Best I Totally Saw Radiohead

Like everyone else on the internet, I went to Radiohead in Newark on Friday night.  By extreme Ticketmaster luck I wound up with a pair of GA floor tickets.  Do you see that hand being raised?  Way off in the distance, just left of the middle of the stage, between the light thing and some speakers?  That's my hand, that's where I was.  This picture was taken from in front of the sound board.

There's Alyssa, that's who I watched the show with, although the venue was full of friends of ours.  I'm still finding out on Facebook that more people that I know were there.

Look at all those guitars!  Look at that Mexican flag!

Caribou opened.  I like Caribou and I liked seeing them live.  I imagine it's a pretty intimidating task opening for Radiohead, I hope lots of people went home and learned more about Caribou that night.  What am I saying.  Radiohead fans are like the most musically-informed fans there are.  Most of the people in the house that night probably knew the names of every member of Caribou.

Post-opener, the stadium was filling up.  Listen, I'm going to spare you an essay, but let me say a few things: This was my first Radiohead concert.  No really, I'd never seen them before.  I'd tried to, not extremely hard, a few times before.  I'm just not a gigantic Radiohead fan, in fact, let me be blunt: I didn't care for them until Amnesiac came out . . . there was this day where I was at the Untitled in LA they were blasting the Pyramid Song (which I recognized as MTV2 was playing it every third video that summer) at full volume and something clicked, I finally got it.  I got into Amnesiac, then used it as a launching pad into their back catalogue and was finally ready to accept the Radiohead way.  Still, all that said, I imagine I was only about 65% as big a fan as 97% of the people around me.  While I was at a concert, a lot of these people were at church.  Radiohead does inspire a certain intensity in it's fandom, they're a rock nerd's dreamband, and during the concert there were definitely a lot of "hmmm, they haven't played this song since their June 14th 2007 show in Barcelona" reactions going on around me.

THAT SAID, it was a rad concert.  I liked it a lot.  I wish it had been louder, I wish it had been longer (even though they played 23 songs in around 2 hours—I could have done another 2 hours, easy).  Radiohead has a lot of these jittery sounding songs, right?  And those I can't always tell apart, but when they played some of their "hits" I was like "Wooo!  YEAH!  Radio-heAD!"  

Just ask the people around me.

From here on out it's mostly going to be pictures of how crazy the lights were.  Do I remember what songs played with each lighting arrangement?  Nope.

But here's the setlist:

Bloom

15 Step

Bodysnatchers

Kid A

Staircase

The Daily Mail

Myxomatosis

The Gloaming

Separator

Pyramid Song

Morning Mr. Magpie

Identikit

Lotus Flower

The National Anthem

Feral

Idioteque (something went wrong during the song, I'm not sure what, and Thom left the stage in frustration.  Then we had to clap and clap and cheer his self-esteem back into shape and they continued the concert)

How to Disappear Completely

Supercollider

Go to Sleep

Paranoid Android

Encore:

Give Up the Ghost

Reckoner

The One I Love (you know, the REM song?)

Everything In Its Right Place

Okay, now for real, Pictures and no more talking:

The concert was about halfway through before I realized: Wait.  They have two drumsets?  Somehow I'd been looking at it but it didn't register with my brain.  But this isn't a picture from the middle of the concert.  This is a picture from when they finished the set.

The crowd waits for the encore.

Encore!!

Thom dances goodnight.

And then the show was done, but they were nice enough to leave the lights on.

Turns out Cole, Chateau, Cassandra, and Jaime (my neighbor!) were on the floor real close to us the whole time.

Number One Concert Champs! Wish you were there, Casey.

One thing I was not expecting was all the Grateful Dead-style solo improvisational jam dancing happening in the audience.  Here I am caught in the act of demonstrating what I mean by Grateful Dead-style solo improvisational jam dancing.  (Not Thom Yorke dancing,  [that link isn't to Lotus Flower, if that's what you were expecting] which I thought was kind of fresh)

Oh no!  Lonely popcorn, do you have anyone to take care of you?!

You know who was pretty popular?  The sound guy in the sport coat.

Talking concert talk.

Made our way out of the music part of the stadium . . . 

. . . into that part of the stadium where everyone is buying t-shirts.

But NOT Mrs. Fields cookies.

Exit, for real.  

When we got to Newark Penn Station the crowd waiting for an NJ Transit train was unbelievable.

But over at the PATH train everyone was packt like sardines in a crushed tin box, if you know what I mean.

Oh hey!  Kirk and Chris were at the show too?!  AND they got seats on the train?  How much did Ticketmaster charge them for those?

Eventually, miraculously, we found a place on board and then everyone was in their right place, right, Chateau?

Arriving in Manhattan, the skies had burst and the rain was falling real hard.  Everyone from the train made a run for it and I lost the group.  Probably everyone else lost the group too, too, but when you're lost, you don't know if anyone else is.

And that's the story of when I saw Radiohead on Friday night.  If I were going to rewrite this post, I'd have more puns and more videos.  Cuz I took some videos and only started punning here at the very end.