…when I’m waiting to see NIN next Saturday: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s new album! The Effects of 333 is a 10-track instrumental album released on the band’s own record label, Abstract Dragon. It’ll be available for download from BRMC’s site as of 3:33 am November 1st.

I love them so much….

Or, more importanly, look at BRMC, but we’re there, too!

Video: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club doing “Spread Your Love” at V Fest 2008

Could they have caught me looking any more unenthused?

I dragged Mark to the venue early so we could get a good spot in line for tonight’s show. I don’t get it, though. When we got there, there were a few people sitting at the entrances to some of the lines, but other lines were completely empty and people were just hanging out and sitting around in the general area. Why get there an hour early only to hang out in the vicinity of the line? Not that I’m complaining, ’cause I just walked up to a completely empty line and plopped my butt down.

And how did this work out for me?

VERY WELL, THANK YOU. Mark and I were on the rail, just a few feet to the left (if you’re facing the stage) of center, for the whole damn show.

Tab the Band was the first opener, playing a handful of songs. They weren’t too bad. I’d see ‘em if they came to Asheville, I guess. I’ll at least check them out online.

Then BRMC came on. MmmmBRMC. Ten shows now, and not a single disappointment. They played nine songs–666 Conducer, Berlin, Took Out a Loan, In Like the Rose, Ain’t No Easy Way, Steal a Ride, Shuffle Your Feet, Six Barrel Shotgun and Spread Your Love–and rocked. My only wish is that they’d been a little louder. I left their set at V Fest with my ears feeling like they were stuffed with cotton (and probably they should have been; I have a really great set of earplugs…and I always forget to bring them). Tonight, though, wasn’t quite there. I guess they save the volume for STP. :)

God, I love BRMC. And they played “Steal a Ride!” And I’ll tell ya, “Ain’t No Easy Way” never gets old live. Never. It kicks you in the ass every time.

Robert Levon Been, BRMC:

Robert Levon Been with his hat for the final song:

Peter Hayes, BRMC:

After them, we had a looooooooooong wait for Stone Temple Pilots. More than an hour and twenty minutes! But Ho. Ly. Shit. What a fantastic fucking show. It was loud and intense and they were totally “on.”

Scott Weiland, STP:

Scott Weiland, STP:

Robert DeLeo:

STP:

STP:

No more shows till Saturday, when we catch BRMC/STP again, this time with Jake and his girlfriend. (Tonight we had Mark’s son Neil and his girlfriend with us. Sort of. They were a couple rows behind us.)

Wow. I’m looking forward to Saturday.

(Oh, one final note: wow. Another really, unexpectedly tame audience. What’s going on, people?!)

Photos care of Mark, who took pictures, so I didn’t have to.

NIN just announced more North America tour dates for 2008. They’ll be coming to Greenville, SC, November 1st—to the Bi-Lo Center, which Mark has always told me has great acoustics (but no one I want to see ever goes there. Till now.) I was going to go to the Deerhunter show here in Asheville that night, but…never mind!

(Hahaha. Mark just came up the stairs: “When do they play Nashville? Is that November, too?”

“Halloween.”

“What day is that?”

“Friday. They’re going from Nashville to Greenville. We could go from Nashville to Greenville, too, if we were feeling froggy….but we’ll have just driven 12 hours on the 28th (up from New Orleans). Not that that’s stopped us from getting back in a car. I should just take that whole week off.”

“I wouldn’t have any vacation left for Christmas.”

“I don’t usually take vacation then.”

“I’d be giving my Christmas vacation to NIN.”)

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to report on the Duluth, GA, show. We had floor tickets, and even though by the time we got there and got our wristbands the regular ticketholders were being let in, we started the show just one row back from the rail in front of Justin Meldal-Johnsen. (Sorry, Mark, for being so, um, testy up till then.) We had a good time meeting and talking with people around us, and then Deerhunter came on. I enjoy Deerhunter—I’m developing an appreciation for droning bands with unintelligble vocals. (In fact, I prefer the newer album from Black Angels over their older one mainly because the lyrics on the early one are too easy to make out. Not that I want all of the music I listen to to be like that, but there are times and places when I do want that sort of thing.) I also like how Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox deals with pissy NIN fans, from the plastered on rictus grin to the “You guys are awesome, Thank you!!! Especially you in the middle flicking me off! You rule!” Mark was disappointed that Bradford wasn’t wearing the cheerleader uniform like he had the night before. This time Whitney Petty, one of the guitarists, was wearing it. A few songs in, Mark said, “Was there a girl in the band last night?” Haha—he hadn’t noticed, even though she was closest to us from where we were sitting.

They finished up and we all went back to standing around waiting for NIN. The ladies we’d met got enormous plastic cups of Coke, which I was sure I’d end up wearing. And then the lights went down.

I was expecting the crowd to surge forward and squish us all together when “999,999″ started. Or “1,000,000″ even. But nope—we had a disconcerting plentitude of personal space for most of the show. It got kinda rowdy during “March of the Pigs,” “Gave Up” and “Terrible Lie,” but the rowdiness was fleeting. I would have preferred a rougher pit.

(Mark did, though, nearly get in a fight he didn’t set out to start. He was prepared to finish it, too, but fortunately didn’t have to.)

Trent surprised us with a few songs: “The Frail” led into “The Wretched” instead of “Closer” (yay!). He threw in “Down In It,” which was all right—I’m kind of worn out on that one, but it’s still neat to have a surprise in the setlist. But then “Reptile!” “REPTILE!” 31 songs altogether, and I spent the whole thing (when I wasn’t annoyed at the two women near us who kept talking to each other and playing with their cameras/cell phones) wishing the band wouldn’t ever get around to the final song and leave. It was fantastic.

Afterward, we went to the Loafing Leprechaun, which is now going to be a tradition for any show I go to Gwinett Arena for.

Oh, and when I saw the new list of NIN tour dates this morning, I went, “Omg! They’re going to be in New Orleans October 25th! WE’RE going to be in New Orleans October 25!” It’s early and I have a headache, that’s my excuse….

Wes Borland, according to his latest post on Black Light Burns’ MySpace blog, is joining Marilyn Manson “for the time being” (but Black Light Burns is still “full on and everything is great”—and they have a second album coming out before too much longer. (The recently released covers & instruments album doesn’t count as a second album, according to Borland.)

Joining MM.

That is sick.

I hope he’s with them long enough for me to catch a show.

Him and Twiggy. Just… yeah.

I’m not gonna grow up to be a concert photographer, but since we went with reserved seats for this show, I figured I’d give it a try. Apologies in advance!

Here’s the stage.

Before the show started, they lowered a rack of lights and…

Oh look at our shitty view! A lot of us at our end of section F (for “fail”) scrambled to find places where we might actually see something besides legs. Thank god they raised the rack a couple songs in; otherwise I would have been really pissy by the end of the show. These were presale tickets! They were supposed to be great seats!

That’s what I get for getting seats, though, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I looked longingly at the people on the floor…

…and decided that despite the road rash and bruises and my inappropriate footwear (canvas slip-on/slip-off sneakers that will surely get lost in the pit if I don’t wrap tape around them to hold them to my feet) I will not hang back by the soundboard tomorrow night in Duluth after all. I want to be smushed up with a bunch of sweaty, screaming, jumping, danging, singing, losing-their-minds people. With seats you just feel so…isolated. I do, at least. If I’m not smushed in with people, I am annoying cognizant of my individualness. I’m a unit. A single, detached entity.

In the crowd, that awareness slips away (usually to the floor, where it gets stomped on and requires a few days recovery afterward).

…um.

So anyway…like I said, after they raised the light rack, we had a good view:

And I was excited to be facing the side of the stage. I’d already seen the full effect of the show on Sunday, so tonight I got the super-cool “behind the scenes” view—just how do they pull off some of their coolest effects? It turns out it’s a three-screen thing, with a normalish screen at the far back and two curved screens (more like metal meshes) that can come down around the band. Here’s how they pull off making it look like there’s a torrential downpour coming down on the band:

Because the front two screens are meshes, wherever “video”—or whatever you’d call it—isn’t projected, you can see right through to whatever’s behind it, like the band, and more rain, and finally the backmost screen, with yet more rain. From a front-on view, it’s amazing.

This is the set for the Ghosts-mix version of “Piggy,” which is fantastic. From the front you see some very cool pulsing effects. When I saw them in Baltimore, I’d had no idea they were layered like this.

Below is a shot from “Only” —layers of white noise. The song opens with “I’m becoming less defined, as days go by, fading away, and well you could say I’m losing focus…,” and the white noise works for it very well.

Also, the screen is heat-sensing, so Trent is able to clear away white noise with his body movements. Very cool. (Earlier in the show, at the end of “The Greater Good,” a stage hand came out with a stage light and “washed” the mess on the screen off by shining it up and down the screen like it was a big paint brush. Sorry—no pics of that.)

Below is the effect for the chorus of “Only.” When you’re looking at this straight-on, you more or less just see Trent singing and static along the bottom. The band is there on the stage, but the lighting—when you’re viewing this from the front—makes the band more or less disappear into the shadows. This is while Trent is singing, “There is no you, there is only me. There is no you, there is only me.”

I tried to get a picture of Josh setting the drum sequencer at the beginning of “Echoplex,” but it was just a white blob…so you’re stuck with my crappy description (and I’m working from memory, so if I get a detail wrong…whatever. I hit my head earlier today.). There’s a screen with three rows of white-outlined boxes (with a line snaking through, but that’s not important—looks cool, but not important). When Josh puts his hand out toward a box, it turns solid red—and it adds a beat to the drum sequence, so he’s essentially programming the drum sequencer via this giant screen on stage. It’s kind of like that piano Tom Hanks played with his feet in Big (if you saw Big when it first came out, not after you could buy those pianos and no one thought you were cool if you did) only…cooler. ‘Cause it’s NIN, and not Tom Hanks.

Anyway. One more shot, from “In This Twilight”:

As this song ends, each band member, one by one, is spotlighted. He stops playing, raises a hand in farewell, and leaves the stage. It’s brilliant. Really a powerful way to end the show.

I’m stoked that the setlists this tour are so heavily focused on the latest three albums: four songs from Ghosts, six from The Slip and seven from Year Zero. Seventeen songs altogether from material released over just the last year and a half. And omg it’s fantastic! I love my NIN CDs, but they don’t compare to how they do these things live.

Tomorrow…. Georgia!

..the only day we went. :)

Gates opened at 10; Mark and I were out of our hotel at 8:00. For some reason I didn’t picture there being parking at the subways station (what? I know. Go figure.) so we walked, and it turned out to be a longer walk than it had looked like on Google Maps. Took the subway to the bus to Pimlico and waited around for the gates to open. And of course we were at the south entrance, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were scheduled on the north stage (at noon, but IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO GET TO THE BARRIER), so I power-walked across the festival with Mark…somewhere behind me.

And we got on the barrier. But we didn’t just get on the barrier—we got there in time to catch 2/3rds of BRMC soundchecking. Nice. (Robert was missing. He appeared to be a little stunned by having to be awake so early in the day.)

BRMC had a very short set with just eight songs on their setlist and a ninth squeezed in before their time was up. They played: 666 Conducer, Weapon of Choice, Berlin, Shuffle Your Feet, Ain’t No Easy Way, Salvation, Six Barrel Shotgun, Spread Your Love and Whatever Happened To My Rock ‘N Roll (Punk Song). Leia’s great on drums. No disappointment there at all. Mark was happy to get to see Salvation live.

Robert Levon Been, BRMC

Peter Hayes, BRMC

Leia Shapiro and Peter Hayes, BRMC

BRMC finished at 12:45, and we didn’t have another band we were super interested in seeing till 6:20. We could have camped out at our barrier spot all day long, but we have pit tickets for Stone Temple Pilots and Nine Inch Nails later this month (twice each, plus some great reserved seats for a NIN show, too), so we felt like we didn’t have to be right up front for either band today. In fact, I was looking to get a further back spot for NIN, one that’d give me a view of the whole stage.

So we wandered off, caught some other bands (but not more than a few songs from each—nothing was really grabbing us…and we practically ran from the She & Him show after a song and a half), watched the aerial sculptures and the Bindlestiff Family Circus—

(a little lesson in safe sex, courtesy of the Bindlestiffs)

—ate bad festival food, drank horrid festival drinks ($10 for a margarita that tastes like gasoline. Oh fabulous!), and we saw an Xtracycle in real life!, which was actually one of the highlights of my day—

!!!!

—and then it was time for STP. Which conflicted with Bob Dylan’s show on the south stage, so Mark headed over that way for Bob, and I held our spot at the north stage and enjoyed STP. They came on twenty minutes late, but once they showed up, they were good. I’m stoked to see them next Sunday.

Stone Temple Pilots

Before and after STP, I ran into some trouble with the porta potties because by late afternoon they had completely run out of toilet paper. Now, it wouldn’t kill me to go without toilet paper once, but. Women before me had hovered, and hoverers splatter. Did you hear me? HOVERERS SPLATTER. All over the fucking seat. So: hot, stinky portajohn with piss all over the seat and no toilet paper to clean it up with and an empty hand sanitizer dispenser. I just held it till we got back to the hotel. Yuck.

Finally it started to get dark, and NIN, who had been given the longest set of any band scheduled over the two days of this year’s Virgin Mobile Fest, came on.

OMG NIN.

And all I have is this blurry picture. Sorry!

The stage/light show was…. There are no words. It was just unbelievable. They put on a fantastic show. And the only thing going through my head through all 1 hour and 55 minutes of it was “OMG NIN.” Cannot wait to see them closer up on Tuesday.

And that was our day in Baltimore. Back on the road tomorrow.

I came this close –> <– to getting to spend a weekend at Disney World next month (in order to attend a work-related meeting the Monday following)…but then Mark reminded me that we have a BRMC/STP concert that weekend.

BRMC > the magic of Disney. Srsly.

My brother is getting married—on Halloween, no less! How cool is that (the getting married part, I mean). I met his fiancé when we were up in New Hampshire in June. She’s cool.

So I don’t know what she sees in him. ;)

The schedule for the Baltimore Virgin Mobile Fest is up; BRMC is on first on Sunday, which is so many awesome shades of yay. I can get in when the gates open, get a good spot at the stage, stand there for a couple hours instead of all freaking day, see mah band!, and then go enjoy the other parts of the festival before we have to head back to that stage to catch STP and NIN in the evening.

I discovered a way to overcome the bar-end shifter problem with the Surly Long Haul Trucker. Paul Thumbies allow you to move the shifters to elsewhere on the handlebars. And that’s something I can do myself, so extra awesome sauce. That makes the Surly LHT the perfect bike—even better than the Volpe, which needed to have the pedals, seatpost, tires and the entire drive train replaced to make it the bike I wanted it to be.

So all I need to do now is place an order…

…at some point.

Writing
Work is going well on Mercy. I wonder why I procrastinate so much (every freaking day!) when, once I finally buckle down, I really enjoy working on it. I ARE MAH OWEN BIGGIST OBSTICKLE.

Having a problem with how to start it, too—not a fan of my original opening. So I’m working on scenes in random order, with the question of how to kick the story off not too far back in my mind. If a brilliant idea doesn’t pop up on its own, I’m thinking of writing a new opening every day for a week and see where that puts me. But not this week. This week I’m going to continue working on scenes randomly.

Cycling
I did 8 miles Saturday, 9.6 on Sunday, and today was supposed to be 12, but like a dufus I missed my turn-off and ended up with 13.5…which is pretty damn cool. Next Sunday you can bet I’ll be pedaling into the Ultimate Ice Cream parking lot for a milkshake.

And after not toppling over for a while, I toppled over today. Twice. Sigh.

Shows
We saw The Warlocks and The Black Angels at The Grey Eagle Friday night. Prior to the show I’d liked The Warlocks better, but The Black Angels won me over live. Their drummer, Stephanie Bailey, KICKS ASS, and I liked how they changed up who played what. They had a few problems—something was going on with the keyboard near us in the beginning, they seemed to have trouble finding room for themselves on the stage, and at one point during the encore Alex Maas’s guitar got unplugged—but none of it took away from the overall show. I’d see them again.

The Warlocks put on a good show, but I’m not sure I’d see them again. Maybe if they hadn’t opened with my favorite song (”Zombie Like Lovers“) (and it was really good) (but it was like coming right away, yet the intercourse goes on and on) (this is, of course, far more my problem than theirs)…. They also weren’t as compelling to watch, even with Bobby Hecksher’s kibby fits.

This was also our first time at The Grey Eagle. Not a bad place. The stage is maybe two feet high, no barrier. They’ve got a bar and a kitchen. No complaints about the sound. Mark’s going back to see Custard Pie on the 18th, when Jake and I go to The Orange Peel to see the “Local Metal Showcase II.”

More NIN rehearsal footage from Pitchfork:

Jubilee has their first video out, for their first single, “Rebel Hiss.”

Better yet, they say their second single, “In With the Out Crowd,” will be available in a week or two. It’ll include three B-sides that won’t be on the full-length album. Mo’ info.

Pitchfork put up rehearsal footage of NIN doing “1,000,000″ with Robin Finck and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. It’s some pretty cool shit.

RIP George. :(

We’re at the cabin we’re renting in New Hampshire. It’s sweet. Rustic and cozy, yet plenty of space & equipped with wifi. It rained all day and the power went out in the late afternoon, but when we came back from dinner it was back on. We’re all working our way through the The Walking Dead series lately—and all trying to read the same copy of volume five at once. Tomorrow: Reesa! (And Rhode Island for the boys.) And hopefully not quite so much rain.

Annnnnnnnd I didn’t get to bring my bike. It got fixed in time, but then Hertz rented us a Rav 4, which didn’t work with my bike rack. I tried to fit it in after we got our luggage in, but no go.

Then, an hour or so up the road, it hit me: my bike has quick-release wheels. I totally could have fit it in the Rav.

In New Jersey we broke down and ended up with a Sebring instead. And not the convertible kind. My bike wouldn’t have fit without the rack, and we wouldn’t have had the rack even if I had brought the bike in the Rav…so in the end it was good I forgot about the quick-release wheels.

I miss biking. Running around Manchester is going to be way less convenient on foot and bus Friday. What can you do, right?

Statement from Robert and Peter:

To all of you who have read or heard about Nick’s myspace posting, Peter and I would like to clarify a few things from our perspective.

It’s true, Nick wont be joining us for the upcoming European tour, but it’s not true that he is fired. We just feel Nick needs time to sort out exactly what he wants right now. His heart and all his energy and attention is on his own solo project and he needs to see that through.

We welcome his singing and songwriting in BRMC, but his focus, at least at the present time, is on doing his own thing and we wish him the best.

He is our brother, our musical partner, and we love him dearly and look forward to playing with him again in the future.

I’m still looking forward to seeing Leah Shapiro with them, if she plays the U.S. summer dates as well as the European ones, but I have to admit that the part of me that loved that they didn’t replace Nick when he walked away near the end of touring Take Them On, On Your Own is snuggling in some warm fuzzies right now. Honestly, I can leave or take Nick as a drummer, but I love their…I don’t know, integrity? loyalty? something? Values, maybe. Well, definitely their values. They’re not your typical band, at all. <3 <3 <3

Bulletin Nick posted on MySpace:

Hey everybody that reads this,
I just had dinner with rob and pete and well, im not in the band anymore. They are going into rehersals tommorow with leah, she just finished touring with the raveonettes and is super nice and cool. They presented it to me like they need a break, i took it as i am fired again and to be honoust with you i respect thier descision. I dont make it easy for them, i hope to be able to play with them again in the futre as a reuinion as there is really no bad feeling other than we all wanna be happy and rite now we are not. Maybe playing drums for brmc all the time is not my calling and there is something else im supposed to do. we will see, Im sorry to all ther fans and know that the drums are in good hands with leah.
find her at http://www.myspace.com/deadcombosound
My best
hope to see you soon.

When I heard last year that the latest incarnation of NIN’s touring band had been disbanded, tears welled, even though I knew NIN’s line-up was always subject (or perhaps even certain) to change. Theoretically, then, I should be at least a little upset about Nick’s departure from BRMC…. Instead, I’m looking forward to seeing what Leah Shapiro can do.

UPDATE: Robert and Peter posted a statement: Nick isn’t ‘fired’; he’s taking time to sort out exactly what he wants right now. See my June 9 blog post for more info.