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[music | Th' Legendary Shack Shakers - Bullfrog Blues]

We saw a rather short show with Wanda Jackson at the Royale last night. Unfortunately she has been playing pretty much a show a day for the last couple of weeks, and her voice was pretty well shot. The audience still loved her though, even though it was a shortened set, and it seems they're going to work out another date as a make-up show. Chances are good that whatever date they pick we'll either be out of town or have another show booked, we will see though!

[music | DEVO - I'm A Potato]
I don't have time to write much tonight, but I wanted to post some pictures

Tonight we saw the English Beat for the second time at the same venue, Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry. I've got kind of mixed feelings on the venue, since it's a pretty chill atmosphere with a BYOB policy, but they had chairs, for a dancy fun band, again.

In any case the band was great and after a couple of songs the crowd really started getting into it, as much as we could with the chairs around. They're going to be doing a couple more local shows, one at another Tupelo location in White River Jct. VT, and then back at the Londonderry location for New Years, which I may go to, depending on whether friends go.

Musically they're still really tight and really interact well with the crowd. The best quote, after Dave polished off a container of coconut milk:

"They can make wine out of it. And it's a fruit, just like the tomato. 53 years and I still can't get the fucking hang of this planet..."

Here are some photos from the show, not that great, but I was back 11 rows, and was bouncing around, click them to view at Flickr:

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[music | Killing Joke - Tension]

My bathroom is being remodeled and is now completely gutted. Before this project, I proposed a change of venue to the brand new Hampton Inn like 7 miles away, but I was vetoed. I am to "suck it up" and use the serial killer Buffalo Bill bathroom in the basement of our house.

Here is that bathroom, and the journey to it. It took a good deal of self control to do this in the dark. Walking the length of the house in an unlit basement with only the timer light dealy on my camera...I fully expected to see a hand coming at me when the flash fired.

Take a tour with me:

It's probably about time Natalie and I went to a big arena show, and so we did...

The reason I never was that into arena shows is the distance and lack of intimacy, never mind the multi-hundred dollar seats. However Natalie scored at the last minute by noticing $50 general adm. tix opened up and snatched them up on the spot. Apparently, there are a few "levels" of GA. There's "on the field", then "Red Zone", which I gather you pay a lot more for, and then there was some inner circle deal.

The trick with the inner circle was that it was guarded by a bunch of security passing people through. Had we not gotten the scoop that anyone with GA is allowed in, we never would have approached, because it looked "Exclusive". The Inner Circle held like a couple thousand fans and got you to within a couple of feet of the stage.

At that point, the only difference between this and any other show was that the stage was like 8' high. We took our spots 3 rows from the stage and laid in wait.

All in all, the show was great. We were close enough we didn't feel like we were watching TV from the stands. This was easily the biggest show I'd ever been to, previously it was probably "anything in a hockey arena", so NIN, Tool, that kind of thing. I think I'll take stadium shows much more seriously now, assuming we can get down close in and not spend a fortune to do it. Thanks U2 for making a show I wanted to see, even with 80,000 other fans.

Here are some of my favorite pictures, here's the Flickr set:

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