My First Concert

This weekend I went to hear the Goats (I think that that's what the people who are full-fledged fans call them--I'm referring to The Mountain Goats) at the 9:30 Club.

It was my very first concert: in my young adult days when all of my friends were going to contemporary Christian music concerts, my parents weren't okay with it. Since then, I don't know: I just haven't ended up at any. Except for one we stumbled across in Krakow outside late at night, but I didn't know that band.

I mentioned to a particularly, shall we say not-pop-culturally-sensitive colleague of mine, that I was going to my first concert, and he was happy to tease me about the fact that even he had been to the 9:30 Club before.

I went with my friend, Judith. I told her it was my first concert and that she shouldn't call me homeschooled. She replied that she wouldn't call me homeschooled unless I wore overalls.

Judith brought the wrong ticket to the show--which is to say, she brought the receipt, which looked like the ticket. So she had to cab home and back, leaving me standing awkwardly with a mass of hipsters waiting for the opening band to come on. It was a desperately uncomfortable situation (and I don't even believe in awkwardness, so you know it was bad!)--I didn't think that I knew a soul in the place, and I really wasn't dressed like they were. So when I caught a glimpse of one of my students, I hustled over and said hello. Which was probably weirder than hiding in the corner, but, hey. They kept me entertained with stories of hiking the Appalachian trail (folky hipsters!) until Judith returned.

The opening band was called something like Megafon (I don't know how it was spelled). No one had ever heard of them, but I liked them--they made you feel like you should take your shoes off, and dance on a dirt floor, swirling your skirt around. It fed nicely into my recent obsession with folk music.

Once Judith returned, we pushed ourselves to the middle front of the crowd, since I wanted to have the real concert experience. As we were (rudely) making our way through the crowd, Judith kept yelling over the noise of the music, "Do you see them? Do you see them?" I kept yelling back, "Who, Judith, who?! We aren't looking for anyone." This exchange repeated itself several times, until I realized that she was just pretending so we wouldn't look quite so rude crowding everyone else.

So The Mountain Goats: John Darnielle is the main guy--he sings and writes the songs. His voice is distinctively slightly squeaky and nasal. That sounds like it would be annoying, but I promise, it's charming (and, interestingly, his talking voice is not distinctive in any of these ways--it's just super normal until he sings). His songs are in the middle of talking/whispering and singing; he was an English major, so the lyrics are somewhere in between a poem and a short paragraph. And his songs are riddled with religious references.

When Judith gave me a bunch of The Mountain Goats music to listen to, she particularly recommended the record, "Get Lonely." Which is beautiful, but also infinitely sad: when John Darnielle sings a melancholy song, I want to cry. The funny thing is that John Darnielle is incredibly good natured, and when he's performing, he smiles a lot. Even during the sad songs.

John Darnielle was particularly charming during the encores. He said that he never decides what songs to do for encores, because he thinks that that is very presumptive. (As an aside: how great are encores?! You just clap long enough and the performers come back and play more! I love it. I think that encores should be integrated into more aspects of our lives, like restaurants. If the food is so good that you just start clapping, they will bring you out more food. Or books--if the book is really wonderful and you just want it to keep going, then you start clapping loudly at the end and a couple more chapters appear. Etc.) John Darnielle, during one of the encores, also complained about people from the audience asking for some particular song that he only likes to play when he feels like it. He said perhaps that person is standing next to us (capturing fairly well the frustration of being stuck in a closely packed crowd of annoying people), and perhaps we've even wondered, "Would anyone notice if I put my chisel in his back?"

The rest of the band besides John Darnielle were some keyboardist I didn't pay attention to, a guitar player (Peter Hughes) who slightly reminded me of Jim on The Office, and Jon Wurster, the drummer from Superchunk (who is also something like a comedy writer!).

The music at the concert was more rocky than The Mountain Goats stuff I'd heard before--hearing it was a great experience. It reminded me of going with my uncle to see fireworks at home when I was little: we'd get so close to the fireworks that you could feel the vibrations in your chest.


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