#13: Don’t -

Let the door hit you on the way out.

Yeah, I know, i know …it is pretty funny watching a bird fly into a window or glass door and knock itself out.
But I was leaving a party on the weekend and mistook a plate glass panel next to an open door for the open door and I tried walking through the glass panel that I thought was the open door, but it wasn’t an open door, it was a plate glass window thing.
And I then realized that the only thing that hurts worse than full-on headbutting a plate glass window is the sting of the laughter of those who heard the crunch and witnessed you bounce off of what you thought was an open door.

And the only thing less funny than that was that I was carrying a baby in my arms at the time.

Still, probably wasn’t as bad as that time my friend severed her nose running through a ranchslider door. For the record, I don’t advise doing that either.

#12: Do -

Stay in touch.

This age of social media is great. People I went to school with keep befriending me on Facebook. Some from the so-called cool crowd.
And thanks to Facebook, I can see that they’re now fat and ugly. And I might still be uncool, but at least I’m not fat and ugly. So YAY: I win.

There is a downside though. A Facebook friend just unfriended me because I jokingly called him a retard.

Some Mongols are just far too fucking sensitive.

Yeah.

Big Day Out, Mt Smart Stadium, Auckland, January 15th, 2010

Biggest “Made My Big Day” Moment: Dancing with cute Kiwi muso chick Gin Wigmore to Groove Amarda in the boiler room at the end of the night. Well, technically I was dancing with her back. She just happened to be in front of me. But she did accidentally bump into me a few times, so that’s kinda like making out, or something, right?
It was a nice coincidence, seeing as I had been enjoying watching her on stage an hour or so earlier and found myself thinking: “Oneday, she will be mine. Oh, yes, She will be mine. (So long as my wife’s OK with that…)”

It’s an opportunity I could have easily missed had I freaked out and chickened out of forcing my way into the middle of the boiling supertop tent, which was already packed and spilling over with the converging crowds of the just-finished Muse and Head Like A Hole, who were now looking to end the night with some doof-doof.
It was cool seeing her go from being a performer up on stage to being a Groove Amarda groover down in the mosh just like the rest of us. The people trying take to pics of her while pretending to take pictures of the people around her reminded me that she wasn’t just like the rest of us.

Best Act I Never Saw: Bandicoot. A trio of Kiwi teens. Had never heard of them, so I checked them out on the interweb. Loved them. Wanted to see them. They were on from 10.30-11am. Gates didn’t open until 11am, though. WTF? I guess they got the role of the band that provides the ambient music and sound check while people are outside queuing. I really wanted to see them. Will have to see whether I can see them some other way this year.

First “Hairs-Raised-On-The-Back-Of-The-Neck” Moment: Catching Dimmer in the boiler room. I wasn’t planning to. I’ve been a fan of leadman Shayne Carter since the album Melt during his former Straitjacket Fits days became one of my favourites. But with so many acts on at once, the BDO is all about compromise as to what you catch and what you miss and I’d been fortunate to catch Dimmer opening for the Brian Jonestown Massacre a couple of years back. But then I happened to be passing and ended up with time to spare so popped in to catch the last of their songs. Their onslaught of rock noise blasted my ears and rib cage and drew me right up front for my first proper dance of the day. I’m still only just getting my hearing back.

Best “OK, You Do Rock” Experience: Ladyhawk. Saw her on the televised NZ music awards late last year and her performance was terrible. But I suspected the show’s sound engineering may have played a part in that so I knew I had to catch her live to decide. Her successful brand of retro rock really did rock. Was lucky enough to get up close and danced to her entire set. A guy from work didn’t enjoy her so much because he was stuck right at the back, but I guess proximity determines experience to a large degree.

The “Holy-Fuck-It’s-Bob-Dylan” Moment: Finn Andrews from The Veils.
Seeing The Veils play an awesome set at the Kings Arms Tavern in 2007 signaled my rebirth as a concert goer, so this was one of the bands I had to see again. Fought my way up close. Then it struck me that I’d never really noticed before just how much he looks like a young Bob Dylan. Or a young Jacob Dylan. So much intensity in his delivery. The band (or instruments) sounded a little off though and there seemed to be a little bit of Dylan-esque rekeying and retiming of songs. But I still loved it. And I do likes me a cute chick on bass.

Nicest Little W.T.F. Surprise: Dizzie Rascal. I like Dizzie Rascal, but again, I wasn’t intending to catch him. I couldn’t work out why he was on the main stage – surely he wasn’t a big enough act for it. Belonged in the Boiler Room tent. Boy was I fucking wrong. Walking down the arena stairs and being confronted with what seemed like an entire audience of tens of thousands of people up and dancing to Dizzie was a surreal experience. He went off. I’ve never seen so many people dance like that in one large space before. I gladly joined in and was thankful to catch his last three songs.

Biggest Disappointment: Lilly Allen. Dizzie Rascal did her a big disservice by being so orsum. She was a complete downer by comparison. We were all hyped-up and ready for something special and she took way too long to fire up. Sound set up for her stage also sucked. Still, I did like watching her perform.

The “Well, That’s OK Then” Moment: It was also annoying to see during Lilly Allen’s performance that a bunch of people had commandeered some wheelie rubbish bins and were using them to stand on to get a better view, which blocked the view of all the people behind. Normally I’d pull someone like that off their perch and beat them with an empty plastic beer bottle, but the people getting the better view were a bunch of cute chicks in short jeans shorts, so in this case I was happy to stand behind their behinds and say nothing.

Moment of Ewwwww: Getting to the secondary stage beer cage area about halfway through the day and discovering it had degenerated into a landfill. People had given up putting their rubbish in bins and the cleaners had given up trying to clean it. I joked about making beer angels in the piles of empty beer bottles, but I was definitely just joking.

Moment of Turning A Frown Upside Down: I really wanted to see Gin Wigmore perform. So I did. Loved her. One day, she will be mine. Oh yes, She will be mine. Then there was a rush over to the main stage to see Muse, a big stadium act I really wanted to see. But turns out so did everybody else. By time we got there pretty much every vantage point with a view of Muse was taken. My compadres and I did manage to secure some seats up in the nose bleeds in the eastern stand. I could see them performing and loved their song choice, but the acoustics where we were were so bad that after half an hour I decided I wanted to go see Head Like A Hole instead. I had tried to catch the reformed dirty hard rock Kiwi band last year but missed my chance with the lead singer accidentally putting an axe in his foot. Going into the Big Day Out I figured I’d have to miss them again because of the Muse clash. But I’m glad things worked out as they did because HLAH were fucking awesome. With almost everyone else at Muse, I managed to get right up front and do a lot of jumping up and down with all the Westies who were also there to see them. HLAH came pretty close to starting a riot, with the next act on (Fear Factory) doing a rude non-silent sound check during the HLAH set on the adjoining stage. Some gathering Fear Factory fans also started throwing plastic bottles at HLAH. It was entertaining to watch HLAH front man Booga Beazley throw insults back at them and Fear Factory, then initially refusing to give up the stage at the end of their set. When they did finally say good night, I got some dirty looks from a few Fear Factory fans as I was leaving, which was amusing because, seriously: hahahahahaaaaohyou’resotough.
Then it was off to the Boiler Room and some more Gin Wigmore.

Moment of Thank-God-For-Drugs: My back was screwed the whole week leading up to the Big Day Out. I’d put it out helping my cousin chase sheep around the countryside. (It’s a long story). I feared I’d need a walking stick or Zimmerframe to get around the BDO. But I washed a double dose of painkillers down with energy drinks before going in and managed to get through the day just fine. Probably helped in no small part from the second hand highs from all the weed being smoked. But anyway. I’m not getting too old for this shit.

Dave Dobbyn & Gin, Waihi Beach Hotel, NYE 2009

I can’t think of a better way to see in a new year than with a legend of NZ music and one of its young rising stars.

No wait… actually, I can:

A better way would to actually have been inside the outside marquee concert at the Waihi Beach Tavern where Dave Dobbyn and Gin Wigmore were performing, instead of merely listening to them from the cold steps of a nearby caravan.

But I guess that’s what you get when you’ve got three children under the age of six and a legal system that prevents you from leaving them alone to go out and party. Bah.

Music is made to be heard though and at least I could hear them just fine, and they sounded, well, fine.

I initially thought the concert had started three hours early, but then realized that the pub was just playing their albums over the PA system. A little bit of a teaser before the actual thing. A little bit of overkill, perhaps.

Thankfully, the geezas across the road turned off their doof doof music to listen in as well when the concert started for real.
Thankfully the wind was blowing in our direction so we heard it loud and clear.
Unthankfully, it was a cold wind, and — seeing as it was meant to be freakin summer — I hadn’t really brought any warm clothes. So a blanket it was then.

The opening act was Christchurch band, Dukes. I hadn’t heard of them. One of my friends said DUDE, The Rock FM play them ALL THE TIME, but who really listens to the wireless these days anyway, so shutup.

We were drinking Tequila when Gin came on. She built up a great rapport with the crowd and sounded sweet. Bloody brilliant, actually. Am planning to see her for real at the Big Day Out. She closed with her hits Under My Skin and Oh My.

We got our lighters out as Dave Dobbyn came on … to light the mosquito coils.

He’s got such a large back-catalogue of hits to choose from and I thought every song selected was great. The old people from the bach in front didn’t think so though. They went to the concert, but only liked it when he played the two songs they knew.

How can you grow up in NZ and be so old and only know two Dave Dobbyn songs? Seriously?

He had a solid backing band and, as with Gin, it sounded like the sound engineer had got the mix right. The only time things didn’t sound so good were when the police went past with their sirens screaming ever 10 minutes or so to arrest some teenager trying to have a beer on the beach.

It also sounded like Dobbyn got a full crowd singalong near the end when he performed the two songs the old people did know: Loyal and Slice of Heaven. We joined in.

That continued with his farewell song, Welcome Home.

My only complaint was that he was five minutes late with the New Year’s countdown. My watch is synchronized to my work computer, which Bill Gates personally updates, so I knew my countdown was on time. But Dave Dobbyn and his audience were doing their 10-second countdown five minutes after midnight and that’s just plain wrong. Craziness.

Anyway, the great thing about listening to the concert from a caravan is that I could go straight to bed 30 seconds later. It was well past my bedtime, after all.

#11: Do -

Choose wisely.

There are no small decisions in life.
Everything affects everything.

High road/ low road?
Red pill/ blue pill?
In a box/ with a fox?

And now this:

My mother has just discovered Facebook.

She has Friend Requested me.

Do I dare, sweet reader, click “Ignore”?

Pearl Jam, Mt Smart Stadium, 27th November 2009

Friday night, I got to sing with Pearl Jam!
OK, strictly speaking, so did 32,000 others. But still. Stick that on my CV: Backing singer. For Pearl Jam.
Yeah!

The concert goers seemed to fall into two camps:

1 – Fans of their hit singles and/or just their first album, Ten, who were left feeling somewhat underwhelmed;
2 – Those who owned and enjoyed and loved all their albums and lesser-heard songs (as well as Ten and the commercial hits), and they were left going Hell. Yeah.

But if the rivalry of Tupac v Biggie Smalls, Vanilla Ice v MC Hammer, or Team Jacob v Team Edward has taught us anything, it’s that we will never agree on everything. Or even anything.

For the record though, I was in the Hell. Yeah camp. I own all their albums… well, except for that copy of the latest album that I burned from my boss’ boss, but I swear it’s on my Santa wish list.
And I actually thought the band did a great job of mixing their commercial hits with the more esoteric rockers from across their catalogue, meaning there was something for everyone, including Pearl Jam themselves.

The night almost got off to a bad start as I frantically ripped my room apart looking for my Pearl Jam t-shirt. Couldn’t go without that. Good thing I have a wife to clean up after me.

After a couple of years of turning up to gigs when the doors open and then having to stand around waiting for hours, I decided to be a bit relaxed about this concert. I’d decided to skip opening Kiwi act Liam Finn as I’d seen him at the Big Day Out a couple of years ago and assumed he would as good as I remembered. I definitely wanted to be there for Ben Harper though. I definitely misjudged how finely-tuned stadium concert machines had become though and turned up about half-way through his set with Relentless7, just missing a Queen/Bowie-cover duet with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder.
Fuck.

I didn’t miss out on sitting down and having the drunk next to me spill an entire beer on my shoes, though.
Fuck.
I accepted his slurred apology and got talking to him, and in return was randomly rewarded with the knowledge that he worked for a private investigator that had been in my work building during the wee small hours of the previous week installing hidden surveillance cameras! Which is bloody lucky, because I was totally planning to steal a whole bunch of company pencils and sell them on the Panmure black market to help pay for Christmas presents for the kids. Phew.

And you’ll never believe this, but there were actually people there smoking drugs! Shocking.
How the scruffy white Rasta sitting in front of us manged to get in with enough to keep the air around us filled with the smell of ganja all night (delivering all those seated nearby a second-hand-high) was truly impressive.

Ben Harper sounded great. Lately I’m used to watching acts in small venues, or being up front in the mosh pit, so it was weird to sit miles away in the stands. I wanted to buy tickets for the general admission area, but at that stage I had no idea who I was going to take with me, and most of the people I know don’t like standing in a mosh pit for hours waiting for the main act to start. As it turns out I was with my little brother in the end, who would’ve totally been up for a bit of elbowing our way to the front. But anyway. Still a great live experience. Pearl Jam came on just five minutes later than the internet and radio said they would. They eased into it with a crowd-pleasing performance of Daughter.

During the second song, Severed Hand, a fight nearly broke out around me as the drunk guy sitting next to me had words with the drunk guy in front of him who was standing up. The guy standing stood his ground and told the guy sitting that it was a concert, so stand up and dance, man! Sitting guy said, Hey Bud, we all paid for seats, which means sitting, and I can’t see with you standing, so sit the fuck down!
Both drunks had good points. But I really just wanted to push both their asses down the stairs and let St Johns deal with them, so I could focus back on the concert.

Eddie Vedder is an engaging front man. Even when he’s stopping to tell moshpitters for the third time to take three steps back and “maintain”. I guess you’d be a little concerned as well had nine people been crushed or trampled to death at one of your past concerts.
It was also a treat to see him rocking an electric guitar for a number of songs.

We knew they were just teasing when they finished their set after an hour and twenty minutes, with an audience-backed Better Man.

We got two encores out of them, with Ben Harper and his ol’ lap slide guitar coming on to help belt out Red Mosquito.

Liam Finn and his daddy Neil were on near the end to help with a very cool Chris Knox tribute of Not Given Lightly. Which confused my brother, who wanted to know why they were singing the Vogels bread song.
My boss, who was seated somewhere in the same section as me, thought Liam Finn was a bit of a muppet for trying to give the song a bit of a punk-edge, but if you’re familiar with Chris Knox’s music then you might actually have thought it appropriate.

Eddie’s voice held out impressively well for the near two and a half hours they were on.

I was hoping that they would close with their bluesy Yellow Ledbetter (an outtake from Ten), and was not disappointed. I love it, even if to this day I can still only make out about 40 per cent of those mumbled lyrics. I basically just made shit up as we went along, to finish off my backing vocal duties. Job done. The shades go down.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, Cassette #9, Auckland, 20th November 2009

I went to Casiotone For The Painfully Alone… alone.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have friends and stuff, and if any of them were still talking to me I would totally have been un-alone.
But there I was. Alone. And, OK, also a little uncomfortable from the nachos I’d had for dinner.
But not painfully so.

And just when I was resigned to the fact that I would be the lone lonely loser on the dance floor, I bumped into a good friend’s girlfriend and her girlfriends outside Cassette #9 in Vulcan Lane.

They were going in. So I tagged along. Suddenly all un-alone.
Sweet.

What a brilliantly trippy little venue. For some reason “Crushed Velvet” came to mind as I walked up the stairs and into the bar. Maybe that was because of the velvet curtains. Or perhaps the deer head on the wall. There were mirrors everywhere and you could notice people using them to check themselves and others out.

While waiting for the music, we sat and drank cocktails from quaint teapots and discussed vampires and werewolves and journalists and what would happen if we mixed the contents of this teapot with the contents of that teapot.

The opening act was Pikachunes, from Christchurch, who I initially thought was just some kid standing on the stage with a laptop, but it turned out it was some kid standing on the stage with a drum machine thingee that looks like a laptop, who sounded pretty freakin awesome, actually. He had stage presence. And a hat, which kinda made him look like Son of Dave, or Tom Waits. Very cool.

Then there was a bit of waiting.
And then what we initially thought was a sound-check in preparation for Owen Ashworth of CFTPA actually turned out to be the second act, Concern (Owen’s brother Gordon). Reminded me a little of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

Casiotone took the stage after midnight. Madness!
Some of us had to be up early in the morning to take their kids to the company christmas party and queue for an hour in the freakin facepainting line!
But I guess that’s how the late-rising electro indy Casio keyboard crowd rolls.

It was worth the wait though. I was hoping he would play some stuff from Etiquette, an album I love, and he was ripping into them after just two songs, with I Love Creedence, the song of his I love the most. Brilliant.

He rarely looked up from his keyboard, but still managed to engage the crowd. I think they liked his humility. He was happy to take requests. He was also happy to play one song (shit, I can’t remember — was it his Love Connection cover?) so long as someone from the crowd got up and sung it. And after a bit of a wait, two guys got up to give a bout of peer-pressured crowd participation a crack.

Someone wondered how they were meant to dance to CFTPA’s somber sound but I found it easy: stick your hands in your pockets and shuffle from side to side. Which is close to how I normally dance anyway, so that was handy. Didn’t have to learn any new dance moves.

And you’d just get into Ashworth’s beat machine beats and then the song was over, reminding you that his low-fi electro approach had short pop sensibilities. The keyboard provided the melodies and Ashworth’s voice delivered some great poetry. They would have been delivered even better had the vocals been turned up slightly, but that’s just me and I’m possibly alone on that one.

#12: Don’t -

Forget that Shit Happens.

Cos somewhere between the last kid and the arrival of this new one, I somehow totally forgot that Babies = Nappies.

Thankfully, my wife reminded me by saving the meconium change for me. And then I was staring down at that first soiled nappy and found myself thinking: Oh, Damn. This Shit Again.

Cuts like a knife

This one time, I got dragged along to a Bryan Adams concert and I nearly got into a fight.

I guess no-one likes being told their music sucks.

#10: Do -

Watch what you wish for.

Especially if you’re wishing for a little more excitement. You know, drama.

Cos then you’ll try and go away on holiday with your kids and 36-week-pregnant wife and then your car will break down on the way down to the beach, and then you’ll wind up effectively stranded in a caravan at the beach with no car while your wife has a couple of nights of false contractions … and the weather will be shit … and then you were meant to get the car back, but the courier… the fucking courier, who was bringing the new part… lost it, so they had to order a new part… and then you get an urgent call from your brother-in-law telling you to head for the hills because your freaked-out father-in-law had called him from Germany and told him to tell you that a “huge” tidal wave was headed for the very beach you’re at.
And, remember, you have no car. And your heavily-pregnant wife waddles very slowly, especially if it involves going uphill. And fuck, all you want to do is finish your bacon and eggs, drama bedamned!

Bedamned, I tells ya!