But I wasn’t blowing off the dust for nothing. As is my way, I immediately set about rearranging the list according to rank. This is where things get interesting. So many variables go into any one concert experience. What album was the band touring for? Were they “on” that night? How was the crowd? Who were you there with? This chaos is what makes live music so great. Two people with the same music tastes could go to the same five shows and come out with a completely different impression about what they saw and heard.
So, that’s what this is all about: me. Egan Caufield’s distorted prismatic musical perception. There’s no second guessing this list because it’s openly subjective. This is what rocked me. Dig?
A couple quick guidelines and caveats: First, each concert includes the main act and the opener(s)—except for festivals, which counted as single event on my overall list but are now separated by performances for purposes of the the top 10. Second, I’ve put dates where I can humanly remember; others are estimated. Finally, I admit to leaving out two Rosenschontz concerts that I went to when I was 6, only because—based on the vague memories I have now—I think If I could revisit them now they would be so mind-blowingly bizarre/awesome that it wouldn’t be fair to the other bands on this list.
Part one, reverse order, #10-6. Dig:
#10 James Mercer (of the Shins) w/ Sam Beam (of Iron & Wine) at T.T. the Bears Cambridge, MA January 2003
In February 2003, Iron & Wine’s Creek Drank the Cradle had just been released, and had not yet garnered widespread attention. Sub Pop had paired Sam and James for a U.S. tour which brought them through Boston. My first concert on U.S. soil after a semester abroad, I was able to rope one friend into to coming along with no expectations. Standing in the third row of a tightly-packed but friendly winter crowd, we were treated to some incredible music that night. Sam Beam brought his sister on stage to sing a few characteristically sweet songs, and Sam Mercer was more endearing solo than with the Shins. I was mesmerized for the entirety of the two sets. Also, the kickoff to my final months in Boston—this unexpectedly superb show can’t escape the top 10.
#9 Eels Live with Strings at the 9:30 Club Washington DC, Spring 2005
I don’t consider myself a diehard Eels fan, but I dig their music and think E is one of the more under-the-radar musical auteurs of our time. So when a friend of mine who is a diehard invited me to see them in during the Summer of 2005, I decided to go for it. He warned me beforehand that the band tends to change their entire stage act every tour. For this tour, in support of the double-CD Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, the band consisted of E on piano, a standup bassist, a drummer playing on empty suitcases, and an actual string quartet. This could have gone awry, but instead I was blown away by a quality show. They played upwards of 25 songs, including a few rare covers. Even my diehard friend was shocked by some of the playlist selections. That’s usually a good sign [A creepy, violin version of “Novocaine for the Soul” segues into “Girl from the North Country”?! Unreal]. E held court with the crowd in a professorial manner, and brought the band back out for four—four!—encores. I was really impressed with the thought and that had one into what the concert would be, and it showed.
# 8 Ugly Cassanova w/ Iron & Wine at the Black Cat Washington, DC, June 28, 2003
After becoming a Modest Mouse fan in 2000, it would be another five years before I saw them live—by that time a shell of their former selves. But I was fortunate to experience the short-lived side project Ugly Casanova, which Isaac Brock pulled off under the tightening noose of Epic Records. The project included members of Red Red Meat and the Fruit Bats among others, and had the feeling of one epic, misguided campfire session deep in the Redwood forest. The type of one-off that I know I’ll spend hours explaining to my children how good it is, to no avail.The release of Sharpen your Teeth coincided with my first Summer in Washington DC, and became something of a soundtrack for the humid, pastoral city. The August tour date coincided with a friends’ visit, and while she was a willing accomplice, her sister was less so. After a late dinner we arrived at the show and missed the opening band--something I never like to do. It was only later that I realized the opening band was Iron & Wine, meaning I would have seen them a full five months before Sam Beam hit it big, which I would be bragging about to you right now in a parallel universe. To say nothing of missing what in retrospect is an unbelievable twin bill for the Black Cat. But anyways…
When we arrived, Isaac Brock and Co. were in rare form. Brock appeared to be drunk, and not amused by the technical difficulties the band was having with sound check. Some faulty connection which no one could seem to find was releasing an awful hiss. After 40 minutes of delay the band hadn’t started playing. The crowd was growing restless and, sensing this, Brock was becoming eagerly belligerent. In a morbid way, after all the stories of Modest Mouse’s twisted past, this was precisely what I was hoping for as my first Isaac Brock experience. While he was trading slurred curses with the front rows, each of the band members tuned their instruments with short, loud bursts of sound. The effect created a jolting cacophony [the hiss never got fixed], unsettling and awkward. Then, slowly, behind Brock’s drunken raving, the instrumental bursts started to harmonize. It picked up rhythm, gradually, and then out of nowhere it started to take a shape…a song. Brock said his last words, shut up, and then joined in the melee, slamming the metal strings of his guitar, and belting out the first lines of Pacifico (“they said they’d give me everything/ now here’s the part that makes me laugh/ they didn’t give me anything and then they took half of that/ sharpen your teeth, or lay flat!”). The awkwardness was shattered, and the room was theirs. The intro had taken about five minutes to materialize, and I had never seen it coming. Not that Isaac wasn’t sincerely drunk or belligerent, but I’ve never seen the mood in a room so masterfully manipulated. By the end of the song, every band member and most of the crowd was shouting the refrain at the top of their lungs (“sharpen your teeth, or lay flat!!!”). Absolutely incredible beginning to a show.
The rest of the show was just as good, which is why it lands in the top 10. In an age when so many bands eschew spontaneity for fan expectation and the comfort of a rehearsed setlist/act, my appreciation for Ugly Casanova grows with time. Ironically, one band very guilty of this is Modest Mouse. I’ve seen them twice, and no show on any scale comes close to the intimate evening I shared with Ugly Casanova at Black Cat.
Unfortunately, the memory is forever tinged by one small catch: against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be convinced to leave before the encore. The following day I read in the paper that Ugly Casanova covered “Styrofoam Boots on Ice, It’s Alright”—an incredible but somewhat obscure Modest Mouse song. The lesson? Don’t break your own rules.
Dig!
#7 Built to Spill at the Showbox Seattle, WA June 1, 2003
I warned you context was everything. I’ve seen Built to Spill three times, and even though I believe that they will one day be remembered as one of the best live bands of our time (and as one of the few bands who seemed to really care about their live show), I always come away from their shows thinking: “solid.” They go a long way to reaffirming my faith in music in general, but on any all-time list, they’re likely to anchor the upper-middle portion. This show cracks the top ten for a specific set of reasons.
It was the Summer of 2003, and my friends and I had set out from Florida for a cross country road trip—literally. By May 31, we had made it to Eugene, Oregon. Knowing we’d be in Seattle the next night, we looked through city listings to see what was going on. Sure enough, our one night in the rainy city coincided with the opener of three night stand by Built to Spill at the Showbox. We rolled into town blasting Hole and Nirvana, ready to singlehandedly blow life back into the grunge movement. We arrived at our hostel with just enough time to change, take in a bit of the city, and then make our way to the Showbox.
Something about being out on Seattle’s streets that night—transient tourists in the great wellspring of so much music that I grew up listening to—it really felt special. Inside the Showbox, the walls were covered with posters from previous shows which only added to my awe-masquerading-as-nostalgia. Built to Spill was characteristically great. Doug Martsch walked on stage with a backpack, set it down, and then never looked back, riffing through a 90 minute no-nonsense set of BtS classics and covers. For the record, the crowd was lousy. One drunk imbecile threw ice from his mixed drink at Doug until another fan shoved him. But it didn’t really matter. That night wasn’t just about the show itself—it was about where we were and what we had done to get there. It was even about the fact that we’d leave the next morning. All that mattered is that we were there. Where it all happened, and—for those 10 minutes when Doug Martsch tore the place down with Cortez the Killer as an encore— where it was still happening. It was about freedom, Summer 2003.
#6 Destroyer at the Avalon Manhattan, NY March 28, 2005
I’ve now seen the enigmatic Daniel Bejar/Destroyer four times, and once with the New Pornographers. One of my top-three bands/songwriters of the past five years, every show teeters on the edge of glory, but there always seems to be a hangup. Most recently he visited my home turf at the Black Cat in support of Trouble In Dreams, too intimate a setting for what turned out to be an out-and-out rock show (i.e., notably bad acoustics). In 2005 I saw him play in Manhattan in support of nothing in particular, where he played a wet-dream setlist, except he did it with a stand-in backup band who did the songs little justice. Perhaps the ideal setting was back in 2004, when Destroyer had first made themselves known to me, and I saw them at Iota, a nondescript bar in Northern Virginia. He was probably selling out larger venues in New York, and meanwhile I was one of about 20 souls who came out to see him that night. [He even used the bathroom right before me!] Unfortunately for me, the Your Blues tour called for a lot of cacophony and squelching, and I left disappointed.‘twas not the case in Spring of 2006, when I made the trip from New Haven to Manhattan for Destroyer’s stand at the Avalon, a church converted into a concert hall. I say “stand” with some irony because they were in fact opening for Magnolia Electric, Co., but you wouldn’t have known it. There was an undeniable ambience that night. Bejar, reunited with Destroyer’s original/primary lineup, had just released the opus Destroyer’s Rubies. As the band campaigned through a well-balanced set of old and new, the room buzzed—people danced, people swayed, people called out, seething energy. Chalk it up to the ghosts of the church, but I vividly remember thinking to myself that for one of the few times in my young musical life, I was witnessing something. Destroyer, the opening band, played for an hour and fifteen minutes and was summoned back for a three-song encore. Before Magnolia Electric Co. even had a chance, I had melted out onto 7th avenue to enjoy the New York night.
Stay tuned for part 2...
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