Specifically The Black Keys.
Only days after rolling back into the good old STP, The Whack Ol' Lady (my lovely mother and concert-attending-partner) and I made our way to the Target Center to see a couple of our favorite musicians tear it up on the big arena stage. These musicians were of course Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, or as they are better known, The Black Keys.
After years of attending only small venue shows (excluding of course big outdoor festivals and concerts), I was somewhat overwhelmed by the big-arena-rock-concert thing. It was like I had been suddenly whisked back to 6th grade when I saw my first real concert (also with the Whack Ol' Lady) at the Xcel. (I saw Green Day of course) (They were pretty fab really). Oh the excitement! The long hair! The tattoos! The unwashed teenage boys in the throes of puberty! Nothing had changed. I watched with amusement as the aforementioned young men frolicked about the arena trying their very best to appear hardcore and passive while simultaneously doing their best not to pee themselves with anticipation. This was their jungle gym now! No adults! (except for all the adults in attendance and the vast number of security guards) Rock music! Girls! Beer! (That they can't legally buy of course) Moshing! (Wait... that wasn't allowed either) Not to mention how cool they will look the next day when they stroll through the halls of their junior high (or high school. I do not discriminate. There are a multitude of grungy and unwashed young men in high school as well) wearing the concert tee from the night before.
The junior high population aside, there was something else I remembered from seeing Green Day so many years ago, and that was the gaudy and flashy excess of it all. And this was Green Day. We haven't even reached Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga in the stratosphere of superflous costumes and special effects. Still, it had been a show. I thought back to the many opportunities that had presented themselves, albeit always at extremely inconvenient times, for me to have seen The Black Keys in a smaller and more intimate setting, and I found myself wishing as I walked into that giant arena that I had taken one of those. But I needn't have worried.
Yes, there were TV screens flashing what appeared to be instagram in video form of the band from artsy angles, as if their designers had taken a bunch of hipsters and dunked them in the sugary mainstream before converting them into concert footage. And yes, they hauled out the biggest mother effing disco ball the world has seen for one single song. But it was as if through all of that Dan Auerback and Patrick Carney were still just on the little First Ave stage ('little' First Ave HAH) playing for a couple hundred instead of a couple thousand. They played as if they weren't even on a stage, and just making music because they just wanted to. And that's what made it a truly spectacular concert. Even in that giant space with thousands of screaming fans, they just stood up there and played the shit out of their instruments because that is what they do best.
I will leave you with this song off Brothers, because they absolutely killed it live.
Stay tuned for much more summer music including Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Jeremy Messersmith, Rogue Valley, Jonathan Richman, and much much more!
Until then, may the force be with you!
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