With or Without Them

Ok, so the concert was a mixed bag.

The stadium? Hugevania. Seriously. I don’t even really have words to describe how big the place was. Anything I say is going to sound like gross exaggeration, but I cannot stress how big this place was. The screen hanging from the ceiling, supported by a series of pulleys each taller than I am, is bigger than my house. Yeah. Big.

With a big stadium comes seats that are really far off the floor. How far off the floor were we? Well, it’s easier to just say we were six rows from the top. Of the really big stadium. The angle of our seats was pretty vertigo-inspiring. Climbing up the steps to our row—just the stairs on the last leg, not the ones that led up to that last flight—I counted 46 steps. At an impossibly steep angle. When we got to the stadium and were still on the floor level, our phones only picked up on the Edge network. (In honor of the band?) By the time we made it to our seats, we were back in 3G territory.

Let’s just say that when I had to make a dash to the bathroom during one of the songs I didn’t know or care about, I was pretty scared I was going to fall down to my demise.

And let’s talk about the music. With that much space, there’s bound to be some reverb. Our seats were directly in the middle of it.  During the first band, Muse, it seemed that there was a lag between the members of the band and the song. Not a ‘lip synching, we’re cheating’ kind of lag, but a ‘this guitar is playing at a different speed than the drummer who is playing at a different speed than the singer’ kind of lag. I asked Robert if we were experiencing some kind of Doppler effect. They eventually got their timing right, but with the reverb it was still hard to tell. By the time U2 came out, the timing had pretty much been worked out via the ‘turn it up as loud as it will go and no one will be the wiser’ approach. Unless you had our tickets, of course.

All that said, I really did enjoy the show. I really like Muse and was excited to be able to see them live. U2 was such an iconic thing for me—they were truly the soundtrack to my life in high school. Largely because I had Joshua Tree stuck in my car’s tape deck for the better part of my senior year and so it was listen to that or nothing—I opted for them and think I’m a better person because of it. Even had I not had the tape stuck in my deck (how old school is that?!?), I still would have listened to them—they were one of the first “cool” musical preferences I ever had that didn’t involve Robert introducing their sound to me. (Crappy 80s pop boy bands that I listened to in junior high don’t really count in this category. Yeah, he had no influence on me listening to them, but they weren’t “cool.” So, no.)

So game plan next time is to get seats not quite so near to God. Somewhere in the ‘second mortgage on the house’ range—not the ‘selling off the kids’ range or anything stupid like that, but definitely not in the ‘plebian sobriety test’ we bought this time.

Incidentally, speaking of sobriety tests, one woman we saw leaving failed the test. All over the sidewalk. How she climbed down the stairs instead of just rolling is beyond me. I was afraid to drink any more that the one $8 sissy girl beer that Robert brought to me—I figured I’d plunge to my death.

Lots of coffee on the ride home, a seriously low-carb breakfast from Denny’s and sleeping until 11 today (thanks for taking the kids to school, honey!) have all contributed to, well, a mixed bag of results. In ways, I’m kind of disappointed, but in the grand scheme of things, I got to experience some awesome music with my favorite person and I didn’t have to deal with teenagers today because I took the day off at work.

It could have been a lot worse.