mclii

I wasn't feeling too well before we left for Chicago. I was honestly debating whether or not I should attempt the trip down. I told Russell about it, and he lined up a back-up for his ticket. I started feeling better, and I thought, yeah, this is it. I can do this.

We went down... we drove around towards Reckless Records, and now I totally understand xkachoojix points about parking in Chicago. Crazy. We got into Reckless, and I was kind of lost... I haven't been to a record store in what feels like forever. I was immediately overwhelmed. I didn't know what to look for, or where to start. I saw the new Shipping News that I was kind of interested in, and the new Low that I was interested in, but I decided to keep with the Codeine themed day from the morning and pick up two super cheap, used Rex discs. Very good choice in my opinion, 2 discs for $13. Good. We stopped down the street at Chipotle, and ate some stuff. And it seemed to all agree with me.

We went to the Metro, and again, another parking search was on. We stopped looking when we realized most of the stuff down there was permit only parking. We found a place that had parking for $6 and settled on that. We walked to the Metro, and immediately, I had to check my bag. D'oh! That'll teach me for bringing that with me, eh? I had my camera in there, and my two Rex CDs, so I took the camera out, checked the bag, and went on through. Red Nails was playing, and I couldn't really get into them too much. Someone in the audience said, "You suck!" and the singer said, "Yeah, but you know what? We suck professionally... it's not too bad of a gig."

After Red Nails were through, I decided to stopp by the soundboard to see if it was ok to film the show, and had described that the Touch and Go website was looking for any sort of footage that they could find. They didn't seem to know what the policy was for the Metro, so they said, "I don't know." I resumed with my normal plan of filming, and went from there. Besides, plenty of tapers were there for the show, and there were a backline of about 10 stereo microphones that I could see. Bah, what can it hurt, right?

Slint didn't have much to setup. They tuned their instruments, dimmed the house lights, and started with a very quiet instrumental in "For Dinner" and I was armed with my DV camera, filming it in kind of a bootleg art type way. How else could you do it when you're all the way to the back of the club? Slint sounded great, and they had really simple lighting cues to emphasize things. One thing that was blatantly obvious about the show, was the pace. It was deliberately slow. It takes real guts to do that, in my opinion. The space between songs was about, on average, 2 minutes. They tuned, and really treated each song separately, with different instrumentation, and the entire place was quiet. I felt like were watching an orchestra.

I decided to pay less attention to filming and more to the show. About half way through their set, a Metro employee came up to me, during a really cool song that I think I've heard before, but wasn't sure. It may be something new that they haven't played before. (upon further review, I have heard it before from a live recording from '89 in chicago) Anyway, the employee said, "Can I see your media pass?"

I said that I didn't have one, and wasn't aware that I needed one. I mean, really, this is a totally independent show, no major label $$$ here, you know? I said that I had read on a Touch and Go website that they were looking for footage from any of the shows, and was filming it for that purpose. The response I got, was, "Can I get your batteries and the tape in the camera?"

I replied, "Can I just give you the tape? I don't have any others."

She said, "Yeah, that's fine," and I gave her the tape.

She then said, "If you want to stop in the lobby after the show, I can see if I can give the tape back to you."

So that was that. Russell looked at me and smiled, and I just replied "I guess not! "

I socked my camera away, and watched the rest of the show. What I started to notice though, started to really kind of grate on me. The sound started taking a turn for the worse (at least where I was standing). The bass and the kick drum started to make standing waves in the room, and were really boomy and overbearing. I HAD to take my earplugs out to hear any sort of definition in anything. I started noticing other degradations in the sound, tom mics clipping, vocal mics losing their presence. It was kind of weird, but still enjoyable.

These past two shows I've seen have been both independent artists, presented in a very professional way. Nice light shows, really good sound, and impeccable playing. Very, very good.

Highlights for me in this show were: The unknown song, Nosferatu Man (drumming), Breadcrumb Trail (very careful guitar harmonics almost the entire song), Ron (is the song really that short?), Charlotte (drumming, guitar heaviness and harmonics, sheer slowness of the song), Pat (guitar detuning, noticing that the song is carved into two very distinctive songs, and amazing guitar playing by David Pajo).

After the show, I stopped in the lobby and couldn't get my tape back. She said, "Yeah, there was to be no filming of the show, so I gave the tape to my Production Manager."

I replied, "Can you please make sure that the tape gets destroyed? I wouldn't want that footage getting out."

She replied, "Yes."

"Thank you." I'm glad they didn't take my battery, as that's no cheap thing.

My thinking on this, was that I wouldn't want someone to just use a partial show, and/or benefit financially from the footage that was on there. I know I didn't want that, so I would hope that it never would get to that point. So, whoever has that tape, has a half of Slint's set, a little bit of an Autolux set (probably), and some footage of our cat playing in the house (and maybe some footage from a friend's wedding). So, if you're into bittorrent, or just scouring the internet and you see some Slint live footage from the Metro, 3-25-05, or, if you see a long-haired cat running rampant around the house, let me know. It's probably my footage.

As much as I like toting my camera around, and filming other bands playing, I think I'm done with it. Unless I'm asked to do it, I'm no longer going to do it. So there.