Things are tough out there, high water everywhere
Here's how we got to Bridgeport [way back in July when I wrote most of this post]:
I've been looking for a summer show to see at SPAC up in my hometown for a few years now. When the Americanarama tour with Bob Dylan, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket was announced, it sounded ideal. But it's hitting Saratoga tonight, and Marisa and I are heading upstate on our way to the Thousand Islands this coming Friday. So: close to convenient, but in fact completely inconvenient. And then, while we're upstate, the tour hits the greater NYC area, with shows at Jones Beach and in Hoboken next weekend.
But: for some reason, the Bridgeport date wasn't in that cluster. It was a full week earlier. In a fit of jealousy that my mom and my sister and possibly Derrick and others would be able to see this show in the comfort of Saratoga, I bought tickets for the Bridgeport date.
At the time, they were for a ballpark. It seemed like an ideal summer evening: A festival, but not with too many bands; good acts but not so many that we couldn't take a break to get some food; outside but in a relatively controlled environment; outside of the city but not hard to reach in Marisa's car. But less than a week before the show, due to the neverending insane heat and endless empty promises of heat-breaking thunderstorms, it was moved next door to a standard-issue arena. Somewhat less summery, but somewhat less physically dangerous.
Something else I failed to consider in planning this 24-hour trip: I-95 sucks. "An hour away on I-95" is not really a thing, unless you are talking about a distance of 15 or 20 miles. We left the city before 2PM, but between traffic, stopping off to check in at the B&B where we were staying, got a tiny bit lost on the way to the arena, parked, and rolled up into the venue, we had missed the first two My Morning Jacket songs.
The show was also starting pretty early, even earlier than I anticipated, because MMJ and Wilco both played near-full sets of 75 minutes or so each, on top of which there was an opener-opener we missed entirely (sorry, Ryan Bingham), and Dylan's 100 minutes or so.
Here's what My Morning Jacket did:
Golden
Circuital
Heartbreakin' Man
The Way That He Sings
Masterplan (not a cover of the Oasis song)
Slow Slow Tune
Victory Dance
Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1
Wordless Chorus
Butch Cassidy
Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 2
Anytime
Gideon
I'd like to say that I didn't know all of the songs because I don't have their full catalog, but really, I could've known the majority if I listened to Z more. Z was the first in a long line of attempts I've made to like My Morning Jacket, and it finally succeeded somewhere between Evil Urges (which has some awesome songs in addition to some songs like "Highly Suspicious" which probably set me back a few months at a time) and Circuital, which I belatedly picked up after getting tickets to this show. You see, it wasn't so much that Wilco, My Morning Jacket, and Dylan together represented a powerhouse of music acts I love, the way it does for Derrick. I was just excited -- after seeing Dylan shows with openers like Mark Knopfler, Phil Lesh, and, most productively, no one -- to see him paired with more current bands.
Anyway, I didn't know all of the My Morning Jacket songs and I missed "Circuital" which is one of my favorites, but I receognized a lot of them, and they are obviously a talented band. I'd see them with other bands I like some other time. Marisa wondered if this was a Walkmen situation, where we'd have to go again to wind up hearing all of the really good songs. Maybe if they keep their following going, we can see My Morning Jacket at SPAC some other time. Or at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe? Or at Red Rocks? I think I'd like to go to Red Rocks, should I ever find myself in Colorado. Yes, there are many venues that I'm unlikely to be anywhere near where I'd consider seeing My Morning Jacket again. Even if I never make it out to those places, we'll always have Connecticut, MMJ.
Then we went to get some hotdogs and sit down for the first chunk of Wilco.
(Was I) In Your Dreams
When the Roses Bloom Again
Misunderstood
Forget the Flowers
Handshake Drugs
Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
One Wing
Impossible Germany
Waterloo Sunset (Kinks cover!)
California Stars
Born Alone
Radio Cure
Art of Almost
Heavy Metal Drummer
I'm the Man Who Loves You
I actually have even more Wilco albums than My Morning Jacket albums. I just don't like them all that much, try as I might, and to the extent that I do enjoy them, I think I prefer their earlier, country-rockier type stuff, or at least "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" is my favorite song of theirs ever. Which they did not play. They did play "Waterloo Sunset" and they generally sound a little heavier and more muscular in concert than they do on the records I've heard. Wilco is fine. Jeff Tweedy seems like a good dude. I'm glad I can cross them off the list. They're just not my thing. Toward the end of the set we went back to the floor (though we were there a few hours after doors, we were apparently among the first 2,000 people to try to get on the floor and get awarded a wristband -- because the ballpark show was GA, the arena version had to be GA too, and because this was also a Bob Dylan concert, a lot of people who got there early apparently did so to claim good seats rather than get on the floor -- understandably) to inch closer so we could move up when the post-Wilco exodus happened.
And it did, and we got pretty close -- not crazy close, but probably closer to the stage than I'd ever been for a Dylan show before. Close enough to deal with some mangy crowd issues, whether that's due to a big arena show in the de facto suburbs or the hippie-friendly line-up or what. But there's a particular type of dude at a show who just doesn't go to many of the shows I go to, and that is the dude who repeatedly addresses Bob Dylan as "BOBBYYYYY!!!" from the crowd, asking him to play guitar or play a certain song or keep rocking or whatever, because if there's one thing a seventysomething-year-old who's been gigging for five decades is apt to do, it's listen closely at what a yutz in the audience is yelling at him.
Anyway, setlist!
Things Have Changed
Love Sick
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Soon After Midnight
Early Roman Kings
Tangled Up in Blue
Duquesne Whistle
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Blind Willie McTell
Simple Twist of Fate
Thunder on the Mountain
Let Your Light Shine on Me (with Jim James and Jeff Tweedy)
All Along the Watchtower
---
Blowin' in the Wind
Strangely, my impression during the show was that this was a good set -- technically, with the origins of "Blind Willie McTell" dated to the early eighties even though it wasn't released until one of the Bootleg Series collections much later, hitting every decade of Dylan's career -- that could've been changed up a bit from the shows I saw last year and in 2010. Upon further research (say what you will about the somewhat corporate veneer of BobDylan.com, advertising products and assorted merchandise, I love that you can look up setlists going back for years and years), I discovered that this was not true -- this set was about fifty percent different from last time, seventy-five percent different from the Terminal 5 show. So, shows what I know. I guess there are enough almost-always-played songs in circulation ("All Along the Watchtower," "Thunder on the Mountain," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," "Things Have Changed," "Tangled Up in Blue") that it's easy to pass over the part where I say: hold up, I don't know if I've ever actually heard "Simple Twist of Fate" or "She Belongs to Me," at least not recently.
So yeah, I got to hear two songs from Blood on the Tracks and a nice selection of his recent work plus some sixties classics. And three from Tempest, which is probably a record for me seeing him do songs off his actual most recent album at the time of the show. I think I'm done with Bob Dylan shows for the forseeable future just because I've seen him a fair number of times this decade so far, but I'm sure I'll be tempted again. With this show, he becomes the only classic-rock type act to make it onto my most-seen-artists list. Go Bob!
I've been looking for a summer show to see at SPAC up in my hometown for a few years now. When the Americanarama tour with Bob Dylan, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket was announced, it sounded ideal. But it's hitting Saratoga tonight, and Marisa and I are heading upstate on our way to the Thousand Islands this coming Friday. So: close to convenient, but in fact completely inconvenient. And then, while we're upstate, the tour hits the greater NYC area, with shows at Jones Beach and in Hoboken next weekend.
But: for some reason, the Bridgeport date wasn't in that cluster. It was a full week earlier. In a fit of jealousy that my mom and my sister and possibly Derrick and others would be able to see this show in the comfort of Saratoga, I bought tickets for the Bridgeport date.
At the time, they were for a ballpark. It seemed like an ideal summer evening: A festival, but not with too many bands; good acts but not so many that we couldn't take a break to get some food; outside but in a relatively controlled environment; outside of the city but not hard to reach in Marisa's car. But less than a week before the show, due to the neverending insane heat and endless empty promises of heat-breaking thunderstorms, it was moved next door to a standard-issue arena. Somewhat less summery, but somewhat less physically dangerous.
Something else I failed to consider in planning this 24-hour trip: I-95 sucks. "An hour away on I-95" is not really a thing, unless you are talking about a distance of 15 or 20 miles. We left the city before 2PM, but between traffic, stopping off to check in at the B&B where we were staying, got a tiny bit lost on the way to the arena, parked, and rolled up into the venue, we had missed the first two My Morning Jacket songs.
The show was also starting pretty early, even earlier than I anticipated, because MMJ and Wilco both played near-full sets of 75 minutes or so each, on top of which there was an opener-opener we missed entirely (sorry, Ryan Bingham), and Dylan's 100 minutes or so.
Here's what My Morning Jacket did:
Golden
Circuital
Heartbreakin' Man
The Way That He Sings
Masterplan (not a cover of the Oasis song)
Slow Slow Tune
Victory Dance
Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1
Wordless Chorus
Butch Cassidy
Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 2
Anytime
Gideon
I'd like to say that I didn't know all of the songs because I don't have their full catalog, but really, I could've known the majority if I listened to Z more. Z was the first in a long line of attempts I've made to like My Morning Jacket, and it finally succeeded somewhere between Evil Urges (which has some awesome songs in addition to some songs like "Highly Suspicious" which probably set me back a few months at a time) and Circuital, which I belatedly picked up after getting tickets to this show. You see, it wasn't so much that Wilco, My Morning Jacket, and Dylan together represented a powerhouse of music acts I love, the way it does for Derrick. I was just excited -- after seeing Dylan shows with openers like Mark Knopfler, Phil Lesh, and, most productively, no one -- to see him paired with more current bands.
Anyway, I didn't know all of the My Morning Jacket songs and I missed "Circuital" which is one of my favorites, but I receognized a lot of them, and they are obviously a talented band. I'd see them with other bands I like some other time. Marisa wondered if this was a Walkmen situation, where we'd have to go again to wind up hearing all of the really good songs. Maybe if they keep their following going, we can see My Morning Jacket at SPAC some other time. Or at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe? Or at Red Rocks? I think I'd like to go to Red Rocks, should I ever find myself in Colorado. Yes, there are many venues that I'm unlikely to be anywhere near where I'd consider seeing My Morning Jacket again. Even if I never make it out to those places, we'll always have Connecticut, MMJ.
Then we went to get some hotdogs and sit down for the first chunk of Wilco.
(Was I) In Your Dreams
When the Roses Bloom Again
Misunderstood
Forget the Flowers
Handshake Drugs
Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
One Wing
Impossible Germany
Waterloo Sunset (Kinks cover!)
California Stars
Born Alone
Radio Cure
Art of Almost
Heavy Metal Drummer
I'm the Man Who Loves You
I actually have even more Wilco albums than My Morning Jacket albums. I just don't like them all that much, try as I might, and to the extent that I do enjoy them, I think I prefer their earlier, country-rockier type stuff, or at least "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" is my favorite song of theirs ever. Which they did not play. They did play "Waterloo Sunset" and they generally sound a little heavier and more muscular in concert than they do on the records I've heard. Wilco is fine. Jeff Tweedy seems like a good dude. I'm glad I can cross them off the list. They're just not my thing. Toward the end of the set we went back to the floor (though we were there a few hours after doors, we were apparently among the first 2,000 people to try to get on the floor and get awarded a wristband -- because the ballpark show was GA, the arena version had to be GA too, and because this was also a Bob Dylan concert, a lot of people who got there early apparently did so to claim good seats rather than get on the floor -- understandably) to inch closer so we could move up when the post-Wilco exodus happened.
And it did, and we got pretty close -- not crazy close, but probably closer to the stage than I'd ever been for a Dylan show before. Close enough to deal with some mangy crowd issues, whether that's due to a big arena show in the de facto suburbs or the hippie-friendly line-up or what. But there's a particular type of dude at a show who just doesn't go to many of the shows I go to, and that is the dude who repeatedly addresses Bob Dylan as "BOBBYYYYY!!!" from the crowd, asking him to play guitar or play a certain song or keep rocking or whatever, because if there's one thing a seventysomething-year-old who's been gigging for five decades is apt to do, it's listen closely at what a yutz in the audience is yelling at him.
Anyway, setlist!
Things Have Changed
Love Sick
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Soon After Midnight
Early Roman Kings
Tangled Up in Blue
Duquesne Whistle
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Blind Willie McTell
Simple Twist of Fate
Thunder on the Mountain
Let Your Light Shine on Me (with Jim James and Jeff Tweedy)
All Along the Watchtower
---
Blowin' in the Wind
Strangely, my impression during the show was that this was a good set -- technically, with the origins of "Blind Willie McTell" dated to the early eighties even though it wasn't released until one of the Bootleg Series collections much later, hitting every decade of Dylan's career -- that could've been changed up a bit from the shows I saw last year and in 2010. Upon further research (say what you will about the somewhat corporate veneer of BobDylan.com, advertising products and assorted merchandise, I love that you can look up setlists going back for years and years), I discovered that this was not true -- this set was about fifty percent different from last time, seventy-five percent different from the Terminal 5 show. So, shows what I know. I guess there are enough almost-always-played songs in circulation ("All Along the Watchtower," "Thunder on the Mountain," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," "Things Have Changed," "Tangled Up in Blue") that it's easy to pass over the part where I say: hold up, I don't know if I've ever actually heard "Simple Twist of Fate" or "She Belongs to Me," at least not recently.
So yeah, I got to hear two songs from Blood on the Tracks and a nice selection of his recent work plus some sixties classics. And three from Tempest, which is probably a record for me seeing him do songs off his actual most recent album at the time of the show. I think I'm done with Bob Dylan shows for the forseeable future just because I've seen him a fair number of times this decade so far, but I'm sure I'll be tempted again. With this show, he becomes the only classic-rock type act to make it onto my most-seen-artists list. Go Bob!