How does this always happen? I still haven’t finished talking about the great time I had playing hockey and meeting up with Cari again last weekend. I suppose I better talk about this weekend before I get even further behind.
I’ll work backwards. For Monday I had been looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith again, but it was too nice out to go to a movie. We washed our cars, grilled out for dinner, played some football at the park, went out for ice cream, and had a late breakfast. Brian and I had a late breakfast because we didn’t wake up until about 10am and didn’t get home until about 11:45am.
The reason we got up so late was because we had been out the night before to see Porcupine Tree at the Fine Line. The short review is that the show was awesome. The only bad thing was that the show was short. They came on at about 9pm and were done by 10:45. Sure, we only paid $17 for tickets, but it went way too fast.
Brian and I picked up our childhood friend Jessie at the BBQ party at our house that day. She wasn’t doing anything that night and hadn’t seen Brian in a while so she decided to come with us. We left the party about 6pm and headed to Jessie’s place in downtown Minneapolis. After parking there and sipping a drink, Brian had Jameson on the rocks, and Jessie and I each had a Jameson with Coke. We then walked the short 7 blocks to the Fine Line and Jessie bought a ticket. A man outside sold Jessie a ticket for $18, $2 cheaper than the door price. She handed him a 20 and he then became confused about how “giving change” works and attempted to ask for a couple extra dollars. Luckily Brian straightened him out and we were good to go.
Once inside we moseyed to the bar and got ourselves another round. Brian switched to Jack on the rocks, I switched to Southern and Coke, and Jessie switched to Newcastle. We wandered up pretty close to the stage–the place was far from packed yet, this was just after 8pm. There was a dude on stage working with a couple of keyboards and some crazy mixing machines and was just playing very laid back ambient music. While listening to this we probably had another round, maybe two, and ordered some food as well: tasty chicken tenders and quesadillas with jalapenos in the cheese.
Finally, at about 9pm, the boys from the band came out and the sweetness began. Much of the music was from their new album Deadwing, which I’m not all that familiar with yet, but they played a bunch of older stuff that I knew better as well.
The first two or three songs were all from Deadwing. The best one of those was Halo. After the first 5 or so songs, the band leader, Steven Wilson, said that they had kept things pretty mellow for the first part of the show so they were going to rock out a bit. What I heard next was “We had talked with Brenden Johnson earlier and we thought we would play his favorite song, Blackest Eyes.” What he actually said was “This one is from our album In Absentia and it’s called Blackest Eyes.” Brian and I gave out a yell and gave each other a spontaneous high five, which was well warrented for the rocking that followed.
Everything other than that was pretty much gravy. The other high point of the music was “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” from Deadwing. The interlude between verses was amazing–some sweet guitar work.
Near the end and after the show (and after a few more drinks) Brian decided he wanted to get backstage to meet Steven Wilson. He spoke to pretty much everyone he could. The security and the t-shirt salesman were no help at all. The guitarist came out after the show but he wasn’t very helpful either. “Look, the band just pays me to play the guitar, I can’t help you.” I thought that was a pretty crappy attitude, but maybe he thinks the music sucks or something. Now that I think about it, he didn’t seem all that excited on stage, but then again, neither did Steven. Finally Brian met up with the tour manager and the result was regrettably the same.
After the show we started heading for a bar on the way to Jessie’s place.
