6/03/1: Chris Martin and His Shirt
Before the Concert
We go to South Street, which is the cool place to be in Philly, and wander about for a bit. Then we stop and eat at a place called Jon's, which serves quite decent popcorn chicken and some mighty tasty pina coladas. Kelly abstains, because she's 19, and actually Jenny has frozen margaritas instead.
Earlier, we had gone to a palm reader, so over our food we discuss our fortunes. Kelly will marry, said the psychic, at 27, and she's destined to have four kids. Jenny, said the pyschic, will marry quite young, which is funny, since she's already married; and she will have three kids. So only two to go. Me, I'm going to get married before I'm 30. Great to know. And I'm going to have three, also. The pyschic said my love life will pick up in August, and I'm going to start dating a dark-haired guy who I already sort of know, but don't know too well. Also good to know. Apparently, I'm going to make a lot of money in my life. And do something with therapy. Like psychology? as a profession. And I'm going to do investments. The best part is that, when the psychic told Kelly that right now two guys are into her, Kelly said, "Are you sure it's just two?" Which is just the funniest thing.
When we're done eating (and drinking), we get Kelly to drive us back over to the Electric Company. Sure enough, Ren is like, tenth in a line that stretches to about 120 people. Cool beans. We notice there are signs up: "This evening's performance is going to be videotaped and/or filmed. Your entrance into the theatre consitutes your consent to participate without compensation." What are we going to do, not go to the concert, now that we've bought our tickets? That's like when you open the box and you find a thing that says that by opening the box you've waived all your rights. I tried to tell Jenny, Kelly, and Reneau this, since I found it an amusing comparison, but I found that the two pina coladas had impaired my ability to put thoughts into words. In any case, Reneau said they were taping it for HBO, and we decided it was probably for that show "Reverb."
Soon enough they were going to let us in, but can I just tell you? These people at Electric Company are total fascists. They made us submit to a "pat-down." It wasn't too bad -- the lady who patted me down basically just patted my pockets -- and they didn't catch Reneau's little camera thing. But I mean, jeez.
The actual concert.
Then we stumbled out into the parking lot, and there was a guy there giving out free CDs with songs by all sorts of neat bands of the Reneau-likes-em type, :) that is to say, melodic Brit-Pop. Heh. Not that I don't like them, too.
That was the concert. I spent the past few days wandering around hoping that Chris Martin would just sort of appear on the street somewhere needing directions so I could just sort of take him wherever he was going, heh, but no, that's not to be.
BTW: Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks that the Electric Company is really fascist. Though I do think it's funny that these people think the place is horrible because it won't let them smoke their pot. I mean, um, hi? Pot's illegal? Whether or not it should be, I'm not about to tackle that subject here, but you can hardly fault them for not letting you do something illegal in their club. That said, they don't have to be big police-state beat-you-down people about it. Yeesh.
Would you like to see some photographs from the Coldplay concert? Reneau-chan took these and sent them to me. Enjoy. :)
This is just amusing babble. At least, I think it's amusing. Your feelings may differ. If you just want to go to the concert, then, go ahead, skim down. I'd put it internal hyperlinks but those are for the lazy.
Jenny, Jenny's sister Kelly and I drop Reneau off at the
Reneau really likes Granddaddy, which was the opening band, and I have to say that they're good and I could see that if I had had the album I could probably get into them. But I also have to say that I didn't know Coldplay too well when I first saw them, and Coldplay still made a big, big impression on me. I knew a couple songs, like, three -- the rest were unknown and still, just hearing that music for the first time was great. So. Anyway. Granddaddy was/were good, but it's like eating a good sandwich when you know that there's a death-by-chocolate brownie and a milkshake waiting for dessert. You can't help but be looking forward to dessert. Mmmm. Milkshake. Aghhhhhh.
So then Coldplay came up. This is what they played:
Ah, the song that may or may not be about Natalie Imbruglia.
During this song I noticed how very, very annoying were our neighbors to the right. But then I stopped noticing this and just watched Chris sing.
For the record, not my favorite tune of theirs, but that's okay because even a not my favorite Coldplay song beats a non-Coldplay song. It was during this song, I believe, that this annoying girl pushes her way towards the front with a big bouquet of flowers for Chris. How very annoying. Just because you bought flowers doesn't mean you get to go to the front and just stand there like a moron for twenty minutes while everyone around you tries to get Chris to notice them and take them so that you will go away again.
So Chris picks up this big red electric guitar, and he says, "lookit this" -- a whammy bar. At least I think that's a whammy bar. Considering my education on the subject consists of repeated viewings of Wayne's World, maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, he shows us how it can make the tone go up or down slightly. "Three thousands pounds for that," he says. So they start playing this song, and not too long into it, he just stops, says the guitar isn't working, and hands it to the red headed roadie who follows them all the time, and decides, instead, to play--
"This is a good song to play, isn't it?" says Chris, as he sits down to his piano.
But then the guitar came back out, and he decided to play Murder after all. Only thing is, halfway through the song, it broke again. And so Chris just sort of gave up and wandered around. That was amusing. I think it might have been during this song that Chris jumped down off the stage to about 10 inches away from me. I -- and everyone around me -- put out hands to touch him but he dodged us. I'm not sure what was happening. And then he jumped back on stage and sat on the edge of it, looking cute. And I think he took the flowers.
"And it's true, that on this tour, we never do change. I've been wearing these trousers for six days now." --Chris
It may or may not be during this song that Chris turned sideways and lifted up his shirt to wipe his face with it. This set off a string of wild applause. So then he kind of pulled up his shirt just the tiniest bit so we could see maybe a half inch square of his pale white British skin. Heh. Hell, yes.
Chris introduced this song by saying that he and Jonny (the guitarist) were going out together to buy some drugs [here, the annoying kids next to me shouted "DRUGS!" really loudly], because, well, "that's what bands do, right? and it was, it was cocaine, actually. Only when we opened the box --" ["BOX!" shouted the kids next to me] "--there was just this powder inside, and it was all, it was all yellow, so that's what this song is really about." Which in case you don't know, is a joke, because Coldplay is tee-total. That means they don't do drugs or alcohol or anything.
It may have been right before this song that Chris said that after their tour in the U.S., they're going to go home and record such a great album that no one will be able to resist it and everyone will buy it and love it and it'll be so great. I'm not sure if this song is the cool one that I like. There's this one that I've seen them play live twice and it's cool, a real rawk out piece. I can dig it, early and often. So there.
He said that he was going to play Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen, and then he played Trouble instead. Which is good, because that's a good song. The idiot girl beside me, Miss "I share a torso with my boyfriend" girl, said loudly: "What is this song?" And her boyfriend said, "I don't know." So I told them the song was called Trouble, and she looked at me like my three heads had sprouted antannae. Which maybe they had by then, I was so thirsty. Anyway, right at the end of the song, Chris sang something like "... on the streets of Philadelphia..." or something. So yeah.
Then they went away. And a mechanical voice, like Stephan Hawking's voice thing, said, "The concert is not complete. Scream to hear more Coldplay." So we did. And surprise of all surprises, they came back out.
"This is a new song," said Chris, "but I think it's quite good, actually."
This was a quite good cover, actually, though I was rooting for him to play "Careful Where You Stand" which they never play and it's my favorite song. Pleh.