Drowning Nor Waving

So yesterday afternoon, after logging my words, Dr. My Roommate and I made the journey to the hinterlands Downsview Park to see this megaconcert object. We have had the tickets for a very long time and were very much looking forward to it: It was my first time seeing both Weezer and the Hip, so.

I am trying to figure out why this was not a mindblowing excess of awesomeness packed into one day.

It started off just fine: Everyone going northbound on the subway was clearly going to the show, and people started cheering and goofing around on the subway train, and then singing along to Weezer songs on the shuttlebus running from the station to the venue. Nice mood! All good!

Hey Rosetta! were already playing when we got there (we missed Buck 65), so we grabbed some overpriced hot dogs and some criminally overpriced bottles of water ($5? Really? Even by festival concert price-gouging standards that's a little much) and got ourselves into the crowd to finish off the last of the set and camp a good spot for Broken Social Scene.

What I heard of the Hey Rosetta! set was really solid. They played "Welcome", obviously (that's the radio single) and a few other things I'm actually familiar with but couldn't name and couldn't say from where, and I probably ought to get around to getting their stuff sometime soon.

Not a lot of people were up for them, so we made it inside six or seven rows of the stage fence for the BSS set and hunkered down to wait the 40 min until they came on. At which point, I turned around and saw that jonofthewired and sandwichboy and their friend Dave were...well, pretty much right behind us. Since there were only 20,000 people in the place, and all. Thus was the afternoon's adventuring party assembled.

BSS played a different kind of set than I'm used to hearing from them, but then again, usually when I'm hearing them, it's their show and their crowd, and they can go as long and as obscure as they please. This was a show the Hip organized, and I think the setlist they picked was my first clue that it was not the sort of crowd I'm at home with: very much the hits (Fire Eye'd Boy, Forced to Love, Texico Bitches, 7/4 Shoreline, Cause = Time, KC Accidental) and a few covers -- Beastie Boys and Modest Mouse. Opening the set with Lover's Spit was nice. They ended with Meet Me in the Basement, but they always do that; I don't think I can hear that song anymore without getting a visceral multilayered flashback of sun-drunk and punch-drunk and giddy and every show they do.


Terrible, blurry stage shot of BSS

After the set the guys wanted to get some food, and I wanted to sit down for a bit -- it was hot and close and several kinds of smoky, and that sort of goes right to my knees and makes me wobble -- so the Roommate and I parked ourselves on a patch of grass and waited for them. They didn't make it back before the Weezer set started, so we went in without them and, well, the crowd had kinda changed.

I don't know if it was more/different people showing up, the tipping point of drinking bad beer (they had Bud. It was $8 a cup. This is a terrible thing to do to anyone) or just serious cultural shift in fan mentality? But. You can kind of feel the mood of a crowd, or a room, and this was not cheerful and grinny and pleasant. It was don't-stand-in-front-of-me, bleary, and kind of mean.


I think this is Weezer, but honestly can't tell.

The set was fine; again, kind of a greatest hits thing. I remember hearing the Sweater Song, Pork and Beans, My Name is Jonas, Say it Ain't So, Troublemaker, Perfect Situation, Island in the Sun, Dope Nose, Hash Pipe, I Want You To. They closed with Buddy Holly. Interestingly enough, they played that cover of Paranoid Android kafkonia gave me just a few days ago. And there was a lot of singing along, both impromptu and of the "Okay, you sing this chorus" type, so that was all good.

Thing is, I don't like being in a crowd of thousands of people and looking over my shoulder. I didn't like the feel in there. I have said here and there that live music is the closest I get to what some people get out of organized religion, and I guess this is what it feels like to spend the afternoon in someone else's church.

Dr. My Roommate left after the Weezer set: she wasn't feeling well, there was a little too much fuckery going on, she's not a Hip fan, and she had to housesit for someone that night anyways. So I stuck it out with the guys in our little press of space until they came on. And it stayed kind of rowdy and fratboyish, and one too many crowdsurfers landed on someone's back, and then one landed on my glasses and, while I caught them, that's it, we were out of there. We watched the rest of the set from off to the side, at a decent distance, with ice cream. And let me tell you, it restores your faith a little to have friends who will quietly interpose themselves between the drunk staggering person in front of you and where you're sitting on the grass, especially when you are feeling like you're surrounded by asshats who are also wasted on bad beer.

Stuff played? Honestly (and kind of depressingly) I wasn't paying huge attention at that point. They opened with Grace, Too, and definitely did Love is a First, Blow at High Dough, At the Hundredth Meridian, Fully Completely, Courage, Bobcaygeon, Poets, Ahead by a Century, Little Bones. There was It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken, which was surprising. There was Fiddler's Green (!), which was even more surprising, since I was under the impression that they do not, not, not ever play that live and haven't for literal years. Although I just found two YouTube hits of it live, so I guess they've started again. The encore was...The Kids Don't Get It, Wheat Kings, and Music at Work.

The best thing in the set, bar none, was a version of New Orleans is Sinking that had Nautical Disaster nested inside it like matryoshka dolls. And oddly enough, that's the one place where I connected with the space, the crowd, the band: standing up on achy legs to sing along, in a sort of spit-through-my-teeth vicious way, the lyrics to the thing that got me into this band in the first place; one of the very first songs ever to haunt me like a shadow in the way that sends me to the keyboard half-blind now to write, but back when I was 12, just swirled around my shoulders in a way I didn't know how to process or deal with.

Here is the official video of it. It didn't make the haunting any less:

It's a poem. It still is. And it still makes me shudder a little, deep down, with sheer intensity and the cold ocean and death, like nothing else ever.

That was worth the price of admission.

Once they left the stage there was this, which we didn't expect, since officially the Downsview Park Canada Day fireworks had been cancelled for the show:



And that seemed to bring everyone kind of down to earth again, and the crowd moved out, and we skipped the whole crowded and stupid shuttle bus arrangement and just walked the 15-minute trip to the subway station -- although it took longer, since we were all tired and totally going the long way -- and, thankfully, Dave's car. And one quick trip back downtown and one helping of late-night post-show dim sum later, that was that.

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I am left, this afternoon, trying to figure out what made that crowd so damned mean, or if festival crowds were always this way, and I was just young enough when I was regularly doing festivals that I didn't notice/got the special treatment for being a cute little 19-year-old girl. I like all those bands and have for years, but that was so decidedly and utterly not my scene it couldn't get any less my scene. Yeah, I've been to outdoor shows where ridiculous amounts of drugs were going around -- see, Island Concert, last summer -- and that was not a substance abuse sort of result. People can be, and are, cheerful and friendly and fabulous at a show during and after serious drinking and pot-smoking (see: Island Concert).

It would easy to say that there were probably a ton of people there not from Toronto (true), or that it's the accessibility of the venue to said people versus something more downtown (possible), or that it was partially the holiday (nationalism, always good for making one a little bit of a jerk) or the fact that it's Pride Weekend (is this where all the jerks went to get away from The Gay?) or a quirk of the fanbase for either Weezer or the Hip, but. I can't honestly say. Too many variables, and too little objectivity on my part. I'm aware that where I live -- in terms of not just city but neighbourhood -- I live in a bubble, and y'know? I can't always say I dislike that.

If I ever see another drunk, skinny, sunburned, scowling, buzzcutted white dude with his shirt off and his hands all over the ass of his stumbling girlfriend, it'll be too soon.

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That being said, and hopefully this isn't famous last words of some sort, for tonight mon ami Danny and I are seeing Coheed & Cambria and Soundgarden at the Amphitheatre. I'm tired, but it's Chris Cornell, and that's something you don't say no to. Let us hope for less back-patting thick-necked laddishness there.