Got some excellent seats (yes, this is a seating venue). Makes for a pretty motionless crowd although there were some people dancing on the sides.
The only downside to the evening – instead of a traditional “opener”, a few episodes of Squidbillies played before the show. My complaint: I’ve got the DVD’s, why would I want to watch entire episodes? First it was novel, then it was like, “C’mon, let’s get it started….”
Unknown puttin’ some smackdown on the crowd while uber-fan is crouched at the front of the stage.
Saaaay….you’re mighty fancy. What’s a purty little thing like you doin’ in a place like this?
So I’ve managed to maintain my composure and not go blindly seeking this his one guitar (and the case, c’mon, how can you resist a leopard print case?) mainly because I have so many damn guitars already. The other fact is that I don’t use any one of them enough to justify another purchase (and really, isn’t that what I said about the last one?). I’m so lame that I almost didn’t even realize that could upgrade the pickup in one of the SG’s to a P90 and get pretty close without having to get another guitar. Although…..I really like the white…..
One of the realities that one has to face eventually is that there isn’t a piece of gear that’s going to make you play any better than just straight old-fashioned woodshedding. In the case of the above guitar, I’m not even sure how it plays. The RI series that I’ve played lately have had baseball bat necks (which I hate). The one above is a sig model, the Billie Joe Armstrong and it’s supposed to have a “play fast” neck (like my 61 SG RI). Which of course I find intriguing.
Here’s the part where I admit that I’ve got kind of a man-crush on Billie Joe. My daughter (should she ever read this) will give the obligatory “ewwwwwwww”. It sounds really stupid, but I’m a huge fan of his songwriting. Back in the 90’s, I listened to Dookie (like everybody else) and gradually fell off in interest as some of the later albums kind of kept going. At the AstroArena, we watched Billie Joe slobber all over the stage – good show. It wasn’t until American Idiot came out that I became a reborn fan.
Here’s the thing that REALLY freaks my daughter out. All the guys in Green Day are pretty much the same age as me. It’s hard to believe, but while they were singing about being burned out on a couch, I was sitting there burned out on a couch watching them sing about it. Not that I think, “Hey that could have been me!” because obviously I wasn’t driven enough to really push myself with my guitar playing. It’s just easy to relate to an artist that’s almost the exact same age as you. Oops. So Tre Cool has the same birthday as me. I knew I was forgetting something. But they were all born the same year as me.
