It's not the band I hate, it's their fans

Aside from farming cucumbers, I spent summers in high school playing Mario Kart in a friend's basement. There are certain conversations that took place there I can remember having more than once, and one of them is about the idea that concerts are sometimes better as memories than they were the first time around.

I'm still mulling over the Built to Spill show from last Monday. As per our usual, we ended up on the side of the stage, which is often a disappointing vantage since the soundman has no idea what is going on over there. For Built to Spill it wasn't too bad, the vocals were low in the mix as they always are, but I was their for the guitar work.

The other thing about the side of the stage is the people watching. We ended up sandwiched between some real squids, the type of guys that you see talking on Conan O'Brien for a second or two before the screen freezes and a big red 'Ass' gets stamped on the picture. The first dude came in making some sort of backhanded apology to his friends for being late while bragging about having just gotten to second base, it was 'tight'. Another salvage of note was wearing flip-flops, polo shorts, and some sort of track jacket style long sleeve shirt. He often had a 24oz. Pabst in each hand and one foot off the ground. He did a lot of air drumming and a little talking about his days of playng JV Baseball. I really regret not getting him to pose for a picture.

In general there were a whole lot more backwards baseball hats than I could have ever imagined.

We didn't get any good pictures because our camera doesn't like the dark. The best I could do was with a really slow shudder speed.