I first thought about getting tickets to the Rilo Kiley concert before they were even posting it on their advertisements. Wayyy back in early April, The E-Train called my attention to the booking date, Saturday, May 28.
I had grown quite fond of the band, starting with the indie hit "Portions for Foxes" off their most recent LP,
More Adventurous. After roughly 7,000 consecutive spins of that one song on my mp3 player, I grew interested in a wider swath of their catalog. As a process of my entirely retail-based fear of commitment, I illicitly downloaded
[1] a number of selections from this and their prior albums, and was delighted to find that I was further delighted, enough to actually purchase
More Adventurous.
I'm not really sure how to describe their music. It's sort of lush and melodic, but at the same time it can be strident and raw. They are probably a tad too sophisticated for mainstream radio, but not nearly artsy enough to be lionized like Radiohead.
[2] I like to think of them as a sort of hybrid of Weezer and Portishead, or possibly like Evanescence with severe-to-moderate bipolar disorder.
Anyway, Over the course of April and May, I dillied and dallied about purchasing tickets – for a relatively paltry $15 – partially because I was not entirely sure whether my Memorial Day weekend plans would take me out of town. By the time I discovered that my Saturday evening was free, the show was, of course, sold out. My only hope was the ice-pure commercialism of the black market.
I scoured various local Web sites such as Washington City Paper and
Craig's List[3] to find tickets for sale. To my glee, there were a few listings for people selling Rilo Kiley tix at face value, but by the time I contacted them those tickets had already been bartered away. In rapidly compounding desperation, I placed my own ad on Craig's, alongside all the other beggars and procrastinators, asking for the opportunity to pay $20 for a single ticket. By Saturday morning, I had received not a single bite.
At 3:00, though, I checked my e-mail again and found that an enterprising profiteer, C.K., had e-mailed all those Desperately Seeking Tickets, offering a single pass to the first bidder. I immediately called him to claim the ticket. At first, he insisted that I pick it up at his place in West Falls Church, which was not going to happen unless his "place" was the Metro information booth. Instead I convinced him to meet me there at 6:00 before the show. I said that I would be wearing a black t-shirt and a blue baseball cap. "I'm the Asian guy with long hair," he said. It did not occur to me until after I had hung up that we hadn't discussed the price of the ticket.
Overjoyed by my good fortune, I ventured off to the 9:30 Club via Metro. I had calculated my estimated transportation time so that I would get to the club with a few minutes to spare. As is typical weekend procedure, however, the system was running at a glacial clip, perhaps because it was carrying an aggregate 12,000 tons of tourists. I got to the U Street Station at a little past 6:00, and burned shoe rubber running to the club to get there by 6:07.
I didn't see C.K. waiting for me out front, but I did see the long line of at least 200 people itching for the doors to open so they could claim a spot at the rim of the stage. I took a quick pace down the line, to see if C.K. was waiting in there somewhere, but I didn't find him. All I found was an endless stream of provocatively attired post-adolescents, each very clearly trying to get back at their parents for what must have been years of emotional abuse.
I took a post on the club's busy corner and scanned incessantly for a long-haired Asian man. 6:15. 6:20. 6:25. 6:30. Still no sign of him. I was getting nervous, not just because I had possibly missed him by being seven minutes late, but also because there was an increasing collection of pathetic souls like me, begging passersby for extra tickets – and getting them. At 6:45 I was about to abandon my vigil for C.K. and join the scalp-ees, when a long-haired Asian man strode up to me confidently.
Though I was furious that he had kept me waiting on the corner like a hooker for 45 minutes
[4], I was loathe to let any of these other moochers outbid me, I welcomed him warmly and whipped out my wallet as if it were on a holster and I was Roy Rogers.
"Twenty five bucks, right?" he said.
"Okay," I replied quickly. He probably thought he was ripping me off. Maybe he was. But I would have paid $30.
I went into the club and staked out my place on the ground floor, about five rows back from the stage and just a shade to the left. My timing was perfect; a thick crowd quickly formed behind me as the first opening band began to play.
They called themselves the Brunettes, a motley assemblage from Auckland, New Zealand. It was one of those groups without a single unifying image besides the practical ethos of pure eclecticism. The lead guitarist was a tousled pretty-boy alterna-rocker, the drummer a hipster Seth Cohen look-alike, the bassist a quirky reincarnation of Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron. It was as if they had formed a supergroup along with that vaguely goth chick from your high school art class and the twerpy dweeb who kept falling off the rope in seventh-grade Phys. Ed.
The Brunettes took full advantage of diverse instrumentation including clarinet, trumpet, glockenspiel, castinets, harmonica and slide whistle, as well as the liberal use of finger snaps and hand claps. Their sound was a bit weak, and they struggled to stay in tune, but they carried themselves with such insouciance and self-effacing humor that I couldn't help but get swept up in their performance. Their catchy hooks and literate lyrics didn't hurt, either.
They were off stage within 30 minutes, leaving the juiced-up crowd with nothing to do but wait and watch as crewmen slowly ambled about, reconfiguring the stage for the next act, a band called Portastatic. Some of my fellow audience members took this opportunity to fetch drinks from the bar, or talk on their cell phones, or blow cigarette smoke in my general direction.
During the next 40 minutes, we were continuously teased by various band members coming out, picking up instruments, then putting them down and walking away. This taunting behavior gradually bloomed into a supremely irritating sound check, with the band occasionally gathering to play an actual chord or two before stopping. Finally, the house lights dimmed and the band started playing for real.
Then, as if to make me long for the romantic innocence of the sound check, Portastatic treated us to an excruciating 30-minute set of whiny, self-indulgent guitar rock. It did not surprise me much when the frontman and shameless guitar soloist, Mac McCaughan, took a backhanded swipe at the nonplussed audience for their disinterested clapping, nor did it surprise me when he introduced the drummer and the bassist as his brothers, which is the only possible reason they haven't kicked the guy off the tour bus yet.
[5]The band did include one woman, stationed far off to the side playing occasional violin accents and Moog flourishes. She was easily the most charismatic member of the group, despite the fact that she was required to do little more than absentmindedly press a key or two on her keyboard. She could have duplicated her performance in traction and it would have made little difference.
Midway through their set, a young blonde woman in front of me suddenly fell to the floor motionless, presumably passed out. Normally this kind of immature, irresponsible behavior would have made me furious. But I was actually thankful that something interesting was actually happening. Eventually we got her on her feet and off the floor – God damn she was heavy – and she returned a half-hour later in fair condition
Portastatic wrapped up their set in just over a half-hour, and not thirty seconds after the house lights came back up, my hip pocket buzzed.
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instant_ethos was calling. I answered.
He must have noticed the background noise.
"Where are you?"
"I'm at a concert."
"Who are you seeing?"
Now, you have to understand something.
instant_ethos is a highly cultured, very erudite guy. He is an unimpeachable authority on musical theory and history. He probably knows more about Rimsky-Korsakov than you know about your dad.
[6] He is, however, generally out-of-touch with the zeitgeist of "popular" music, which he reflexively regards as "juvenile." He considers Tom Jones to be "post-adolescent." Avril Lavigne? "Pre-natal."
Anyway, there was absolutely no chance in Hell that he was going to know who Rilo Kiley was, since they have never appeared in an iMac commercial. And I wanted to avoid that tedious exchange, which I was certain would have gone something like this:
instant_ethos: Who are you seeing?
ME: Rilo Kiley.
instant_ethos: Who?
ME (louder): Rilo Kiley.
instant_ethos: Who?
ME (shouting, drawing stares from bystanders): Rilo Kiley.
instant_ethos: Guy Smiley?
ME: RI - LO KI - LEY.
instant_ethos (dismissively): Never heard of him.
So I decided to skip to the end.
"You've never heard of them."
"Who is it?"
"Trust me. You've never heard of them."
"Tell me."
Frustrated that he was neither trusting me nor getting my hint, I sharply insinuated that he was not cool enough to know who anyone was, which I have to admit was a pretty laughable thing for me to say since I myself was just barely tepid enough to get past the 9:30 Club bouncer.
instant_ethos did not laugh, however. Instead he hung up, and I immediately regretted my tone, especially since arguing with him was at least preferable to watching another half-hour of hirsute DeVry graduates painstakingly arranging microphone stands.
Also by this time, the muscles in my back had started to tighten up, such that I was shifting my weight from right leg to left leg to right leg as if I were slow-dancing. At one point, I attempted to inconspicuously bend over and stretch, but I immediately felt awkward and uncomfortable, and when I straightened out again two women behind me were eyeballing me as if I were a rather unwelcome ankle fetishist.
Finally, just past 9:00, the house lights dimmed again and the place erupted into a chorus of claps and squeals. The lead singer, Jenny Lewis, sheepishly approached the microphone clad in a black miniskirt, a spangly sequined pullover and red bangs that practically covered her eyes, and the band launched into its
More Adventurous opener, "It's a Hit."
And thus began the 9:30 Club's one-night love affair with Rilo Kiley. Each song elicited substantial cheers from the crowd, even the ones from their old albums, which I am guessing some in the audience must have acquired legally. On the one hand, I was astonished and impressed by the band's ability to replicate their familiar studio sound. Lewis' voice, for instance, is no studio creation; that girl can wail. On the other hand, because they didn't venture much from the sheet music, there were not a whole lot of surprises once a person figured out what song they were playing.
I knew almost every song they played, but for one or two here and there. Of the 30 songs in their catalog that I know well, there's only one that I don't like very much – "Love and War," off of
Most Adventurous, which to me sounds like an ambulance crash – so I was hopeful that they'd clip it from their 75-minute set. No such luck, though it was immediately followed by an amusing moment in crowd interaction.
One particularly amphetamic girl in the front row kept screaming that it was her friend Stephanie's birthday and waving a cell phone in the air. Finally, whether he was being playful or just trying to shut her up, guitarist Blake Sennett asked her to toss her cell phone to him so that he could sing her Happy Birthday. Our eager audience member enthusiastically threw him her phone, hurling it so hard that he dropped it on the floor and it cracked into at least several pieces. He tried to put it back together and call her back ("Hello, Stephanie, this is Rilo Kiley." "Who?" "Rilo Kiley." "Guy Smiley?") but it was to no avail.
Toward the end of the set, Rilo Kiley broke into their song "With Arms Outstretched," a grungy torch song accompanied (on the album version) by an enormous choir. This afforded the crowd another opportunity for interactive sing-along fun, and everyone was getting worked into a pretty good lather when I noticed a surge in shrieking.
I looked to the corner of the stage where some random guy had wandered on stage and started singing along with everyone else. I turned to two girls next to me.
"Who is that? Why is everybody freaking out?"
I couldn't hear their response over the screaming.
"Who?"
"It's Conor Oberst. Of Bright Eyes."
This answer sated me, even if I had no idea what Bright Eyes was. Judging by the thunderous applause he received, I can only assume he helped develop the polio vaccine or something. He left after that song, but did come back on stage during the encore, along with the Brunettes, the roadies, tour managers, bodyguards, second cousins, bouncers and everyone else who worked in the building, apparently, to join the band in an impromptu rendition Pete Townsend's "Let My Love Open the Door" It was a nice moment.
It would have been even cooler if someone's love had opened the door, because apparently someone left it locked. After the house lights went up, all 1,200 people tried to leave the club at the same time, resulting in near Irish-soccer-level trampling. While I had thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I was most eager to get moving and go home.
I had Brunettes songs to download.
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