pivoboy

Quite a good show - better in spirit I think than the last London club gig I saw at Hammersmith four years ago - full of good humour and energy. Would have liked a few more new songs but we did get a handful off Summerteeth and even Forget the Flowers. The club setting, not a constant venue for a lot of Londoners as opposed to Hammersmith or Shepard's Bush places, was quite good with a raised level in the back so those down front didn't block views for everyone. The sound was a tad too loud in that it drowned out nuances or muddied up finer points of songs like Jesus Etc. But when they got int

The conundrum of success vs ``artistic integrity'' vs our own fandom and the ``they're all MINE'' has been an ongoing saga for me and countless other fans. I remember loving the Blasters and wanting to proselytize for them everywhere in the hopes more people would like them and thus, they would have the fame their rightly deserved. But really, would anyone have wished world-wide fame on them? It wasn't ever realistic given the narrowcasting of radio stations and the kind of music the band was playing in the fading era of REO Speedwagon and the dawn of MJ and Madonna. X, another fave of mine, t

Lord, lord, they haven't even played any of these tunes yet on a tour, so give them a bit of time before they do the breakup thing. I certainly don't expect to find them on top of the Sears Tower with a bunch of policemen trying to keep crowds back on the street and Jeff asking if they ``passed the audition.'' I think perhaps this is what felt good to them in recent months and this is the record they want to put out. Since I have never really gotten over the shock of SBS and the sudden downshifting in tone this record is not a huge surprise. I am not ready to pass judgment on (the Album) yet -

I did not think of Harrison's song when I heard You Never Know the first time until around 2.58 when the slide comes in and I kept thinking - is that like a Harrison slide swipe or a homage to 70s-era Gerry Rafferty-styled rock? To me, there seem to be a lot of embellishments throughout that can be throwbacks to other eras, including the rumbling piano on Country Disappeared which reminded me of Watching the Wheels.

Actually if they do all release albums on the same day, will Glenn's fare the poorest? Will he have to wear the Cat makeup? Not sure it worked for Peter Criss.

To be fair, Wilco requested to be on PHC and secondly, they hung around the show most of the weekend because they were really pleased to be there. (This from a friend who works on the show). One might want to evaluate Wilco's dorkiness vis a vis their own feelings about PHC to determine who is zooming who here.

I saw these guys at the Astoria in London about two months ago. The show wildly surpassed my expectations but I hadn't seen them before and so didn't have much of a frame of reference to go by. I're read a lot of reviews that seem to indicate some people really don't think much of them live - especially a really bad review of a show they did in San Francisco before the new record came out. I'm not sure whether its a matter of them not playing well from show to show or just the way that people come away from the concerts. The Astoria show was fab.

I expected some reference to the location of the show - unless there is a second Alter Schlactherhof in Dresden, that's the spot where Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of the city and later inspired Slaughterhouse Five.

I would have thought so as well but it wasn't a one-off during the show - it came back again several times. At one point after the guys Whooped again in that rather Iconic American way that is instantly reconizable, Tweedy asked what they were doing in Germany - "are you guys hedge funds traders or something?" To which one of them said, "Teaching English!" And Tweedy said, "Ugh, I pity the fools." It got a laugh but one of my friends claims he saw Nels cast a slightly withering glance over at Jeff, who then wisely laid off adding any more comments about Americans in Germany. It was hardly a sh

Great, great show - probably the best I have ever heard the band play - Jesus Etc was stunning, as was Via Chicago. Dragged a bunch of Wilco newbies to the show and they were more than impressed. Only negative they really picked at was what they felt were Jeff's nasty comments toward some American fans in the audience. After the usual shout-outs for Chicago and other American cities Jeff asked if they were Americans and then said, "Man, we come over here to get away from you people." I have heard similar comments at other shows so I wasn't surprised, but my friends felt that he went on too far

Dresden on Saturday - anyone know what the space is like? It looks like a narrow hall that is multi-use - I expect it to be standing. Looking forward to it.....

It might be interesting to get a list of records together that we thought were amazing and then turned out to be pop piffle. We have all made cocktail-chatter boasts about how we just bought some new record and ``yeah, it's REALLLLLLY great'' (snort, look smug, reach for peanuts on living-room table). Or took a grandstanding position about some artist that would ``be around forever.'' This would be the anti-Astral Weeks problem - the What the Hell Were You Thinking? Award - when something is really far less than the sum of its parts as it might have looked at first. I myself am guilty of many

Judging by the hand-wringing, angst-filled missives that have erupted here since the album was streamed, it's clear we all want our heroes to present something more than music itself - something life-affirming, something that trancends art and is ultimately hot-wired into our DNA. We want to be able to tear our hair out and knit belts to them in tribute, to hire skywriters to adorn the heavens with the received messages and of course for the album to move a million units so we can tell the Non Believers that they were really wrong, man. Me too. And judging from what I can see, there are some f