Sold my soul to rock and roll.
March 4, 2004
Entertainment, thy name is The Crystal Method.
We had a BLAST at the concert last night. Of course, getting in was no mean trick, as when we stepped out of Ringlers Pub where we’d gone for dinner, there was already a line forming as early as 7:20, and the tickets said 8 PM. As I looked closer about 20 minutes later, it was DOORS OPEN at 8 PM, not starting time. Drat. So we stood around in the cold and watched as more and more people arrived, but we lucked out and were standing maybe 15 people from the front of the line. At 8 PM, they let us in, patted us down, and sent us upstairs.
I’d never been to the Crystal Ballroom, but I need to go there more often. It’s a beautiful place, built in the early 1920’s as a dance studio, and while McMenamins has managed to keep what I assume are the original painting and decorations on the wall, the Crystal Ballroom is famous not for your surroundings, but the floor.
You see, the slogan, if you will, of the Crystal Ballroom has always been “Dance on air!” and it feels almost true. The floor of the Crystal Ballrom has give to it, and as you walk around, jump up and down on it, whatever, it feels like it’s going to give under you and you’re going to fall through because it sinks a bit. The result is a hardwood floor that’s more comfortable to stand or dance on, and that’s why the Crystal Ballroom has been one of the country’s best-known dance studios for the better part of a century. I met people who were into swing dancing and ballroom dancing in Beloit who had heard of the Crystal Ballroom, and I was disappointed that I’d never been there when they told me about the unique floor of the place.
Anyhow, we shuffled in about 8 PM and headed up the two flights of stairs to the ballroom itself. Since we were pretty much some of the first people in there, we were able to walk right up to the barrier in front of the stage and wait for the concert to start. Of course, they needed to allow plenty of time for people to shuffle in, so that was another hour before the opening act came out at 9 PM. He was a DJ, pretty good, but his choice of music wasn’t all that great until he played a cool song I liked at the end of his set. He played for an hour, then after hauling his stuff of the stage, Security actually moved the barrier CLOSER to the stage. So I was now pretty much second row. I could have reached over the person in front of me and touched the stage (or reached out to shake their hands, as it would have been) if I’d desired.
Anyhow, at 10 the boys from TCM came out much to the delight of the audience. As I looked around from time to time, it was interesting seeing the mixture of people who were there at the concert. Most of the guys, I would be willing to bet, were into computers, and before the concert I pointed out the Mac on stage among their audio equipment to my sister, and I heard several other epople notice the same thing as we stood there. Computer guys just have that look, y’know? I’ve done my best to avoid it in years as of late, and most people when they meet me don’t guess that I’m into computers, but nonetheless, we can ferret each other out pretty easily. Techno and computers just go together, so it stands to reason that at a techno concert, there will be a lot of geeks.
Of course, that also meant there were a lot of guys dressed all in black, wearing black leather dusters that they’d probably purchased in about 1999 or 2000 when The Matrix was popular. As Heather pointed out last night, she thinks that most of these guys are still wearing them because they spent so much on them even though they’re not popular anymore. Personally, I think it’s more that they don’t KNOW that they aren’t popular anymore. That became the chiq-geek look a few years ago, but when The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions came out and…how shall I put this…didn’t meet expectations? the trend ended. Is something rally trendy if everyone does it? I don’t know. I’m not much for trends, personally. I’ve wanted a nice leather jacket for a long time, and I’d personally rather have one of the longer ones (one that goes down below your waist, not a full-length duster), but it has nothing to do with trying to look like a movie character.
Anyhow, it was funny seeing the mixture of ages, too. I would be willing to bet that the largest demographic were people in their 20’s, but there were a good mixture of people younger and older than that, too. Seeing the people not old enough to go into the alcohol area was funny, because I always want to go up to them and say “Just when DID you start listening to Crystal Method?” Their first album came out in 1996? 1997 maybe? I purchased it before it went gold, that’s for certain, so at least seven years ago. And then there were the people older than their 20’s. People Heather’s age were fairly common, but there were some women behind me towards the end of the concert who looked like they were about 40, and they were really getting into it. That was funny. I also saw a guy who was definitely in his 40’s, ear plugs and everything, there with who I assume (and hope) was his daughter of about the age of 12 or 13. Guess he didn’t want her to go alone. Either that or he digs TCM, too.
So this was the closest I’ve ever been to the stage at a concert. When Dan, Heather, Sarah, and I drove up to UW Green Bay three years ago to see Collective Soul, we were maybe 20 feet from the stage. Close enough to definitely see them, and even though there was seating we chose to stand up by the stage. This one took the cake, though. We were SO close. And of course, being that close meant other people trying to get up close, too. There were a few people who just made their way up front to hang on the barrier for a better show, but we would always push them back out. It was like I could hear the collective “Excuse me, we were here first!” coming from all of us up there. Mostly it was rude because they’d push their way up and then push someone aside to have their spot. Not literally, of course,, but you know what I mean. There was this guy who REALLY pissed me off towards the end of the concert. I was pretty much standing up against the women next to me, and somehow he managed in the course of about 20 minutes to make his way from behind me, in between myself and the woman next to me, and then opush me over one direction about three feet. I ended up behind him. He was this little guy, about 5′7″ or so (I could actually see all the way over his head when he was standing in front of me, his head came up to my nose), wearing a hat pulled down so tightly that he actually had to tilt his head upwards to see the stage. What a dumbass. I just wanted to pick him up and toss him back where he came from (somewhere in the back, I guess), but I know there are rules against dwarf tossing. It wasn’t that he not only took my space and moved me over so far, but that he did it in such an annoying way by dancing and pushing me over. You’re always going to bump into people in a concert like that, but you don’t keep stepping on people’s feet and knocking into them over and over. IT’s just rude, and everyone knows that. You hit someone harder than a brush, you always turn and look, either to see if they’re all right if you hit them, or give them the glare if they bumped into you. Everyone does it.
Anyhow, what made this guy even dumber in my mind was that after he stole my place was that he stood up there for about 20 minutes, then he turned around and left, going back to the foul pit from whence he came. What the hell was he thinking? “I made it to the front! All right! I can go back now!” It’s not like climbing a mountain, bub. When you make it there, you stay. I was happy to be rid of him, that’s for certain, and when he left the gap where he’d been standing immediately closed, so I guess he’d pushed more than just me out. Everyone wanted to be back where they were before the dancing dwarf came through there.
This time seeing them was much better than the first. Not only was I much closer to the stage (last time was at the Allstate Arena outside Chicago), but they had more music to draw upon. Four years ago they still only had one album, so that meant 11 songs to draw upon that people would recognize. It was a pretty short set, if I remember right. They played about five or six songs off that one album they had at the time, then the next act came out. This time they had three albums to draw upon and were able to play for a full hour and a half. It doesn’t sound like much, but there wasn’t a whole lot of breaking between songs. They’d stop, then start up the next one immediately, so it went pretty quickly.
Playing techno live is no mean trick, either. When you consider that most of their music involves samples, their job on stage is coordinating when the samples play, how often, etc. In that way, none of the songs are ever played the same way, I’d imagine. Several of them they had to haul out analog keyboards to actually PLAY some of the music that required notes to be played and not just samples and backbeats. Either that, or because they kept breaking keyboards. When I saw Collective Soul, the lead singer had a funny habit of picking up the microphone stand and tossing it into the air and catching it again. I mean WAY up in the air, so high sometimes I’d think he wasn’t going to catch it. Sort of the same way with keyboards last night, in terms of level of abuse. One of them had a funny habit of leaning the keyboard and its stand so far forward that it looked like it was going to fall over into the audience, and a couple of times he’d let it go and it would start to fall and he’d catch it with one finger. That keyboard got a lot of abuse. I think their set length was defined more on longevity of the keyboards that night rather than time or level of exhaustion, to be honest.
Since few of you actually know their music specifically, I won’t bother talking about which songs they played. I’m almost certain that all of my readers have heard them at one point in time, even if you didn’t know it. The TV show “Third Watch” on NBC uses the song Keep Hope Alive by The Crystal Method as its theme song. The song “Name of the Game” was featured in its entirety in one of the climactic scenes of the movie Blade II. Busy Child was used in the movie Lost in Space as well as used along with High Roller in various commercials. So I’m sure that you’ve probably heard them at some point, whether you know it or not. Good stuff.
So that’s about all I have for now. My throat’s a little scratchy today both from the smoke (in the non-smoking place) and from doing a bit of yelling, but it was so worth it. When are they coming back…?
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