Bob, Neil, Wilco, and Nine Inch Nails - My return to the big city

Always a good idea to hit some shows after a long road trip. It certainly helped ease the pain of acclimating back into the big city. Six weeks out west, L.A., Boise, Vancouver, Eugene, Seattle, and Portland were all good to me and equally good to my wardrobe. It was a vintage shopping extravaganza!

First show back, Wilco at the now defunct McCarren Pool in Williamsburg. Perhaps it should be defunct, as it took approximately 40 minutes to get one beer! Show was amazing, as this line up really has a lot of energy and Nils Cline just wails something fierce on guitar. I remember seeing them with the Flaming Lips at the Garden on New Year's Eve a few years back and they almost put everyone to sleep, a hard thing to do on such a festive evening. Outta Mind (Outta Sight) was the showstopper for me and the hipster crowd was just loving every minute of it. Tweedy and company are injecting a lot of energy into their older tunes and it is working like a motherfucker.

Next up, Neil Diamond at the Garden. We were well prepped as we luckily found the one unhip bar in Williamsburg that had karaoke on our way back from the Wilco show and belted out Cracklin' Rosie to gear up for the big show. I had never seen the man before live and it was pretty damn surreal. Despite the fact that he claims he is going to keep playing until he hits the grave, Neil treated the show like a retrospective and milked the applause for infinite minutes after each song. It was as if he was receiving a lifetime acheivement Grammy or Oscar. Quite annoying at best. His back up singer mauled "You Don't Bring Me Flowers." I've heard better karaoke versions for Pete's sake. Of course, there were some great moments. Hell Yeah off his last record, 12 Songs, was quite powerful. I like that record a lot and am always inspired by older artists who are still churning out quality material(Insert Bob, Nick Cave, and Mudcrutch here). Watching the older suburbanites dance around was quite entertaining. He does do it to the ladies.

So, speaking of Bob, he was incredibly underwhelming at the Borgata in Atlantic City. First off, the venue feels like a ballroom/conference center and the sound was quite lame and tinny. On top of that it sounded like the King was taking the night off, with this sort of lazy staccato vocal approach that he used on every single tune. Jeez! I've seen him really kill twice in the past year or two, but this show simply paled in comparison.

Finally, Nine Inch Nails at the Izod Center. That was pretty weird as it used to be the Brendan Byrne Arena( I was always impressed how a lame guvnor from NJ got his name on an arena) and then was the Continental Arena and is now the Izod Center. Like a giant billboard/advertisement for Izod, complete with disturbingly vanilla loudspeaker announcements welcoming you to the venue. On the web site, Izod doesn't even mention that it was ever named anything else, taking responsibility for the NJ Devils various Stanley Cups and rewriting history corporatocracy style. The end is near I tell you! Certainly not the same as those days when I played indoor soccer in the home of the MISL's NJ Rockets! We were styling in a suite though, as my buddy knew the promoter. I am not a Nine Inch Nails fan nor have I ever been, but I just wanted to check it out for curiosity. The light show was absolutely worth the trek out there. I have never seen anything like it. Incredibly creative and mesmerizing. Really next level shit that must be seen to be believed. And there were a few tunes that they were playing like 21st Century dark boogie rock, which I really enjoyed. Wish was one of 'em.

So if I could post three tunes for that week of shows, they would be Wish, Outta Mind (Outta Sight), and Hell Yeah. A strange and interesting combo, for a strange week back in the city of cities.

This version of Wish was not anywhere near as 70's boogie as the one I witnessed. A total Foghat, Clash, dark, grooving, anthemic freak out. For some reason, the embed is disabled on youtube, but here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRyshAQ1r80