SHARING THE SHOWS
What the hell was I thinking?
That phrase ran through my mind as I drifted in and out of consciousness on the Amtrak from Newport News back to DC. When Henry emailed me in June about the Greta Van Fleet (GVF) show, I was in “summer mode” and feeling impulsive, so I bought a seat next to him and his friend Franco. The following week, as I was in Tampa drudging through those essays during the Advanced Placement reading, String Cheese Incident was finally playing a reasonable distance from DC, the night before, so Pete, Maggie, and I would make it happen. I had just gotten tenure and thought, Ehhhh, I haven’t taken a single sick day yet! I can get away with it! As I joked with John, “I was such a different person back then.” Translation: back-to-back shows. I had been up since 5 that morning (with a couple of quick power naps), and I had taken the afternoon off from work to recover from the trip. My personal battery was at about 8%; when I mentioned the last 24 hours to Franco, he asked, “How are you even awake?” The answer: I pounded a 12-oz Diet Coke followed by a 20-oz Diet Coke to get my energy level up. Rolf’s nickname for me, Diehard, seems to have some truth to it. I wasn’t too familiar with GVF before Henry suggested it. Drew had told me about their music, but after Henry’s email, I listened to their album, From the Fires, and I was hooked. The Led Zeppelin influence is obvious; in fact, if anybody did a parody of Zeppelin, GVF might fit the bill. I thought of this clip. They are awesome in their own way, and judging by the young crowd, they seem to be Led Zeppelin for Generation Z. And I love the fact that this brand of music transcends generations. I even saw older rock fans there, wearing T-shirts for iconic groups like Guns n’ Roses and Sepultura. Case in point: Henry, much younger than me, was also flying solo to Get the Led Out, the Zeppelin tribute, back in May. In the five years I’ve been writing Not Enough Concerts, I’ve given out this site, and Henry was the first person to respond, and from there, this union was born. During the break between Surf Curse, the opener, and GVF, we discussed our takes on Roger Waters’s performance style and Pink Floyd in general. Rock never dies. I couldn’t identify any of the songs by titles, but the show did rock just the same. Most of the crowd up in the nosebleeds sat, but Henry, Franco, and I moved around, banged our heads, sang along, and eventually, Section 416 followed suit. During the encore, a bunch of red and blue lights lit up among the crowd. It took me a minute to figure out how: people had the lights on their phones turned on. Back in the 1990s, we used cigarette lighters (the first memory that comes to mind was when Holly touched her lighter to the fire coming out of mine when Rusted Root played at SUNY Plattsburgh, our alma mater, back in 1998. How times have changed. The caffeine wore off as I laid down on my couch; Chester wasn’t happy about his Dad being gone for so long, so he sat on me a good while as I drifted off to sleep.
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