IT WAS TOO STINKIN' SHORT!!!!!!!!!!
The venue was one of those indoor/outdoor amphitheatre-type places, my friends and I had gotten lawn tickets, but managed to sneak our way down to the lower level seats. We were so psyched! We had our big Canadian flags (though we're not Canadian, go figure) and we kept getting these weird looks like "um... the Chieftains are IRISH, you morons!", but they all understood once the band was introduced... "Ladies and gentleman... From Newfoundland, Canada... Sire recording artists Great Big Sea!" They came on promptly at 8:00. Sounded great... Started with Process Man, then Ordinary Day, Going Up, General Taylor and When I'm Up... The crowd was really digging them, and then WHAM! The stupid stage manager guy comes out and tells them that their time was up and they had to stop. That's it. Five stinking songs. They played for exactly twenty minutes. We were extremely disappointed, so was the rest of the crowd. Like I said, the crowd was really starting to dig the music and then all of a sudden they were cut off.
So, dejected as we were, my friends and I decided to walk down towards the side concession area. Once down there, we realized that the side "stage door" was right there and the tour buses were just up the hill. Low and behold, while my friends went off to get in the long line for the ladies room, Séan comes walking out. I got to talk with him for a while. Alan came out as well and by that time my friends had rejoined me, so we talked with him for a while too. This was my first chance to meet them, and I was thrilled to discover that they were even nicer than I thought. Alan gave us a heads-up that GBS would be playing a song with the Chieftains, so we stuck around to hear them do "Lukey". That was fun, at least we go to hear one more song. Alan was right-the Chieftains set did "kick some serious a$$". Another good thing, Alan told us that there had been some people backstage from the one radio station in town which my friends and I had been bugging for the past year to play GBS, and they seemed really interested in playing them and bringing them back to Philly. Yeay!!!!!!!!!
--Sue Weiss