no real apparent reason and making fun bets on what John would be wearing that night (hell, who wouldn’t make fun bets with roughly a 33% chance of getting it right?), they came on at 9:30. And it was glorious. It didn’t matter that I’d seen that grey shirt John was wearing like a bajillion times (Nicole won that one. I stupidly chose the star shirt) or that, for all intents and purposes, Mike was invisible (and not Batman invisible) as the stage was so fucking high I couldn’t see him, they were there and they were real.
I know it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but if you take a step back and really think about it, a lot of long-time fans, obviously myself included, have never seen them at a concert or at another kind of event. You see their pictures, performances and you listen to their songs, interviews or what have you but there’s always that slight disconnect in a way because it’s all indirect mediums. The moment they opened with Sweetest Lie, I was jumping up and down, holding the rail and not caring about jotting down the set list and using my camera to capture the moment instead of living in it.
For that reason, after having such a hard time with that one Here Is Gone video I decided not to bother with any more because the logistics made things difficult and I wanted to watch them play their songs instead of focusing my energy on the camera. It’s a big catch-22 I find – you’ll have your footage and ripped audio forever but you don’t get to enjoy it while you’re actually there. Taking photos isn’t that bad but it’s the same thing with taking the set list too (which is why I’m not bothering with that at Toronto – I’ll remember if anything different was played there). Speaking of which, here’s the set list (exactly the same as Detroit):
Sweetest Lie
Big Machine
Slide
Dizzy
Here Is Gone
Another Second Time Around
Smash
Can’t Let It Go
Black Balloon
Home
Better Days
Stay With You
Now I Hear
Tucked Away
Name
Let Love In
As I Am
All Eyes on Me
Acoustic #3
Iris
Encore:
Notbroken
Broadway
For the show as a whole, John and Robby weren’t very chatty but they were smiling an awful lot and they played really well aside from a few minor lyric substitutes like the one I captured on film and on Another Second Time Around if I’m remembering right. No retarded guitar show and tell and no fucking up Iris or Acoustic #3 – the latter of which surprised the hell out of me and on the former John actually sang most of it save for the end and one chorus so it’s all good.
All throughout the thing, I was trying not to start singing randomly or yelling while Nicole was recording a few songs and I was trying to get Robby’s attention with the telephone gesture. I think I finally managed to catch his attention once because he looked at me from his side of the stage, made a face and walked into his mic before talking to Korel for a sec. I might be delusional here but I just hope he remembered what he asked me to do during that call two weeks ago or else I just made myself look like a cheap ho.
Regardless, I got tons of pictures of John and Robby (plus a few of Brad, a semi-retarded pic of Mike and Korel blowing...his saxophone) and had myself a good laugh at the end when John was introducing Korel and when he walked up to Brad, stopped and told the crowd he was from Paris, France and dubbed him François.
After the show, I picked up a shirt but they sold out of the EP so I’ll have to pick that up in Toronto with maybe another shirt and stuff. I still have not heard of any of the EP so I guess there’s a perverse accomplishment there. It’ll be like, 2 am or so after the Toronto show before I get to listen so I’m looking forward to that.
Getting home was no problem and neither was waiting in the parking lot. I was so busy just leafing through and deleting bad pictures that it killed a lot of time (going from 144 to 99 and then some) on top of walking to my car and going to the merch booth. Oh and tweeting too. That helped.
Interestingly enough, the last song on my shuffle before I parked the car at home was Switchfoot’s Stars, also the only time they popped up on shuffle during my trip. It felt like a very appropriate end to things, I thought. I'm just glad I'm not aching as bad as I thought I would today.
Pics will follow soon, I have to pick and choose right now.
Ticket lady who could not scan/rip fucked us up a bit though.
(And nevermind what I thought when I saw the title of that one article shortened to "Goo Goo Dolls had fun 'blowing'...") ;D 
