I used to go to Seattle fairly often. The girls and I would go for shows, or for shopping. I’d head down with or without Vancouver Radiohead kids to meet up with Seattle Radiohead kids for shows. Lately, I haven’t been going south nearly as often. But the fact that I’ve made more acquaintance in Seattle and my friend Peter from Denmark moved there, and buying concert tickets for a few shows down there, I got my NEXUS pass so I could skip lineups and move a little more freely.
The pass got me through YVR in record time when I came home from Europe a few weeks ago, and yesterday, it enabled me to bypass a good two hours’ worth of lineup on the way to Seattle. So holy crap! I recommend it. If my Main Distractor ever gets his permanent whatnot or employment status squared away here, we are going to have to get him registered pronto. Or plan on crossing over at 4 am or something. Guess which one I prefer :p
So I headed down, made it in just under 3 hours, and met up with Pete and a friend of his from work. We picked up Pete’s gorgeous and really cool wife, whom I hadn’t met before (long overdue!) and went for a v nice supper at The Pink Door. That was delicious. Then we walked over to Key Arena, stood in a couple of lines, and missed most of Crystal Castles, who evidently had started before the ticket showtime of 8:00 pm, as their set was done at 8:15. Whoops! that was a pisser (or a pity, as Pete would say) as we both were interested in seeing them.
The Nine Inch Nails show (the floor tickets were originally intended as a birthday present for my Main Distractor but, alas, Canadian bureaucracy decided that it was not to be) was better than I expected. Not that I expected crap or anything, but while the music was about what I thought I was going to get (a little more new and less old than I would have preferred in a perfect world, but hey), the light show was phenomenal (I keep using the same adjective, so I guess it’s the right one). Radiohead put on a pretty sweet LED show on this tour, don’t get me wrong, but Trent’s light guy has better drugs than Radiohead’s guy or something, because it was on another level entirely. Here’s The Frail and Closer which doesn’t show the stuff I’m raving about, but anyway. I’ll keep looking on Youtube in the next weeks to see some of the songs later in the set, because it was really really cool. I thought the bass player, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, was stunningly good. It was a good show and if my dear sweet boy couldn’t go, I’m glad that I got to go with Pete as he really enjoyed himself too.
Made it home in three hours, including stopping for gas and stopping to read some Nexus paperwork and take out my contacts, and half of Portishead’s Third while waiting for the border.
