You can find part one here and part two here.
Sunday September 5
Day three of the festival and I am loving it! No surprise there. Same routine, we took the monorail to the Bumbershoot Festival and grabbed a snack at the hospitality area. Our first show to see was David Bazan at the KEXP secret lounge. While we waited, we heard a few songs from a nearby stage by The Tripwires which were ok but nothing special. Then we went in to see David. He’s the former singer-songwriter behind Pedro The Lion, now with a new band. We were really close up to see and hear his new songs mixed with PTL songs too. Good stuff. After that, Petra wanted to see Art Corps Presents so she went to that. I wandered a different direction to see a couple songs by Crash Kings, who I didn’t really like too much, and then The Redwood Plan at the cool Sky Church venue. They were quite a bit better. I also watched part of David Bazan’s “real” (public) set and then part of regional act Slender Means. David was good again. I like his literate and smart lyrics and the songs are catchy too.
I met back up with Petra to chat and have some food, then she headed out to a modern dance show, the 605 Collective, and I watched some of Motion City Soundtrack, a recently popular band whose first song was fast and loud but the ones after that got better. I watched about four or five songs then Petra and I met back up and went into the Main Stage to see Hole. Yes, Courtney Love’s band, back together with her and some new members. Everyone was expecting her to be a total train wreck, after all the crazy things she’s been in the papers for. But amazingly enough, she looked great and sounded good too. No train wreck, just a really entertaining show. And afterwards she walked along the rail and shook hands with people, including both of us! Wow! Then it was time for the day’s headliner Weezer. Thousands of people filled the venue and it seemed like everyone there was singing along with every lyric from every song! I have to say that Weezer was great! I didn’t realize they had so many hits but I recognized almost all the songs and they were all good. The singer and leader, Rivers Cuomo, was all over the stage and off too. He came within about 5-6 feet of us at one point and then at another point he came right next to Petra, who was next to me. She touched his arm, that’s how close he was. And the crowd was wild! People were crowd surfing left and right. We thought we were out of that area since we were on the side, on the rail. But since we kept seeing people crowd-surfing very close to us, we wondered if we were really out. And then a person was passed right over us. I helped pass him and kept him from falling onto Petra (or me). Wow, craziness! But it was all fine and fun. And Weezer was a high point of the Festival.
Then it was back to the hotel to study the schedule for tomorrow and to get some sleep.
Monday September 6
Day three of the Festival. Last day, I wish it would last forever! Anyway, it was off on the monorail to the Festival. We had a “secret stage” show to start the day (after some food of course), featuring New York band Ra Ra Riot. We had great seats and we both liked them quite a bit. Next up was a comedy show featuring Tig Nataro, Marc Mahon, and Doug Benson. All three were funny, this was a good show. Then we headed back to the secret stage for a show by The Thermals. We had never heard them before but they were pretty good. Kind of a punk-pop threesome, catchy but not overly smooth. After that we watched a few songs by a twosome called Lay Low, but it was v-e-r-y low-key and we both lost interest fast. More food, that will fix anything! Then back for our last secret stage show, featuring the 80’s band The English Beat. They still had the leader and main singer and did most of their hits from that period. Good stuff if mostly nostalgic. I would have liked at least a couple new songs.
Then it was time for Jenny and Johnnie. I liked Jenny Lewis’ work with Rilo Kiley and also her solo stuff, but this new material didn’t do much for me. A few songs were enough. After that, Petra went to see the Axis Dance Company and I checked out a few songs from Surfer Blood on another stage. Not bad but I wandered over to yet another stage to see Wild Orchid Children. Noisy but good and they didn’t sound like everyone else. Then we watched part of The Thermal’s “real” set. Did I mention that it rained off and on today? We had to pull out our bumbershoots 😉 And that was it for the 201o Festival. We’ll be back for the 2011 version, you can bet on it!!
Tuesday September 7
We took the light rail to the airport to catch the plane home. There was a two hour plane delay but we made it. I’m already ready to go back to Seattle…
BTW, we bought some new CDs because of bands we saw this year at Bumbershoot: The Raveonettes, Ra Ra Riot, Bob Schneider, and Hole. We will probably be getting more Weezer one of these days too.
Pictures from the trip coming soon. Why not leave me a comment?
