Farms…farms….farms…oh, a truck stop…farms…farms…MILWAUKEE!! Pulling into Milwaukee that day was like being Mary Tyler More. I wanted to spin around and throw my hat in the air. City! Real, big city! Vibrant, exciting, so much to do…so much to see…so much traffic…so little actual vehicle movement. Ah yes, on Friday in a big city, rush hour starts at noon.
Anyway, after sitting in some slow-moving traffic for a while, I tooled around Milwaukee for a bit…scoped out the venue’s location, then went to the hotel and got settled in. I don’t know why hotels have to have such slow, shitty internet service but that one was the worst. The big banner touting the “Free Wifi” didn’t mention that not all rooms could receive the signal. Meh. Must be the same reason they have almost no water pressure. Lame.
Anyhow, after killing some time, I got all dolled up and headed for the club. Unlike the Foo Fighters, this wasn’t going to be in a big arena. But the club was huge in it’s own right. A five or six story brick building called “The Rave”. Apparently has multiple bands in different rooms every week. The place was ENORMOUS. When the doors opened, they crammed all of us Arctic Monkeys people into a tiny bar and let us drink and listen to a local band while we waited for the doors to the main room to be opened.
The drink prices were RIDICULOUS! $10 for a tiny little Jack and Coke? Geesh.
Another difference between the Foo experience and the Monkeys…the crowd, on average, was far younger. I felt old. The only people there who were even close to my age, were escorting their even younger kids to the all-ages show.
I scoped out the floor, it was big and full of hyped up 20 somethings. Yeah…uhm…nah. I’ve spent my days crushed against the barricade by the entire crowd in frantic rocker bliss. It’s a rush, but I’m kind of over that. I don’t really want to be the old lady they had to pull out of the pit because she passed out. LOL.
Off to the balcony with me! Compared to the arena gigs, there really wasn’t a bad seat in the house. The stage was right there everywhere you went. I wound up sitting next to a dad and his teenaged daughter. After chatting a bit and finding out that they drove all the way from St. Paul for the show because it was the only one that was all ages, a couple of girls in Nirvana shirts came and sat on the other side of me.
I was ready to embrace them as fellows of my musical tribe twice over, but then one of them said she was “a photographer” and proceeded to explain that the reason she kept getting shots of back of the person’s head two rows up was because the autofocus would only key on the area her flash was lighting up. When I mentioned that my flash was off, she got all uppity on me. “It’s too dark to shoot without flash.” You can’t be in the tribe if you call yourself “a photographer” when you aren’t one and you can’t be in the tribe if you think you already know everything when you don’t, and you REALLY can’t be in the tribe if you think you’re better than everyone else when you’re really just a douchenozzle.
I just smiled at her though. We were too far away from the stage for her flash to even touch it, the max you’re gonna get from a flash on your point and shoot is like 10-20 feet. The mistake I keep seeing people make when trying to shoot a show is assuming it will be dark. Uh…what about all the spotlights? I saw one poor guy at one of the Foo Fighters shows trying to shoot at ISO 800 and in macro mode! My shots aren’t perfect, but at least they aren’t giant blobs of white light reminiscent of an alien space craft landing.
Not-a-photographer and her friend eventually switched seats because a tall guy sat in front of them. Her friend was much more pleasant to chat with.
The Vaccines were the opening band. A U.K. garage rock band that sort of reminded me of Big Country on quaaludes. They had talent, but weren’t really my cup of tea. I give them a ‘meh’. During The Vaccines’ performance, a tall guy took one of the seats in front of me, so I slid over closer to St. Paul Dad, leaving an open seat between me and the Nirvana fan girl. This little shift becomes relevant in a second.
During the break between bands, St. Paul Dad, got up to go to the bathroom and so I was sitting between two empty seats. A young couple pushed their way into our row and asked the young girl who was there with her dad if his seat was taken. She said that it was and they completely dismissed her as if she weren’t relevant to anything in life. That raised my brows and my hackles.
Now, when I say this girl was young, I mean young. Young people tend to get younger looking as I grow older, but I swear if she was 14 I’d be amazed. I had her pegged for 12 or maybe 13. The couple enquiring about the seats looked much older, late teens or early 20s.
So they ignored the girl saying that the seat wasn’t available and instead asked me to scoot down so they could have the two seats together. I already had an attitude from how rude they’d been to her, so I responded pretty coldly. “No, there aren’t two seats together available here. Only one. Her dad’s sitting in this one.”
The guy got snotty with me, going on an on about how he had paid just as much as me for his ticket and they had every right to take this girl’s dad’s seat because you can’t save seats at a General Admission show…blah blah blah they kept arguing and kept arguing getting snottier and nastier as they went. I kept telling them it didn’t matter what they paid or what they thought the rules were, they couldn’t have the seat. The poor girl who now had her hand defensively on her dad’s seat, looked terrified. The Nirvana shirt girl on my other side even got into defending Dad’s seat.
I added my hand to the seat so the young girl and I made a big X over it and then waved the argument to an end. “Look! You are NOT taking her dad’s seat. We’ve been here for the last hour. This seat is NOT AVAILABLE.” Argue all you want, but what kind of douchebag wants to steal the seat of a little girl’s dad? If they thought they could out-snark me, they were sadly mistaken. Snark, in fact, is one of my super powers and my ‘evil bitch from hell’ glare has ended more arguments than they’ve ever even had. I glared, and they went to tell the bouncer on us.
When the bouncer came over to check out the scene, he scoffed. “No way man. They’ve been here the whole time. He just went to the bathroom. If you wanted seats you should have come earlier.”
Woohoo! I could have kissed him. Giving a big sigh of relief, the young girl thanked me. Her dad came back and for a while I was paranoid that the irritating couple might spill a drink down the back of my neck or something, but I looked around and couldn’t find them again.
I have to admit, the crowd was pretty awesome once the Arctic Monkeys were on stage. Everyone knew all the words, even to the new songs (and the new album isn’t out until Monday!). Alex Turner isn’t overly chatty on stage (he barely speaks actually), but a few songs in he did pause to say, “You’re a fucking great crowd, Milwaukee.” He sounded as though he was surprised by it.
They played almost everything I wanted most to hear. Brainstorm, I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor, Do Me a Favour, Fake Tales of San Francisco, Cornerstone…but, alas, no Old Yellow Bricks, and no Mardy Bum *sniff*. They closed the show with Florescent Adolescent.
The show was great! I’m definitely looking forward to seeing them again in July with a U.K. crowd! Shall be made of awesome!
