We begin with Dave. Finally.

Finally, I'm getting around to making random comments/observations in regards to my three summer concerts. (I was a spectator, not a performer ... no need to recoil in horror.) I know everyone is shivering with [Frankenfurter] antici ... pation [/Frank], so without further ado:

So, five of us made the three-hour drive to the Polaris/Germain Amphitheater (or whatever it's called this week) in June to see the Dave Matthews Band. One of the drawbacks to living on the hem of the outskirts of a suburb of Nowhereville, WV is that good artists rarely venture into this area. But we all love us some Dave (and my cousin has an unhealthy obsession with Friendly's, the closest of which is in Columbus) so away we went. En route, we saw our lives flash before our eyes multiple times (eliciting several shrieks of, "Blue ... no yellow!" from my friend Victor.) Nevertheless, we arrived unharmed, in the intermission between Dave and the opening band (which we pronounced "oar" because we are so thoroughly old and non-trendy. Oh well.)

The demographic at a DMB concert is interesting. In the seats that are under roof and that are actually, well, seats, you have your yuppie crowd. The cheaper, uncovered section of lawn "seats" contains one giant pile of college-age people who manage to be hyper-aware of all of the world's tragic ills, yet ridiculously happy at the same time. Yeah. They're happy because they're all high, see. If the hovering cloud with the very distinct smell hadn't dissipated already, I'd submit it as evidence. :-) Since our seats were on the back row of the covered section, we spent a lot of time observing the lawn crowd. It was very convenient for those times when Dave et al. were just endlessly droning on and on with their guitar solos and their jamming and all of those weird noises that Dave makes. He's like a human noisemaker with his clicks and tweets and trills ... my theory is that he's too cheap to buy the instruments that will make those noises, so he just trains himself to do it.

I noticed early in the show that every time Boyd was shown on the jumbotron, the crowd (the lawn-dwellers in particular) went, "Woooooooo!" They also went, "Woooooooooo!" when the lights that were mounted all around the stage would flash at us. Actually, I think they were so happy that they'd "woooooooo!" at just about anything. Boyd IS fairly woooo-inducing, though, because he plays one awesome violin or fiddle or whatever it is. Even though he looks like that rastafari Muppet, whose name I can't remember.

A little further down the row from us were four teenage-looking girls wearing short skirts and trucker hats that said "DMB". They thought they were very cute. You could tell.

Sometimes, Dave would turn around and face the band between songs for an extended period of time. I'm sure they were discussing what to do next, but I thought it would be amusing if he had been saying, "Well, crap. Does anybody remember what I came out here for?" Or, "Are they all still out there? WHY WON'T THEY STOP STARING AT ME????"

Victor and I had to translate Dave into Non-Mumblish for my cousin Susan ... a fairly easy task, since he doesn't say much other than, "Thank you very much" and occasionally, "Thank you very much TONIGHT." Oh, and after an encore of Stay, he said something like, "That's it. Go home." Which is actually kind of contridictory to the lyrics of the song, but whatever. A lot of people actually DID stay, because there was another show the next night. I decided this was a good thing after I watched a lot of the happily high lawn-dwellers stumble out to the parking lot.

I just realized that I don't have much to say about the music itself, just that I think Dave is such a phenomenal songwriter. Oh, he did sing a few new songs, one of which I really liked. I noticed that he said "Hello Again" repeatedly in the lyrics, and from that, I deduced that the song is probably titled something like "New Song #12". The music to "Hello Again/New Song #12" is really interesting ... I couldn't tell much about the lyrics, because they sounded like, "Mumblemumblemumble rrrrrrrrrrr click click click tweet! Hello again!" I liked the beat instantly, though ... the hook lives up to its name, because I had it in my head for a while afterward. Weeklydavespeak.com has an mp3 of it, but you have to register for their forums in order to get it. It's really clear, though, to be a bootleg live recording.

That is all. Thank you very much TONIGHT!

Edited to add ... Clifford! His name is Clifford! Whew.