Radiohead
Shoreline Amphitheatre
Mountain View,
06.27.01

Here's something interesting: a live review where the reviewer (that's me) didn't actually see the show (that's the Radiohead one) that they're reviewing.

…I'm overstating it….

The Shoreline Amphitheatre has a pavilion with reserved seats, and a tilted lawn for general admission seating. It's kind of like a circus tent at the home plate of an inclined baseball field with no diamond. The bad news (the good being that I was within 300 yards of Radiohead) is that from 5 rows back of the front gate of the lawn, you can't see the band. Nothing. Space. An empty fucking void.

That wouldn't have been a big deal if the three big movie screens at the front of the lawn portion of the venue just showed a pass-through video of what was going on onstage. Sound travels fast enough that I would have been convinced that I was watching a live show, which I was. But the VH1 techies behind the video board decided they wanted to make a music video. So the screens turned off between songs. I didn't even see Thom deliver the witty banter that was making people roar with applause.

Beyond that, like some evangelical show gone wrong, the video of the songs themselves were made out of overlays of the feeds from the three to four onstage cameras, so what we really saw was a video collage montage. Before I go any further, let me let you dear readers in on the hate seething up inside me from pre-show antics. I'd never seen so many people from so many obviously different backgrounds at a show. That would have been okay, but I couldn't handle the groups that were there. There seemed to be a large contingent of the Silicon Valley "Dot-Commers". Or maybe the anger stemmed from the twelve year old girl next to me exclaiming to the fraternity guys in front of her that this was her first real concert. Totally ridiculous! Maybe it all lies in my egomaniacal nature, but for some reason I associate die-hard Radiohead fans with intellectuals.

Fuck it -- that's a whole other debate.

Anyway, based on all this, I can only assess the positives of the show aurally. Here it comes: They made up for the fact that I couldn't see them, in spades. Songs from their "new electronic era" were performed masterfully live, and the video (thankfully) showed the audience close-ups of the makeshift instruments they were using to create these beautiful sounds. 23 songs of pure bliss, including three encores. The low point of the night was the low point of Amnesiac, “Knives Out.” But even that had a certain grace, given that Thom's voice was beginning to fade by that late in the show, and the chinks in the armor of his wonderful falsetto made it seem all the more unreal.

As a side note, the only other time I'd seen that many telltale circles of friends, wisps of smoke, and burning disks of embers was at a Grateful Dead concert I got dragged to when I was in 10th grade. The whole experience was just otherworldly. And if it was otherworldly for me, I bet it was downright ethereal for the people who could see the band.

Arun Subramanian

Unpop
30.06.01