Mommybrain

Saw Radiohead last night at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. One word with hyphen for extra emphasis: a-mazing.

Deerhoof opened. Quirky & avant garde. There were some seriously strong opinions about them on the BART ride back to the city. Not in Deerhoof’s favor. I thought they were fun. Here’s a link to someone’s Flickr photo. I think they’re doing the Bunny song in this picture. It goes something like: “BunnyBunnyBunnyBunnyBunny… Bunny”.

We had decent seats and I took some photos too, but we were a bit too far away and my little Casio doesn’t have a great telephoto so instead of showing my crappy pictures of Radiohead, I’ll just like to this one. He’s got a flickr stream full of lovely shots. You can get a feeling for how AWESOME it was.

So I always knew Radiohead was made up of some serious music geeks but you can’t really appreciate how geeky until seeing them perform. And by geeky I mean they are into what they are doing. And they play with all kinds of gadgets and make fabulous noises both with boxes with knobs as well as by augmenting their own instruments. Like taking a bow to an electric guitar, for example.

There were a couple songs where the crowd clapped along. Which reminded me of a Jars of Clay concert I went to a lifetime ago (over a decade, at least) where — seriously — the entire audience stood in place and clapped along to every single song. It was like being at a contemporary church worship service - you know with the choruses instead of old hymns and the drum set and plugged in acoustic guitar and the really enthusiastic young music director? It was really really strange. And kind of creepy. I was trying to dance in place but kept looking around wondering when everyone was going to stop clapping along. They never did. They just kept clapping. Last night wasn’t like that.