Radiohead @ Nissan Pavilion, 5/11

This is really happening. I’ve been keeping track of my year end favorites for about five or six years now and in 2003, I decisively named Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief as my list-topper. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of their live show since, well, I missed it. Realistically, I couldn’t see myself driving solo five or six hours away in the middle of midterms whilest running a fever and hacking up a lung. I think I did well on those midterms but I’m sure I kicked myself for the past five years for not making the drive down to Atlanta or up to Washington, DC to see that show. Fast forward five years and I’ve more than compensated for this judgment call by making ill-advised road trips to see the likes of The Dismemberment Plan, LCD Soundsystem, The Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, Rufus Wainwright, The Shins, etc. AND I finally had tickets to see Radiohead. I left work last Sunday fully expecting to head to the best show of the year. I guess in that sense I was setting myself up for disappointment because it was not the best show of the year. It is, however, the best story of the year and an unforgettable experience. However, as it is a personal narrative, and a long one at that, I’ll put it behind a jump cut.

MP3: Radiohead :: 15 Step
MP3: Radiohead :: Reckoner

Has the light gone out for you? Because the light’s gone out for me. Bristow, VA is a tiny little town outside of the far outlying Northern Virginia suburb of Manassas. Despite the Nissan Pavilion being pretty much the only reason to have ever heard of Bristow (unless you’re from there), they have no idea how to deal with the sort of traffic that accompanies a sold out show. It took nearly three hours for me to drive 40 miles (which I vaguely remember from my last visit to the Pavilion in 2003), almost two of those hours spent in the 5 mile stretch of road leading just outside my exit to the parking lot. The steady rain didn’t help the traffic but I still considered myself insanely lucky since I got out of my car just in time to hear the opening notes of “All I Need.” I started a dead sprint towards the entrance, furiously texting my friends on the highway behind me and my friends already inside the concert.

It’s going to be a glorious day. I feel my luck will change. In retrospect, opening the phone was a bad plan. See kids, phones and water do not mix well. I think I got an undecipherable text to my friend who was already on the lawn but the screen kept going to other options, an eerie white light came on the outside and a few songs later the phone turned off completely, as if laughing at my futile attempts at communication. I start to realize that although the architects in ancient Greece and Rome (and even the architects in not so ancient Columbia, MD and Va. Beach, VA) made amphitheaters so that everyone with tickets could see…such architects did not work on the Nissan Pavilion. With the jumbotron disabled, all I could see was the light show (which was indeed spectacular) and although I could hear “15 Step” just fine, I wasn’t sure that I was getting much more than what I was listening to on the way over. Then they played the opening chords to “Lucky” and in that moment nothing mattered. Not my solitude in a crowd of 15,000, not my dead cellphone, not my crappy seats, not the crappy weather. I took my rainjacket hood down, lifted my face to the raindrops and grinned like an idiot. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Rain down. Rain down. C’mon rain down on me. I wasn’t alone for very long. I stayed at the top of the lawn near the entrance for the In Rainbows-heavy beginnings of the set. I could see the wave-like lights moving against a blue background for “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and could occasionally see projections of the band’s faces in the middle of the large blinking lights. I half-expected for the people I was waiting for to walk up behind me. They didn’t, but another friend of mine did and he said that he knew a guy that could get us into the orchestra pit. Fantastic! Except that my friend clearly hasn’t been in an amphitheater any time in the recent past because when he told his golden ticket-holding friend that we were “outside the pit” we were really in that concrete walkway between the lawn and the seats walking back and forth, waiting for someone who was waiting for us somewhere else. It felt slightly wrong to feel the lakes growing around my feet during “Myxamatosis” and I really wished I could see, I don’t know, something. We abandoned this wild goose chase at the first notes of Idioteque, hopping back onto the lawn, where for the first time all night, I could see Thom Yorke. And he was contorting around like a total spaz. Then he followed this up with a song that he introduced as “a nasty song, it’s not nice” for those of us suffering in the rain. This song of course was “Paranoid Android,” which had never seemed so literal. Or so perfect. I failed to understand just why the people around me weren’t losing their shit, exactly and I also knew at that moment that a guy I knew was standing, drier, in the seats of this sold out event…and making fun of the band. I hated him right then.

You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s why it really hurts. The band followed “Paranoid Android” with “Just” and my friend asked me how I felt about trying to climb over the barrier into the seats. Well, I felt like we’d get caught but as this is something that I’d never done before, uh, sure, I’d try it. Well…I tried it. And we got caught and had our asses sent right back to the lawn. It felt unholy not to be completely enjoying “Reckoner” and “Videotape” and my friend told me that he was tired of trying and failing to get a hold of his friends and that he was just going to leave. He also didn’t want to ruin the rest of the show for me. I insisted that I’d buy him dinner, reminding him that I can’t see no matter where I stood, so I might as well enjoy “Everything In Its Right Place” while buying him dinner. It really meant that much to me that he not leave. Well, in heading to buy him dinner, he found the fucking entrance to the pit, gained some renewed life and we waited for his friend in a little enclave outside of the pit on the way to the seated area. I can finally REALLY see the band and I can see that Thom Yorke has pulled out a second drum kit for “Bangers and Mash.” Finally, utopia. Well, utopia was short-lived as the event staff told us that fire marshal regulations forbid us to stand in that little enclave. At which point my friend lost it, started vigorously arguing with event staff, and finally got dragged off. I spent “Bodysnatchers” trying to find out where they’d dragged him, exactly and discovering that no, I couldn’t still get him dinner as he’d been unceremoniously ejected from the show. And with this, the first set ended.

The best we can is good enough. I headed back to the top of the lawn for the first of two encores that I couldn’t see. It started with “Optimistic,” the song that originally got me into Radiohead, believe it or not and the song that, despite everything, still described my mood at that point. I was soaked through to the bone but I was there. Thom Yorke dedicated “Fake Plastic Trees” to the people who couldn’t make it into the show since the band had been told during the break in the action that police actually shut down some of the flooded roads and stopped letting people into the amphitheater. Fucking “Fake Plastic Trees.” Still, even after that and “Planet Telex,” I was starting to lose a little bit of willpower, not to mention feeling in my extremities. But they finished off their two hour set with “House of Cards,” and I ended that washout with a smile on my face.

For a minute there, I lost myself. I’m convinced that I couldn’t have gone through that ordeal for any other band with the possible exceptions of Sigur Ros or Fugazi who likely wouldn’t play that lousy venue. And really, it boils down to my love of this music. Love makes us inhuman. Love makes us stand for two hours in a cold windy rainstorm and enjoy it. Love makes us disregard that we haven’t eaten anything in seven hours. Love makes us abandon our vehicles in a quick dash for the stage so that it takes nearly two hours to find them in a clusterfuck of parked and moving vehicles and people in all directions later on. I wish I could say that I stood right up front and could see everything perfectly, but instead, Radiohead gave me a bittersweet experience and ultimately, that’s a more fitting tribute.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 3:01 am and is filed under The Yellow Stereo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.