Big Bad Concert Rankings: No. 5
It’s finally here! After one full year of breaking down my personal best-of list, we’re finally, mercifully, at the end. Mostly.
I retroactively added Spotify playlists for each article, and this one is no different. But to get the ultimate feel, I added way more songs than the others. In fact, for each of the Top 5, I am adding the complete concert setlist for the very same show I’m discussing.
At the end, I’ll compile all the best tracks I heard while at the shows, not my favorite songs of their all-time, although there is certainly some overlap.
My list started with an Honorable Mentions post (linked above) that details the hopes I had for this breakdown. Well, the list kept growing until I decided to make it exhaustive of every show I have ever seen.
That’s why I start it at 213 and not some nice round number. I have seen more than 213 shows, however.
The number is more like 225 to 250, including nights of live music and comedy, which I don’t include. Maybe that’s the next list.
No, I already know what the next list is going to be. I may even start it after this one publishes. It’s getting more difficult to write about shows knowing the next one is that much farther away because of the virus. Before everything shut down, I bought so many tickets to things.
I had tickets in hand for Wallows, Nada Surf, Barns Courtney, Cold War Kids, Dropkick Murphys/Rancid, Brother Ali, Young M.A, Royal Blood, Silversun Pickups, Josh Ritter, and a whole festival in Miami featuring The Strokes, Robyn and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Dermot Kennedy, Smashing Pumpkins, Kaleo (176), Stephen Marley, and Todd Rundgren were all set to play at 20 Monroe Live. My aunt got tickets to Blink-182 during Summerfest, and I was seriously contemplating Guns N Roses, The 1975, and Khalid purchases. It was shaping up to be a great year.
And it ended with Killswitch Engage which landed at No. 173. In fact, I was really hoping 2020 would be on parallel with the stellar 2019 lineup, yet only GZA and Grace Potter broke into the Top 50.
What the immediate future can’t replicate, I will try to conjure with the following memories of the best of the best.
5. The War on Drugs
I took a wild road trip through the Midwest in 2018. Detroit was my first stop, but little did I know, it would be one of the most flawless concerts I have ever seen, or will see again. That same road trip featured shows from Janelle Monae (13), Arcade Fire (11), and Phantogram (66) in Milwaukee, a White Sox game in Chicago after unsuccessfully trying to meet two friends and then randomly meeting one at the Game, a quick drive to Ohio to see Weezer and Pixies (35), all before meeting up with the rest of my family in Pittsburgh to get our tailgate on for the Brewers/Pirates game.
The Brewers got swept in that series but eventually made the NLCS and our third Spaniard caught a tee shirt. Wonderful trip, but let’s get back to the beginning.
Not Detroit. A little bit farther than that. When I first heard The War on Drugs.
In high school I read a book called As Simple As Snow and I loved it. The author credits singer Damien Jurado with several inspirations and meditations that helped him write the book. His songs do have a melancholic feel that was very intriguing, maybe more so than the book. This was in 2005. For a few years and several MySpace and Limewire song downloads, I was pretty full on Jurado.
The melancholic aura has a time and place, but needs to be undercut with a certain energy otherwise everything starts to be seen with grey-tinted glasses.
After Limewire ended, I searched for other music platforms — Sirius XM was big as an upperclassman, while Grooveshark was a major player when I worked for MLive — but I always come back to YouTube. Before the annoying advent of the five-second ads, once you hit autoplay, it was smooth sailing to a litany of musical avenues.
Because I was heavily into Jurado’s music, the label, Secretly Canadian, would often pop up. At the time, say 2011 to 2013, Secretly Canadian had a great lineup. Major Lazer, Yeasayer, Jason Molina, and Richard Swift all caught my attention. After many bouts with that channel, Secretly Canadian’s sister label, Jagjaguwar, was also putting out insanely good albums that were crossing over into my playlists.
Bon Iver (30), Foxygen, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Dinosaur Jr, and Gayngs/Volcano Choir supergroups were all heavily influencing my CD buys based on that one channel subscription.
And a year later The War on Drugs released their album ‘Lost in the Dream’ and I didn’t know it existed. I don’t know if it was because the algorithm was faulty or I just wasn’t listening that intently in 2014, but I still didn’t have The War On Drugs on my radar until a year later, when I got laid off.
So, you have me laid off, along with over 60 others, from a job you absolutely loved doing, and there’s this need to go back to the comforts of music that get you through tougher times. Except I wasn’t an emo kid. I didn’t discover Taking Back Sunday until much later than some of my middle and high school friends, and that was about the only ‘scene’ band I listened to. No eye shadow or black nail polish. Other than socks and dress pants, I don’t think I had much in the way of black clothing. What I needed was melancholy.
With a hint of rock and roll.
And that’s when Secretly Canadian filtered The War On Drugs’ Red Eyes into my playlist.
That did it. Things weren’t marginally better for months, but I was content that things would be better, eventually. It’s the power of good music.
An Ocean Between the Waves is my favorite song from that album, but not my favorite song performed by the band in Detroit. That honor belongs to Under the Pressure. If you haven’t heard of the band before today, buckle up. The album versions of their songs are phenomenal, and lengthy. I think and average track is six or seven minutes long. The live version is double that.
I really try to avoid grainy shots of cell phone videos, so I’m not going to do that for this entry because a pro-shot version exists. The video below is of Under the Pressure from the Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands two months after their show in Detroit. It’s transformative, and so was the rest of their two-hour show.
