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Shoreline Amphitheater September 6, 2003 Review by Jake Thomas I wasn’t even planning on going to this show, I was planning on seeing Casiotone for the Painfully Alone this fine Saturday night with some of my friends. But soon after I awoke, I heard someone yelling my name on the sidewalk outside my house. I look out, and it’s one of my good friends – he’s one of those guys who is connected to any and everything – seems he had 3 free tickets to the REM/Wilco show at the Shoreline that night for me, knowing that I love Wilco but couldn’t afford this monstrously priced event. So I roped one of my friends into going, and I was off to see my first show at the Shoreline, as well as my first show at a venue this size in a long, long time (I think the last time was probably 6 or 7 years ago, when I went to see the Moody Blues with my mom – most of the crowd was my grandma’s age, a really strange sight after going to small shows for so long, but that’s another story altogether). First thing I noticed when I got near the venue was that apparently whoever designed the place intended it to look like the circus was permanently in town. I’m not really clear as to why this is a good idea, but then again I hate clowns. Upon closer inspection as we entered the amphitheatre I noticed that the entire back of the place was covered wit ha fence or some sort of netting, making you feel as if you are standing in the middle of a golf driving range. But none of this really matters, not when you’re getting to see Wilco for free, and they started playing as we were locating our seats. The first track was one of the songs off of their internet-only EP, and it was the only song from their set that I’d never heard before. And it was damn good – I need to get that thing downloaded pronto. Other than that, most of their set was from ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ with at least one song from all of the other records to boot – most notably ‘Box Full of Letters’, which made me as happy as a pig in shit. Their set was much shorter than I’m used to, being that they were the opener, but it was worth seeing anyways. If you can’t say anything else positive about the venue, you can at least say that the sound is good – it was at that perfect level of loudness where you didn’t need earplugs, nor did your neighbors ruin your good time by chatting. Hopefully next time around they’ll actually play a show of their own at a venue like the Warfield so I can see more of them. I stuck around for a good chunk of REM’s set. I listened to them a lot in high school, but can’t say that I’ve followed their career that much since. Other than occasionally busting out ‘Green’, I can’t say that I’m much of a fan anymore. Not that I dislike them, it’s just that I don’t much think about them at all one way or the other…anyways, luckily they played a number of older songs while I was there, most notably ‘Orange Crush’, ‘(don’t go back to)Rockville’, and some other of their more recent popular tracks like 'Night Swimming' and ‘Losing My Religion’. There were also some new tracks thrown in there, one of which was quite good and the rest very ‘eh’. Stipe was full of vim and vigor and silly comments, such as after their first couple of songs he said hello to the crowd with the following, and in all seriousness: ‘Hi, we’re REM. This is what we do.’ It was one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a while, but I’m not sure if everyone else got the joke. I left happy that I saw some of REM instead of just leaving after Wilco, and glad to see they can still draw such a crowd. It’s just that next time, let’s have Wilco headline. --- Check out our previous Wilco experiences: Photos December 3, 2001 @ Fillmore Review September 6, 2002 @ The Warfield ©2003 playinginfog.com |