Kelly Pendergrast - groupie, San Diego
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Ok, so after being in long-distance love with him for almost ten years, I finally got to see Beck (or "Bahk", as I have to call him over here, or people think I'm saying "bic" and talking about a ball-point pen) LIVE! IN CONCERT!
In the last few years I've belatedly seen most of the musicians and bands that I loved as a teenager, and these belated encounters have had varying degrees of enjoyableness for me. Nick Cave was fantastic, Bob Dylan less so. Kraftwork were awesome, Jane's Addiction were OK. But since Beck was my pretend celebrity husband for about six years, I was pretty excited about seeing him in San Diego.
However, I failed to take three things into account: that the show was at my university's sports auditorium, and that San Diegan university students are, for the most part, intolerably bland and offensively drunk. The third thing is that Beck is a scientologist and married to the redhead girl from Dazed and Confused, and while this didn't affect my enjoyment of the show, it probably means he wasn't gonna be marrying me (and, judging from Katie and Tom, being married to a Scientologist is kinda freaky).
Anyway - the show was weird. I arrived late with my friend Sara, and walked down the bleachers into the aircraft-hanger-esque space. The crowd was large, but immobile and loosely packed. We easily made our way up to the front (this was amazing to me. No one shoving me, me not standing on people's feet or having to squeeze myself between thousands of sweaty huge stinky dreadlocked dudes or whatever, and no one giving me evil looks or anything), but when we got to within feet of the man himself, this heinous drunk girls-gone-wild type took offense at us being near her, started shoving Sara, and then they almost got into a fist fight. Serious - people had to pull them apart! It was wild! Then, after that first bit of badness, these things happened:
-Beck pulled a girl on stage to help him play the harmonium for one song. She startedawful this aweful grinding booty dance as she pumped the harmonium. This was all during, like, the saddest Beck song ever.
-The guys standing behind me were like Beevis and Butthead in the flesh: "huh, dude, that's Beck! Hurr, hurr. Wooh! Beck! Rock out, man! Hurr, hurr".
-No one danced, not even a little bit.
-At the end, people swarmed onto the stage and finally danced, and not in a happy-love Flaming Lips animal-suits way, but a tank-top skanky bleach blond drunken awful way. I think some girls made out, and people cheered.
Gaaah!
Whatever. I still love Beck, he still has the best hair in showbiz, but man, San Diego crowds suck baaaaad.
In the last few years I've belatedly seen most of the musicians and bands that I loved as a teenager, and these belated encounters have had varying degrees of enjoyableness for me. Nick Cave was fantastic, Bob Dylan less so. Kraftwork were awesome, Jane's Addiction were OK. But since Beck was my pretend celebrity husband for about six years, I was pretty excited about seeing him in San Diego.
However, I failed to take three things into account: that the show was at my university's sports auditorium, and that San Diegan university students are, for the most part, intolerably bland and offensively drunk. The third thing is that Beck is a scientologist and married to the redhead girl from Dazed and Confused, and while this didn't affect my enjoyment of the show, it probably means he wasn't gonna be marrying me (and, judging from Katie and Tom, being married to a Scientologist is kinda freaky).
Anyway - the show was weird. I arrived late with my friend Sara, and walked down the bleachers into the aircraft-hanger-esque space. The crowd was large, but immobile and loosely packed. We easily made our way up to the front (this was amazing to me. No one shoving me, me not standing on people's feet or having to squeeze myself between thousands of sweaty huge stinky dreadlocked dudes or whatever, and no one giving me evil looks or anything), but when we got to within feet of the man himself, this heinous drunk girls-gone-wild type took offense at us being near her, started shoving Sara, and then they almost got into a fist fight. Serious - people had to pull them apart! It was wild! Then, after that first bit of badness, these things happened:
-Beck pulled a girl on stage to help him play the harmonium for one song. She startedawful this aweful grinding booty dance as she pumped the harmonium. This was all during, like, the saddest Beck song ever.
-The guys standing behind me were like Beevis and Butthead in the flesh: "huh, dude, that's Beck! Hurr, hurr. Wooh! Beck! Rock out, man! Hurr, hurr".
-No one danced, not even a little bit.
-At the end, people swarmed onto the stage and finally danced, and not in a happy-love Flaming Lips animal-suits way, but a tank-top skanky bleach blond drunken awful way. I think some girls made out, and people cheered.
Gaaah!
Whatever. I still love Beck, he still has the best hair in showbiz, but man, San Diego crowds suck baaaaad.
