March 29 2007: Sebadoh, the Bent Moustache - Pearly Street Ballroom, Northampton MA

Well, I should have gone to Boston to see the Long Winters. But instead I stayed in Northampton for a nice low-key evening with Sebadoh, who were awful. At least I didn't pay for it or have to drive two hours each way. But I should have gone to Boston.

The sound was horrible, the band didn't really seem to give much of a fuck about anything performance-related, and the night's highlight occurred when this bald guy tried to dive into the crowd from the stage. But this was no stage-diving-type show, because the crowd was mostly bored and motionless and certainly in no mood to catch anyone. Plus it happened in between songs. So the band stops playing their song and then this guy gets a good running start and everyone sees what's about to happen and have plenty of time to move out of the guy's way and he dives in head first like he's at the swimming pool and hits the floor with a huge fucking THUD.

But I did finally see J Mascis around town. And the openers were from Holland and were pretty good. And I guess "Vampire" was ok, and I guess that parts of "Brand New Love" and "Rebound" were ok too. But that's about it. Show pretty much sucked the whole way through.

March 19 2007: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ray Price, Asleep at the Wheel - Grand Ole Opry House, Nashville TN

Spring Break! So Caitlin and I got into the car and drove our asses out of cold and snowy Massachusetts and straight into the supple bosom of seventy-degree sun and the rolling hills of Tennessee. Oh it was beautiful, and oh it was good to get out of town.

And, um, we saw Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and Ray Price. At the Grand Ole Opry. With 4400 folks of all ages, decked out in their sunday best, all raising their glasses to some of the best musicians I've ever heard. And the Opry was pretty much my grandparents' church in Portland, only bigger and with better music and beer. We were sitting in fuckin PEWS! Tenth row pews!

Ray Price played first, and was incredible. At least fifteen musicians were backing him, including five or six string players and a guy playing better steel guitar than I thought was humanly possible.

And then Asleep at the Wheel played a couple tunes on their own before Merle came out and played while they backed him on numbers like "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink."

And then on the second verse of "Okie from Muskogee" Willie Nelson came out and joined Merle! And for the next tune they did Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty" together, which was probably the highlight of the night. And then they did some more tunes together. And then Price came back out and they ALL did some tunes together. And then Willie did a few on his own. And I don't know that I've ever seen such a well-dressed crowd cheer like Nashville did when the set finally closed with "Whiskey River." Goddamn.

And the show was over and Caitlin and I walked around in a daze and thank goodness she was driving.

And life was great. We went downtown and took shit in and I had a couple budweisers and things were just fine even though we couldn't fit into the bar where the band was playing "Fulsom Prison Blues," because we just went to the place two doors down where the band there was playing it. O the clear moment.

And wow was a lot of fun had. I really want to go back to Nashville.

March 3 2007: The Thermals, the Big Sleep - T.T. the Bear's Place, Cambridge MA

This was probably the most punk rock of a show I've been to in a long, long time, and all these kids were packed into this tiny room and they were all jumping around and fucking CROWD SURFING and just going nuts, and the band was playing these 2.5 minute songs back to back to back, and I felt kind of old standing there in the back with Sweeney and Jared, just standing there sharing a PBR (for old times' sake)with Sweeney, and every now and then someone would fall into me or bump me en route to the front or something like that, and these are all things that I usually don't care for. Plenty of shows have been ruined for me by probably the vary same assholes who were jumping around tonight. But I think that if there was ever a time/place for kids to jump around and crowd surf and just go nuts, it must be a Thermals show. And really, maybe jumping around is the only appropriate response to a set full of songs like "Our Trip," especially if you're that 17-year-old with the fake ID who told his mom he's staying at a friend's house in order to make it to a show that didn't finish until 145am? I mean, punk rock isn't supposed to be about sharing a beer in the back while tapping your foot. And it's not as though all I was doing was tapping my foot - there was definitely some moving going on on my part. But these kids. Wow.

So yeah - crazy show. People all over the place, the Thermals up there rocking everybody's ass off, it was almost perfect. The set was pretty well-rounded between their three albums, and I have to give the kids credit for even knowing the old tunes. "Back to Gray" and "Brake and Brace" got the same response as "Pillar of Salt" did. "Everything Thermals" got played, and "God and Country" opened the encore, and "It's Trivia" and "No Culture Icons" were as great as they've ever been.

And the whole thing kind of took me back. I got to know the first Thermals album while driving through southern Utah just for kicks, and probably the wildest/craziest/broken-glass-all-over-the-place-type sex I've ever had happened after seeing the Thermals play for the first time. So the Thermals and I have some pretty good memories together, and it was nice to see that they haven't gone soft on me.