Radiohead @ Red Rocks
Comments(2) What a night!
The heat was bearing down on us as we walked around Golden, running a few errands before we headed up to the concert. I stopped by the old liquor store to pick up a couple cases of Fat Tire to traffic back to Minnesota, where they will stay in storage while I carefully meter their consumption. We stopped by Safeway and picked up 3 liters of water to bring along with us. Our colorado trip so far had consisted mostly of drinking water, and from the looks of it, we were going to need a lot. As we started up the car, I was thinking that many of the same people were working at safeway. In fact, the same guy was working at the liquor store as well. Some things change and some things stay the same…
After Safeway we stopped at the little deli off campus and found it closed for the day, so we headed south and stopped a new (since I’ve been there) deli next to Buy Back Games (the place where I waited in fear and anticipation the night of the PS2 lauch. Anticipation because they were drawing names for the privliege of buying one of the 15 PS2s they had. Fear cause I didn’t have $299 plus tax to actually buy it. The geek humiliation would have killed me.)
Anyways, the deli was called Penguini’s, and after making fun of our strange requests for no mayo or cheese, the deli-woman went to work. I promptly schooled Sonja in 3 games of Super Bust-a-Move on the arcade machine they had. As game three was finishing up, our sandwiches were ready and we were off.
About this time, Sonja was craving something icy, so we swung into the 7-11 in South Golden, and almost got hit in the round-about (nothing changes). Some marketing wizard at 7-11 corporate decided to abandon all tradition and logic and replace the classic blue and red flavors with Coke, Mountain Dew, and Banana flavored slurpees. We passed on the young whipper-snapper drinks and picked up some cold Gatorade, (the new “Ice” Gatorade).
My excitement level was building steadily, so we drove over to red rocks, and parked in about one hundred different “wrong” ways about 14 inches from a beat up RV, and a Nissan Pathfinder cozied up on the passenger side soon after we had stopped. Some day I will write an extensive entry on the correct way to park, but suffice to say, this was wrong. How ironic that I was worried about my car while going to see a band that about as anti-consumerism as they come (if that’s an -ism… well, you know what I mean)
Water and sandwiches in hand, we began the hike from parking lot to the stairs where we would chill for the next couple hours. Don’t laugh, it is a hike from the parking lot and I was out of breath when we sat down on the stairs behind some some outdoorsy-neo-hippies (guy reading the bible and making notes in his notebook, and girl reading 100 Great Hikes, or something), and in front of some old guys with Widespread Panic T-shirts. We’ll call them the middle aged liberals, that drank “brew-skis” and read the Onion.
And so begins my rampant sterotyping and labeling of the various parts of the Radiohead crowd…
(part two below)
After sitting and talking for a while, eating our sandwiches and drinking up some water, we heard some cheering from above. Towards the top of the line, people began to stand, and like a fast moving wave, the entire crowd was soon standing, ready to be let in.
It was all a tease, however. We moved up three stairs, then four more, then maybe two. The next thirty minutes we slowly stuttered up the steps in anticipation. But soon enough, we were there. And in. And we made a medium paced jog up the stairs of Red Rocks to settle in to some beautiful seats. Row 43. Dead in the middle.
(continued….)
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