Well, today was just beautiful. Impossibly so. Sunny, blue skies and temperatures settling into the 70s. There was no ambitious mercury in the thermometer. No overbearing sun. Just this …
… and the promise of another day or two of it afterward.
It was this beautiful. I couldn’t decide what to do with the day. Which was weird.
Finally, I settled on sitting outside and reading. It was a good choice.
It was such a good idea, I did it again, sitting outside this evening, listening to the symphonic crickets, flipping through pages of a book, asking myself why I don’t do this all of the time.
I should do this all of the time. Or at least more.
We return to the Re-Listening project. Regular readers know I’ve been listening to my old CDs in the car, and in the order of their acquisition. We’re in, let’s say it is 2006, listening to a 1998 record that I picked up at a library sale. It’s everyone’s 1990s friend, the Dave Matthews Band.
“Before These Crowded Streets” was their third album. Béla Fleck appears. Alanis Morissette is on it. And so is the virtuoso Tim Reynolds — this being just before he joined the band. It was another successful album, even as they were beginning to change some things up. The instrumentation gets more exotic, the time signature experiments are underway, and the themes got a bit more mature, a bit more worldly.
This was the record that pushed the Titanic soundtrack from atop the Billboard charts. Three singles became hits, the record went platinum four times in the United States.
Some of the best parts of this record are the interludes, usually outtakes, between the songs. And the biggest memory I have about this record is actually from a live show. They play the amphitheater in 1998, supporting this record and the version they did of “Don’t Drink the Water” was just about the most intense thing I could imagine seeing at a yuppie party. Here’s a version from that tour, about three weeks earlier than the show I saw. This is sedate in comparison to my recollection.
They’re still at it, of course. Ten studio albums and something like 17 live albums later. Touring machines, who even knows how many millions of concert tickets they’ve sold at this point. But I know some people who have purchased a lot of them. My god-sisters-in-law (just go with it) and their large entourage see them a lot, probably four or five different dates a year. And they invited us to one of them. It was my third or fifth time seeing them, and my first in 20-plus years.
I don’t think I even mentioned the concert here. We left the show early for some reason that was never explained. The group gathered and walked out and, I said Who doesn’t stay for the false finish, let alone the encore? And the answer was, the crowd of people we were with, for some reason.
Though I blame DMB as the sole culprit in the outlandish ticket prices we’ve seen explode in the last several decades,
they still create a happy crowd. And their tour continues right now. They’re playing the northwest, before heading back east in late September for some festivals, and then a few fall dates in Mexico.
We’ll go north, to Canada, when next we return to the Re-Listening project.
But what will we get into here tomorrow? Be s ure to stop by and find out!
