My friend Kyle Reinford tipped me off with a facebook Wall post and I magically was one of the lucky few to get two tickets to see Thom Yorke play a warm-up show at the Echoplex last night.
As I somewhat sarcastically noted on Twitter, getting the tix was anticlimactic…one of those things that I tried on a whim and the online ticketing gods smile upon me…thousands of people were freaking out in the mean time.
The show itself was great, the band sounded awesome. The video above pretty much tells the story. My wife and I just hung back where she could see and jammed out and danced. For all the hand wringing and excitement over the show, I was pretty surprised at how unenthusiastic and shoe-gazing the crowd was. The band was KILLING it and these pretentious “omg I hate it when people talk at the show” losers weren’t giving any energy back to the band.
To that point, during one of the encores I walked up to the front…everyone was standing like 12” away from everyone else, it was easy to move around. Frankly it seems a bit weird and suspicious to me when people are being that mellow at a show like that.
Because I’m old and lame, I have to admit that one of my fav parts of the night was going for dinner and drinks at our favorite mexican place in LA, El Conquistador, and then cabbing over to the venue right when the band started. All the losery shoegazers wasted their night standing in line for no reason. Ahhhhh, the vindication.
Definitely one of the coolest shows I’ve been to in a long time. When my bro was in town in August, we caught Fiona Apple with Jon Brion at Largo and that was pretty amazing, too. Gotta love Los Angeles.
