Thursday Night Pre-PAX Gameworks $10 all-you-can-play/Destructoid Mixer:

We had wanted to do a Pre-PAX party, hoping for something like last year’s big Harmonix Rock Band 3 party, but due to PAXDEV happening all of the Pre-PAX parties were closed to the general public.

Instead we headed to Gameworks and walked right through the bar and I thought “Wow, there’s no one here” until we got by the main entrance and there was a line out the door and to the side of the building, which I expected. The guy that got in line behind us was a blogger there for the Destructoid Super Friends Indie Mixer event, which it turned out was in the bar an hour later.

I had brought the 3DS and DS with me to see if I could get guests for my inn on Dragon Quest IX on the DS and StreetPass activity on the 3DS.

While in line to buy our $10 + $2 card handling fee passes for the evening, I already started getting guests and StreetPass tags.

By the end of the evening, I had a bunch of tags and 9 guests for the inn.

We were there to play Tank! Tank! Tank! but on the way through the bar noticed the Pac-Man 4 Player Vs. Battle Royale machine. Since both were occupied, we started out on the classic coin-op machines on the second floor, walking past the crowded Street Fighter IV, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Tastunoku Vs. Capcom units and the Tekken 6 and older fighting games to settle in for some Mr. Driller, Robotron 2084, Frogger, Galaxian, Ms. Pac-Man and Arkanoid.

I dislike broken trackballs and still suck at Robotron after all these years. Not much has changed but it is always great to play those games in a real arcade even though I can emulate them all easily on any computer, pretty much all of my consoles and even my phone.

We settled in and played three rounds of Tank! Tank! Tank! which alone covered our $12 cards. I love that game. It was a definite highlight of the night.

After Tank! Tank! Tank! we did indeed play Pac-Man Battle Royale, tying at the end with a score of 5 to 5. My wife claims she won better than I did but I think we both came out winners. Either way, the clash of two Pac-Man titans was fun and I’d imagine would have been much better with four frantic paced players.

We played an older DDR machine and I got pretty tired with three songs on easy, mostly due to being skillless but also due to still being pretty sick.

I sat at a small bar table and got more StreetPass activity and my wife decided she wanted to play Ice Ice Baby and U Can’t Touch This on the newer DDR machine. We filmed that and she closed her three song set with Daft Punk is Playing at My House.

After considering playing the Hummer machines that were jam-packed in the back, we decided Tank! Tank! Tank! was enough and headed back to our hotel to rest up for the main event, Penny Arcade Expo 2011.

PAX Friday:

We got up early enough to eat at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. They had an interesting self pancake maker, which was a good theory but had very slow execution. I had a lot of bacon on my plate and a sampling of the other breakfast foods available. After eating, we headed to the Convention Center and were directed to the queue line, where we eventually got our swag bags and lanyards. Then we headed for the 3rd Floor’s Raven Theatre for our first panel, What They’re Saying About You: How Marketing Segments and Targets Gamers.

We got blocked on our way down the hallway, and ended up waiting on a bench for around half an hour, with me juggling StreetPass and inn guests and my wife looking through the program and checking what was going on on the internet.

Eventually they let us head to the theatre queue and we passed by the Nintendo handheld lounge along the way. It was there that I acquired some tasty Kirby Cotton Candy and when we got in the queue line, we got some cool Pokemon cinch bags. The swag pile had started quickly.

I liked the way they had the room themed out with paper ravens scattered on the soundboard, on top of the projector and along the front of the panel stage. The panel itself was actually pretty informative. We learned that in order to make your game noticed, you probably shouldn’t use Let the Bodies Hit the Floor in the commercial, unless your game merits using Let the Bodies Hit the Floor in the commercial. We learned about how a marketing team tries to get the attention of non-gamers, with the example of a commercial for Rage that featured an NBA Basketball star. It was created specifically for the NBA finals and the marketing team thought it to be extremely successful. One of the panelists also unveiled a very cool piece of swag available at the Bethesda Softworks booth, a horned mask/hat to advertise The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

By the time we got in line for our second panel, I already had acquired 107 StreetPass tags, and gotten 100 new Mii guests in my plaza on the 3DS. I didn’t have much success with getting inn guests on Dragon Quest 9.

The Harridan’s Guide to the Game Industry was in the Serpent Theatre. The highlight of the panel happened before it began when the enforcers were playing “Epic sax guy 10 hours” from YouTube. The panel itself was pretty stupid. I dig that it consisted of female game industry employees. We were really only there because Michelle Juett, art unicorn of Ska Studios was on the panel. Even she didn’t have much to contribute, but she did briefly shout out to James Silva, her boyfriend and founder of Ska Studios who was sitting in the front row.

Otherwise, the panel was a failure in my eyes. The women on the panel all had similar experiences in getting into the industry. Most of them worked first for Arenanet. They didn’t really answer any open questions or say much of anything at all other than how they liked their jobs but they had to put in many hours and encouraged people to use their free time when they are in school to make mods for games and build up their portfolios. Pretty much just common sense stuff.

After the Harridan’s Guide panel, we raced to the Sheraton and got into the overflow line for Wil Wheaton! a very popular panel featuring TV’s Wil Wheaton. I had figured all hope was lost, but when the line condensed we just barely made it into the Pegasus Theatre for the panel.

Wil read stories from his blog about games. One was a recent entry about his experience buying his first Pokemon game at age 38. He purchased Pokemon Black on the recommendation of a friend and ended up spending an entire flight to Europe playing the game instead of sleeping. His next story was about his friend’s custom rules for Dungeons and Dragons and his experience playing the game with those rules. His third story was about getting his wife’s old Atari 2600 out and hooking it up to the TV to demonstrate it for their kids. His son proceeded to own him on Combat and thought Adventure and Yar’s Revenge were pretty lame.

What I like about when Wil talks is that he always adds extended commentary to the stories and often goes off on tangents. Tangents in this talk included his first time telling kids to get off his lawn and his friend’s adventures as a character in D&D based on the Travelocity gnome.

During the Q&A portion of Wil Wheaton! Wil was presented with an actual cape of dicks. Apparently he had mentioned on a podcast that he wanted said cape, and a cosplayer dressed as Amy Pond and her Doctor companion presented it to him. He accepted said gift with glee and wore it for a lot of the expo thereafter.

We retreated to our hotel to recharge and drop off swag after Wil’s panel. We could have gone to another panel or visited the expo hall, but we needed a bit of food and a bit of rest, and had two more days to do those things.

We ate a ham and cheese sandwich from Three Girls Bakery at Pike Place and unloaded our swag. The best swag item we had acquired at that point was a tasty fortune cookie promoting jumala.com. Jumala seems to be a game design firm of some sort. I don’t care who they are, their cookie was good.

After dinner and recharging a bit, we headed to the Paramount Theatre for the night’s Video Game Orchestra/MC Frontalot/Metroid Metal/Minibosses concert.

The line outside was not yet that long, so we were pretty much guaranteed entry. There was an actual tank across the street in a parking lot to promote World of Tanks and my wife and I each got different toy mini-tanks. She got hers the hard way, being thrown one from the top of the tank. Mine got handed to me in line out of a box.

When we got inside we got seats behind the soundboard on the balcony. Our view was just slightly obstructed but the sound was as good as PAX gets.

I didn’t care for the venue. It was pretty inside but just didn’t feel right for PAX to me.

Video Game Orchestra put on an excellent set. They are a ten-piece “rockestra” with string quartet, keyboard, sax, flute, drums, bass and guitar. Their set included music from Mario, Zelda, Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid among others. It was a good mix of songs by a very talented band of musicians.

MC Frontalot showed that he IS the embodiment of PAX during his set. He and his band brought a ton of energy to the stage to do their nerdcore rap performance. He had a drummer, bass player and keyboard player and brought out the string quartet from VGO for one song as well. The crowd demanded an encore and Metroid Metal were gracious enough to allow him to have one. The encore was a mashup of the Penny Arcade Theme Song and the Doctor Who Theme Song. Frontalot was very entertaining and I’m glad we had the chance to see him live.

Metroid Metal were up next and seemed louder than last year. They played a bunch of metal versions of Metroid songs and Frontalot joined them on one track. It was pretty much the same as last year’s PAX when we saw them and I was very tired by the time they came on. One improvement over last year was they got rid of their Metroid balloon and replaced it with “indestructable” Metroid balls that were about the size of beach balls but much better made.

By the time Metroid Metal were done with their set, I’d finished Puzzle Mii and the first run of the Find Mii RPG using StreetPass. We’d had 222 tags and 205 hits in a 24 hour time span. We’d acquired 300+ figures in our Street Fighter IV figure collection. Also, I was exhausted. We left before Minibosses took the stage and retreated back to the Convention Center in search of late night food.

We got pastries, a muffin and a piece of zucchini carrot bread at a small cafe on the first floor of the Convention Center. I also got an extremely scalding hot tea. We headed upstairs to get QR codes for the PAX XP scavenger hunt and stopped by the Nintendo Handheld Lounge for a bit. I started the second go through of the Find Mii RPG and by the end of the night, we were up to 300 StreetPass tags and a Plaza Population of 275 Miis other than my own.

The handheld lounge’s pillows were pretty comfortable. My wife flopped over and did her best Mario 64 version of Mario at rest while the player isn’t moving. Eventually my tea cooled enough to drink and we headed back to our hotel, having had a fun-filled and successful first full day of PAX.

PAX Saturday:

We had decided on Friday to focus on the Exhibit Halls on Saturday, since we had spent a grand total of zero minutes in the Exhibit Halls on the first day.

The PopCap Games Plants vs Zombies Zombies were outside the convention center in Saturday Night Zombie dance gear and dancing to Staying Alive when we got there. We got PvZ light up shaded sunglasses from one of the PopCap employees as we walked past.

Passing by Bandland, there was a small queue for Wil Wheaton and I really wanted to buy a copy of his Games Matter chapbook. The enforcer on duty said to come back around noon, but Pax_Lines on Twitter said the line was closed before then and that there was a special guest joining Wil at his booth.

Once inside the exhibit hall, we headed straight to the Nintendo booth for the Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary lanyards they were giving out and to try out the new Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword game. My wife tried out Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D to get a free poster and I asked if there was any StreetPass or SpotPass activity available. I found it very odd that there was nothing for StreetPass or SpotPass in the Nintendo booth. Capcom’s booth nearby got me Capcom employees in my Plaza and lots of Street Fighter hits, enough to max out my 500 figure collection. Sadly I still need 50 figures due to duplicates.

My wife had fun playing Ocarina 3D, but it was the same game that came out over a decade ago. I didn’t care for the control scheme for Skyward Sword, but we both had fun playing the dungeon level that was one of three available to try out. There was also a boss battle and a demo of the bird racing portion of the game available to try out.

After Nintendo, we were headed for the Ska Studios booth and I got distracted by the giant Dragon booth where Bethesda was giving out those cool not viking hats. We spent around an hour and forty minutes in line and got to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for 15 minutes and acquire hats. Some red-headed woman got to cut us in line, which I thought was rude… no wait, it was Felicia Day, fine she can cut. Sadly, we couldn’t watch her playing because of where we were in line at the time, but we know she was there and that was a pretty cool thing. My wife missed catching a Prey2 shirt that was thrown directly to her, because the woman next to her was faster in grabbing it. Prey2 looks pretty great from the demo reel they showed. I’ve never played Prey and may check it out just on the interest I now have for the second game. Skyrim was an Elder Scrolls game. Just like the others in the series but with better graphics and incorporating a lot of the features in later Bethesda titles like Fallout 3. I’ve never been a huge fan of open world “American” RPGS, but this one felt pretty good to play. I liked the little details like fish in the water and butterflies and birds in the air that showed up as I was walking. It felt very immersive. But really, I was there for the hat.

We finally made it to the Ska Studios booth and I bought a red Z0MBIES tee shirt. We played the Windows Phone 7 version of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 and Time Viking and ENDL3SS Z0MB1ES!!!1 modes as well. I didn’t care for Time Viking but ENDL3SS Z0MB1ES!!!1 is like crack on a phone. I am jealous of the few people in the world with Windows Phone 7 devices that will be able to purchase the game sometime in the future.

James and Michelle and former Ska employee SuperDunner and another friend were playing Charlie Murder, so we took as much swag as we could and left them to their game, planning to return later and check out their other new game.

We took our lunch break at Jimmy John’s in the US Bank Centre. On they way there we passed by a guy busking playing “Black” by Pearl Jam on his iPhone app, Guitarism (rhism.com). We had a Bootlegger Club sandwich and some Barbecue Chips and there was definitely MSG in those “all natural ingredients” chips. I didn’t really care much at the time, I really needed to eat.

We unloaded our swag and decided to check out Halo Fest next. Halo Fest proper was all about Microsoft’s Halo franchise. What was cool was they also had demos of Fruit Ninja Kinect and Forza 4 Kinect to play. We played Fruit Ninja Kinect twice and had a ball. I also got some Halo mini-figures from MegaBloks that were a nice little collectible and some other Halo swag that wasn’t all that great. We found a discarded Street Fighter X Tekken poster that my wife’s coworker really wanted on a table at Halo Fest as well, so in the end, Halo Fest was a great place to visit.

Next we headed back to the convention center proper and returned to the exhibit hall, where we played Fruit Ninja Kinect at the Halfbrick Studios booth, I found a bug playing Charlie Murder at the Ska Studios booth (Rex “died” when my wife’s character, Lester inadvertantly shocked him with her guitar. I talked to James and Dustin about the bug and then we headed to our first panel of the day, the Harmonix Reverse Q&A at the Serpent Theatre. By this point in the day, I’d amassed an army of 357 Miis in my plaza and 400 StreetPass tags. We were mostly done with Find Mii RPG’s second run through.

They handed out very heavy die cast Dance Central cassette “bling” necklaces. Horrible swag. The panel was also shitty. Harmonix spent the first half of their hour giving a demo of their new iOS app, VidRhythm. I had only briefly read about VidRhythm earlier in the week but since it was a reverse Q&A, I offered a suggestion of what I thought it was. I was right. It takes a quick ten second clip and mashes it up with a pre-recorded song and one of several video templates. It is like a bunch of other pointless iOS apps and it will be $1.99 and probably sell like hotcakes later this year. The only thing the VidRhythm demo was good for was the Wil Wheaton/Paul (of Paul and Storm)/Jonathan Coulton/Stephen Toulouse/Larry Hryb cameos in their first video.

Next, they focused their attention to Dance Central 2. They had a booth for Dance Central 2 on the exhibit hall floor. I don’t give a shit about Dance Central and neither did the majority of the audience based on their reaction when they brought up some songs that were going to be in the game.

The Harmonix developers treated Rock Band 3 as almost an afterthought. They asked the crowd why they were still interested in a “five year old” game and gave the impression that they were “done” with the franchise. I didn’t like that one bit. They asked for suggestions on where they should next go with rhythm peripheral games. I wanted to offer that they should return to their Frequency/Amplitude type games with no need for seperate peripherals. They wouldn’t call on me. Their loss.

To close out the panel, the Harmonix folks invited anyone with Dance Central bling necklaces to Top Pot Doughnuts to hang out with them, play Dance Central and VidRhythm and eat doughnuts and coffee on them.

Instead of hanging out with assholes from Boston, we got in line at the Raven Theatre for the Education Through Play panel. I was shocked at how full the line was. Apparently James Portnow, the CEO of Rainmaker Games and Dan Floyd of Pixar Canada, who host a podcast called Extra Credits, are incredibly popular. Portnow spent most of the panel pontificating on the need for change in the American Educational System and spent zero time explaining how he was going to orchestrate said change. One of the creators of Everquest was also added to the panel since two of the guests were not able to make it due to Hurricane Irene. A woman from Valve Software, who wasn’t scheduled for the panel at all and was there to attend as an audience member, added herself to the panel and was the only person there who admitted she didn’t have answers but was at least open to trying to use games like Portal 2 and Fold-it to encourage educational growth.

I absolutely felt like I was at some business seminar and no longer at PAX during this panel. When they got to the Q&A portion, over 60 people jumped up and got in line to “ask questions”. The majority were just saying stuff that was ass-kissing to CEO dude. I was pissed. Most of the suggestions they made I have been doing in the workplace for the past ten years. I have no idea why but the CEO dude got a standing ovation from the crowd. He really needs to hook up with Nolan Bushnell and help fund his open source classroom idea. My body was also pissed, as I started coughing uncontrolably and had to leave a bit early.

My Droid 2′s keyboard bug came back and I could no longer type more than one word without it crashing. That sucked.

I headed to the Unicorn Theatre queue for the Dragon Age – The Future panel and got some more StreetPass activity while my wife suffered through the rest of the Education Through Play panel that went fifteen minutes overtime.

She eventually joined me in line and we got into a very full theatre full of excited Dragon Age fans. I’m glad I left early because if we had both stayed through the whole Education Through Play panel, we would not have made it into the theatre for Dragon Age.

The panel talked about several core aspects of the game. The story, scope, combat systems and character customization were all touched on. They said they want the next game to be more of an expanded map of Thedas than the previous games and don’t want to focus on such small regions, like they did in Awakening and Dragon Age II.

Then they opened up for questions. They took two and said everyone else had to sit down and go back up later.

Enter mystery guest Felicia Day.

She got settled while they debuted a trailer for her Dragon Age web series. It looks like it was filmed with a low budget in a park, which is about the norm for a Felicia Day produced series. She said it was very rough and not representative of a final product.

I suspect it was probably a “demo reel” of sorts and the real thing might be marginally better. Still seemed cool though.

I haven’t played Dragon Age II, but people asking questions kept making it sound like they were ashamed for liking it.

The thing I liked about the questions that were asked, mind you still gushing over the writing of the game, the PAX attendees weren’t like the Wil Wheaton “Can I have a hug?” girl from the previous day. Felicia flirted with the dude in costume that asked the third question, but she initiated it and made him a bit more nervous. Otherwise, no one else interacted with the secret unannounced guest. They focused their questions about gameplay and kept bringing up terms like MMO and Tolkien. I don’t really see a resemblance to either when I play the game. They steal a lot more from Martin than Tolkien but the panelists were diplomatic in their responses.

They showed no new game product.

It was a good panel to end our night and I am glad we attended.

We ate crappy New York style pizza on the first floor of the convention center for dinner after trying to sneak in to the last few minutes of the Sega party at Gameworks unsuccessfully. On the way across the street from Gameworks, I completed Find Mii’s second go through and ended our StreetPass activity for the weekend a day earlier than I expected.

I was distraught that my phone was messed up and acquired the new CyanogenMod Gingerbread build for it. I started installing and skipped a step and needed to set the phone back to factory to start the process over. Unfortunately I had moved the factory setting files off of my EeePC before heading to Seattle. The wifi was slow so I slept for a couple of hours while the factory files downloaded. At around 5AM, my phone was back in working order and I was back asleep.

PAX Sunday:

We started out the final day of PAX in the queue room. We got there before doors opened because I wanted to secure the Bastion giveaway scarf and buy the Bastion soundtrack. Our first task was to offer James and Michelle at Ska Studios congratulations on their engagement the night before. James proposed to her via custom code in Charlie Murder. That was cool. My wife also bought her red Z0MBIES shirt. I got both Bastion items at the WB Booth and we got in line for Gotham City Imposters, which sounded like a cool concept. The Xenon Xbox 360 debug units kept bugging out and I ended up causing the team of Batmen to be shorthanded because I tried changing a setting while bored. Due to my bug-induced handicap everyone playing got free tee shirts, which normally only went to the winning team. The game itself was a pretty lame Counterstrike capture the flag mode type game, which disappointed me.

We walked around the exhibit hall a bit more and ended up in line at Bandland at the Wil Wheaton/Felicia Day booth. We bought Wil’s Games Matter and the expanded deluxe version of Happiest Days of Our Lives. My wife had Wil sign our program next to his panel and had Felicia sign next to the Dragon Age panel. It was cool to see both of them there.

We dropped off the bits of swag and purchases at the hotel and headed to Hard Rock Cafe for the PopCap Games party. They weren’t ready yet, so we went to Mishou Cafe and debated lunch. I was under the impression that PopCap was gonna feed attendees so I convinced my wife to just head back to the Hard Rock Cafe and wait it out.

The PopCap Games party kinda sucked. We got the other color of the shaded sunglasses, a cool Saturday Night Zombie set of magnets and an iPhone gelskin but there was a distinct lack of food. We had some cheese and crackers and some vegetables and some mini-doughnuts but not much substance.

The zombies danced and performed on stage for us, and interacted well at the tables with the fans. The Bejeweled Blitz tournament fell flat because unless you had an iOS device, you really couldn’t play in the tournament. Apparently someone was going to be fired as a result of that mishap.

We left after about an hour and ate a proper meal of pepperoni calzone and various assortment of desserts at Mishou and when I was about to give up on PAX and get some sleep at the hotel, my wife decided it was time for a final speed run of the exhibit halls.

We stopped by Bandland and bought the CDs we didn’t have that Paul and Storm and MC Frontalot had for sale. Video Game Orchestra were playing an impromptu show in the corner and while we were there played the Zelda suite as a Link cosplayer and a Shadow Link cosplayer cheered them on.

We visited the sixth floor exhibit hall for the first time and I saw Dan Dixon’s amazing Universe Sandbox for the first time. Universe Sandbox lets you change mass, cause collisions and blow up pieces of the universe and see what happens. It uses real science and is much cooler than the universe presentation we saw at the planetarium last week. I happily took a card from Dixon and thanked him for demoing his product. He described it as “like Minecraft but in space” which I realized a few minutes later when passing the rabid fans chanting “LAVA! LAVA! LAVA!” as Notch demonstrated new lava effects in his hugely popular Minecraft game, that he was adding that comparison for the benefit of “those people”. I was just happy to have an actual universe simulator out there available for me to play with.

We checked out the other indie games and the PAX 10. I thought Retrograde was a pretty cool concept, using a guitar peripheral and combining it with a space shooter. Unfortunately it is only going to be available for PSN, which I don’t have a guitar controller for.

Finding Aurora, a paper folding game seemed like an interesting concept. Dinosaurs Go Home was a fun take on tower defense.

All Zombies Must Die and Orcs Must Die both looked like a lot of fun. I didn’t get a chance to play either but will check them out in the future.

The standout game for me on the sixth floor was Skulls of the Shogun, which is a turn-based RTS type game was amazing. Retro City Rampage is still in development and still feels and plays like Grandtheftendo. I wonder what is taking so long. Both games should be on XBLA in early 2012.

After our time on the sixth floor, we got in the queue line for the (Dire)Wolfman Theatre and went inside to watch the Omegathon Finals. The finals are the traditional close to each PAX and the winner won a trip for two to the Tokyo Game Show.

The Guitarism app guy somehow got into PAX and was now busking on the sixth floor of the convention center.

We watched the two remaining Omeganauts play a competive round of the original Legend of Zelda after Gabe and Tycho joked that the final game included space marines, race cars and gazelles and then revealed it included none of those things when the Zelda theme started playing and the curtains raised.

Each Omeganaut had a navigator, a previously eliminated Omeganaut, armed with the game’s FAQ from the internet to help guide the contestants to the first piece of the triforce. The game was close and fun to watch.

After the finals, we did one final lap of the fourth floor exhibit halls, starting in Bandland buying the VGO CD, then getting swag handed to us at every turn, my wife even getting another of the coveted not viking hats.

We closed out our PAX at the Ska Studios booth playing a final round of ENDL3SS Z0MB1ES!!1 until a rep came to take away the Windows Phone 7s. Michelle gave us both free Charlie Murder tee shirts and we said our final goodbye to her and James and headed back to our hotel, happy to have spent a weekend with cool people, great games and awesome music.

Epilogue (Post-PAX Monday):

Monday morning started very early. I went to Pike Place and waited for The Crumpet Shop to open for breakfast while my wife packed up the swag as best as she could. We split a ham, cream cheese and egg crumpet and a butter and raspberry preserves crumpet and a Crumpet Shop tea. It was a challenge for me to carry all of that back to the hotel but I made it without incident. While The Crumpet Shop is incredibly popular, I’ve had better crumpets from Bimbo Bakeries back here at home.

We finished breakfast and packing and took the light rail back to SEATAC. My bag had to be rescanned at the security checkpoint due to the stupid Dance Central swag. They eventually let us through and we got settled at the gate. I bought a Seattle duffle bag from the Hudson News shop and we stuffed the majority of the swag bags into it, so we were then “carry on legal” with just two carry on items each and it also would help us with our public transit trip home to not have so many bags.

Our flight was uneventful. I didn’t have any near death experiences and we had a safe BART/bus ride home afterward.

We ate lunch at BJ’s Brewhouse at Tanforan and then came home and slept for the afternoon and evening.

Our Seattle vacation/PAX adventures have ended and in less than eight hours, it is back to work and a return to our “normal” lives. Great memories of fun times are all that remain.

The highlight of PAX for me was most definitely being socially engaged in the StreetPass functionality of the 3DS. At one point, I got a tag from a character that commented “I’m behind you” while we were in the Skyrim queue. Sure enough the avatar looked a lot like the guy behind me and I shook his hand in real life. There were hundreds of people playing StreetPass mini-games throughout the weekend and Nintendo could probably generate a lot of sales if they rented out 3DS units to attendees at conventions like PAX in the future.

Just being in Seattle with my wife and not having to think about the rest of the stuff going on in the world was great.

Things have been done since I last wrote. My wife takes a good account of our calendar and keeps it in a note on her Facebook, so I can remember what to write about.

08/18 California Academy of Sciences Nightlife with Adam Savage and Chris Hardwick

I was excited for a geeky night of science jokes and an “80′s theme” when I texted my wife at the beginning of August and asked her to buy tickets for this event. What I didn’t account for is the Pre-PAX plague that I had been stricken with last year returning in full force this year.

I called off from work on the 17th and 18th but had a small amount of energy for this event. We got there early enough for Planetarium tickets and I was hoping for an awesome “all-digital” look at the night sky.

Instead, we got a very lame trip through the universe that I’ve seen much better from the Discovery Channel. I was disappointed in the Planetarium, but this didn’t stop me from still having a somewhat good time watching the pendulum keep time, listening to the DJ spinning 80′s music and sharing a good fried chicken sandwich and turkey sandwich half with my wife.

We saw that the water fountain encouraged the use of drinking tap water versus bottled water in a sign directly above it.

I had thought that the SF Sketchfest portion of the night was all going to be held in the middle glassed in room. I was wrong and we missed Chris Hardwick and Veronica Belmont’s Nerdist Podcast live recording, which was in the African room. Instead, we got to see some cool local comics open for Adam Savage. I liked Edwin Lee. He was funny and brought the 80′s video game and pop culture references. Adam Savage unfortunately did the same stand-up routine he’s done since the first w00tstock: how he handled his kids seeing porn on the internet for the first time.

I’m very bored with that story by this point, as I’d heard it at least four times since 2009. Oh well.

After Adam’s boring stand-up routine, we explored the museum and saw the coolest animals there, the African penguins and the Leafy Seadragon. The aquarium was cool and we hung out until the museum closed.

I was well enough to go to work the next day, but barely, so I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with our huge day of concerts on Saturday.

08/20 Stone Temple Pilots, Cheap Trick, The Hooks, Fuel

Saturday started with the Bonehead Barbecue at the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. I don’t listen to The Bone but a concert with Stone Temple Pilots and Fuel for $30 each was a deal too good to pass up. We bought those tickets the same day as the Cal Academy Nightlife tickets, when I still wasn’t sick.

We missed the first few songs of The Hooks but caught a lot of their set. We had seen them once before at Bottom of the Hill opening for The Toadies. I like their brand of Irish Rock a lot.

Fuel have changed lineups over the years, leaving only the lead singer as an original member. They sounded like a tolerable Fuel cover band. I think the lead singer may have had a cold because he sounded pretty different from how he sounds on decade old CDs. It was still good to see them live.

Cheap Trick rocked the house. They brought out their trademark five necked guitar to close out their set and sent the majority of significantly older than us crowd home happy, I hope.

After many of those previously mentioned old people left, Stone Temple Pilots were in great form for their set to close out the afternoon. I was very happy that we got to hear many classic Stone Temple Pilots tracks. They did a good mix of their top hits with newer material and a few deep tracks thrown in as well. Some stupid woman was whining afterward that “they should have billed the show as Cheap Trick and others” because Stone Temple Pilots’ set wasn’t long enough for her. WAAAH! They played for 70 minutes, which was plenty good enough for a festival act in my book.

I’m glad we spent a second weekend in the park. It was a good show.

08/20 David Berkeley

I won tickets for this Cafe Du Nord show at the Amber Rubarth KC Turner House Concert a few weeks back, again, before I got sick. I felt well enough to push myself to go, mainly because David was playing his first show with a new trio that included Rob Reich on accordion and Alisa Rose on violin. Alisa is from Real Vocal String Quartet and we just saw Rob in late July twice with the Circus Bella All Star Band and with Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters. They are both talented local musicians and I was right that they added a lot to David’s set.

Unfortunately, I’m not really a fan of David Berkeley. Had he been solo, his set would have been boring and there’s a very good chance I would have skipped it. With the trio, I was glad we made the trip. Never can pass up good local music.

08/21 Ramon and Jessica

My wife’s birthday and Ramon and Jessica were playing a show at Yoshi’s in San Francisco! It was going to be awesome… except I’d overextended myself on Saturday and my wife ended up celebrating her birthday alone. Dammit.

She said it was a good show and that Ramon and Jessica got to play three sets. I wish I could have been there but I really did need the rest. Else I wouldn’t have made it to work on Monday and Tuesday and may have had to cancel our trip to Seattle.

Unfortunately my wife got pretty sick on Sunday too. So Monday and Tuesday at work were pure torture for both of us. I considered cancelling the hotel and trying to sell our PAX passes but we didn’t.

08/24 Brandi Carlile, Katie Herzig

Another concert in a park. This one coming after a torturous to me flight to Seattle. The air pressure at 36,000 feet and also on the descent into SEATAC was very painful due to my chest congestion. I’m very glad we were able to fly standby on the earlier in the day flight though. It saved us from having to rent a car, we got to rest for a couple of hours at our hotel and take public bus to Woodland Park Zoo for yet another great show.

We had lunch at Pike Place Public Market’s De Laurenti Food & Wine, grinders and cannoli. Good stuff! I love me some Italian sandwiches and desserts. We also saw an amazing deli case full of sausages that I’d love to have bought and devoured.

The bus to the zoo was surprisingly convenient. I wish our public transit system in the Bay Area worked as well as Seattle’s.

Katie Herzig brought her trio with her from Tennessee just to open for Brandi in Brandi’s hometown. She said onstage that her booking manager described the venue as being much smaller than it actually was. The crowd was pretty big but there was still a lot of space to walk around and the small amount of rain we got between sets and near the end of Brandi Carlile’s show was not at all an annoyance.

I liked two of the three new songs that Katie’s trio performed. Her one “non-hit” Hey Na Na was flubbed a couple of times but it made it unique for the show. I think new song Midnight Serenade was my favorite from their set. Probably because we’d heard the majority of the rest of the songs several times on Vienna Teng’s Inland Territory tour.

Brandi’s set had the crowd response we never can get in San Francisco. Still not anything like you’d see at a European festival, but a bunch of happy people there enjoying great music in a beautiful setting.

One thing I really liked seeing was that they had an American Sign Language interpreter positioned near the front of the stage, so even those with hearing impairment could enjoy the show.

The highlight of Brandi Carlile’s show for me was the encore, which included the twins’ rendition of Sound of Silence, and covers by the band of Forever Young and Hallelujah.

After the zoo show, we headed back to our hotel and got a good night’s sleep, expecting Thursday to be a rest day before PAX. That’s not exactly what happened.

08/25 Exploring Seattle Center and Chittenden Locks

Thursday started early with a walk down 5th Avenue to Top Pot Doughnuts for breakfast. Their doughnuts were big and fresh and I was pleaseed with the experience, except for the pure sugar cane water lemonade. Too sweet with the sweet pastries and a bad choice on my part.

After breakfast, we walked further down 5th Avenue to Seattle Center and took the first elevator up the Space Needle for the morning. I’d never been up the Space Needle and it was cool to see the views on such a clear day. The sun was a bit bright over the city view but looking out at the Puget Sound and the famous Sound Garden was great.

After our Space Needle trip, the heat and everything else caught up with me and I nearly passed out. I needed a drink so we stopped off at the Center House and drank some liquids and got a quick lunch at the burger place there.

We looked into things to do and had almost settled on the Pacific Science Center, but instead took a trip to Ballard after another walk to a bus stop that could get us there. We went to Chittenden Locks, where salmon were migrating up the fish ladder and we figured we’d have a cool experience.

We got there just in time for the 1:00 guided tour and spend around two hours enjoying the history of the locks, seeing a couple of fish and a hungry sea lion and walking amongst the trees in the botanical garden. We saw a nice tame squirrel enjoying lunch being fed to him by a woman on a bench and had a great time just being away on vacation for a while.

When we got home we had dinner at Piroshky Piroshky eating, you probably guessed it a ham, spinach and cheese piroshky. My wife supplemented hers with a small macaroni and cheese from Beecher’s and I added a sweet white nectarine to mine.

Then we headed back to our hotel, where I discovered that Gameworks was $10 for all-we-could-play for the evening. Tank! Tank! Tank! was in our future, thus beginning our PAX adventure that will appear in my next entry.

I tried to get us there in time to see !!! but we arrived too late.  No loss, we headed for Choco Lands after taking a quick break where my wife to get even more CDs from the KFOG tent by the likes of Butterfly Boucher, Elizabeth and the Catapult, David Berkeley, Nellie McKay and a Jordan Burger compilation that had Vienna Teng on it. She got a flashlight and rubber ducky promoting Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and a stuffed Disney On Ice Mickey Mouse plus a random plastic shot glass from the Alice tent. I took photos of Friday and Saturday’s murals and rested in a tree during all of this.

Josh Ritter started playing on Lands End when we departed to the lands of tasty chocolate. He was not noteworthy in the brief bit I heard.

Our first stop was Food Truck Forest for a S’mores Bar ($5) and a Crack Bar (peanut butter, caramel and chocolate) ($5) from Brass Knuckle. We continued onward to Choco Lands and two Epic Cookies (peanut butter and chocolate mint crackle) ($3 each) and enjoyed all of the tasty desserts at a picnic table near the Epic Cookies booth. The desserts we shared were all tasty but the prior day’s chocolate chip and walnut cookie was better than the two we had on Sunday. The Crack Bar was my favorite dessert of the festival. I plan on getting another when Brass Knuckle is at a nearby Off the Grid event in the future.

We headed down the stairs into Eco Lands in search of fruit, but Fat Belly Farms fresh fruit and vegetables were way too pricey. We settled on a Strawberry Banana Smoothie ($7) from Little Village instead and filled up our OSL water bottle while listening to and enjoying the sounds of Ty Segall. The part of Ty’s set we saw was pretty good. I’d probably be okay watching him open for someone again in the future. The smoothie was good but pretty small for $7.

After acquiring water, I was on a mission to find a spot in the cluster of trees near the back of Speedway Meadow. I figured if I could find a shady spot to sit, I would make it through the rest of the festival and hopefully enjoy three great electronic music acts to close out the experience.

We got a spot on a tree low to the ground and I sat through most of Major Lazer’s set. Diplo previously worked with MIA and Switch produced the Santigold album. Unfortunately, their Subsonic like set was dampened by their hypeman constantly yelling at a San Francisco crowd to do something. Like they care what he thinks. Even getting a bunch of girls on stage seemed like a chore. The set would have been a lot better without the hypeman, but as it stands, maybe I should have braved Lands End for Fogerty to check him off the big list of rock legends. With no injury, that probably would have happened.

My wife went to Sabores Del Sur and picked up three chicken empanadas for dinner ($12 for three) between acts. We enjoyed them while watching and listening to a funky and surprisingly jazzy set from Sound Tribe Sector 9. I enjoyed their set a lot more than Major Lazer. The food was good too.

Up next was Deadmau5, but my wife needed to take a break so we took a little walk and caught a bit of the Infamous Stringdusters set on the Panhandle stage. They were a bluegrass band with fiddles and banjo and mandolin and standup bass and had the crowd getting down. Again, the Panhandle didn’t disappoint in a quality musical diversion. We snapped photos of the giant Chia Buffalo and eventually headed back to discover Deadmau5 starting ten minutes earlier than scheduled.

The whole time from the lineup announcement up to that moment I had wanted to see the spectacle of a Deadmau5 show. His set didn’t live up to those expectations. Getting bombed with confetti and glitter by partiers in the crowd was far more entertaining than anything The Fiver was doing on stage. I am glad I stayed in the lively part of the crowd for a few minutes after my wife retreated to our tree. By the time I got to the tree, the adrenaline of anticipating great electronic music and awesome light show wore off. I was in pain again. Deadmau5′s visuals can be freely acquired in an late 90′s or later version of Winamp. Turn on the visualization and play some generic electronic music and you too can be Deadmau5 in your own home.

I gave up around 35 minutes into his set and my wife didn’t mind leaving either. We headed back to Lands End and heard the better parts of the Arcade Fire headlining set as my wife finished last minute shopping and took photos of the Sunday murals. Then we beat the rush and headed for the shuttles and the end of our three day festival adventure.

We bought an encore helping of Homeroom Gilroy Garlic Mac+Cheese ($6), a plate full of Tater Tots with bleu cheese and bits of bacon dip ($6) from Q Restaurant and two desserts from Farmerbrown: a red velvet cupcake and a pecan pie square ($3 each).

It was a mini-feast lunch and something you can probably only experience at Outside Lands.

I bought another refillable water bottle after forgetting the one we bought yesterday at home ($15) but it was worth it because they are great build quality “canteen” style bottles.

Next, I checked in at the Intel Cube and got my free 1GB USB flash drive. When my wife tried to check in for another tee shirt they said she’d have to tweet and she just gave up.

We visited the different tent shops and radio station booths and at the Alice booth I got a Dinner for Schmucks key chain. My wife got magnets. At the KFOG booth they had a bunch of promo CDs for donation and we got quite the haul:

Rachel Platten – Be Here
Serena Ryder – Is It OK
The xx – xx
A Fine Frenzy – Bomb in a Birdcage
+Live+ – Custom Radio Content Liners, Audio Clips & Announcements (The River)
The Brian Setzer Orchestra – Songs from Lonely Avenue
Jarvis Cocker – Further Complications
Evanescence – The Open Door
White Rabbits – It’s Frightening
Meat Puppets – Lollipop

We donated $23 for that selection but probably could have taken them all for a dollar or so. We felt generous because of the cool selection.

As we were selecting CDs, the first band on the Lands End stage, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis started their set. They rapped over a bunch of mainstream music. A standout for me was a rap over Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Otherside. Otherwise, they sounded like a couple of rappers, which isn’t normally something I’d spend a lot of time listening to.

We headed for the other side of the park after hearing Otherside and found a nice comfortable perch on the hay bales across from the Panhandle Stage for Ximena Sarinana’s set.

I liked the interpretive dancer dude and his later recruited female partner in the crowd more than Ximena’s songs. She just doesn’t interest me at all. It was at least relaxing to sit at the stage and we heard much better music there later in the day.

After the Ximena Sarinana set, we headed to Choco Lands and my wife’s date with destiny at the Candybar. We got a S’mores Lollipop ($9), Hot Chocolate with marshmellow ($8) and a chocolate creme brulee ($7). Not only were the prices high, I didn’t like the taste of any of it and the hot chocolate ended up getting thrown away. So much for that experiment.

The Lloyd Family Players roaving band of musicians and flag wavers seemingly followed us through the Eco Lands to Choco Lands. They put on an entertaining performance.

Staying in Choco Lands, we had Epic Cookies’ chocolate chip and walnut cookie ($3) and a half pint of Clover milk ($2). The cookie and milk were much better than the higher cost/lower quality of Candybar.

What was really lacking in Choco Lands was not having Charles Chocolates there. Boy I could have gone for one of THEIR s’mores.

After the Choco Lands excursion, we headed for The Barbary, where we saw two stand-up comedians. Moshe Kasher was a not-gay Jew who interacted well with the crowd, knew how to improvise and put on a good set. Paul F. Tompkins, former host of VH1′s canceled Best Week Ever, was a nervous ninny who didn’t get over well with the crowd, pulled prepared material that wasn’t funny out of his brain and then told one story about Weird Al on I Love the 80′s and his effort to make a joke that Al just didn’t get. Don’t worry, The Barbary crowd didn’t get it either. I think we probably should have left when we heard the growly devil like sounds coming from one of the other stages, after Moshe was done. That was probably some entertaining music whatever it was.

We took a photo with the World Series trophy in the Sports Lounge.

We went to the Prius Playground in the Eco Lands next and stood in line for custom screenprinted tote bags. While wandering by the Panhandle Stage, we heard a familiar song. Christina Perri was performing and played “Jar of Hearts,” which I knew we had heard before and figured she was just covering it. It turns out the song is Christina’s biggest hit so far and Dia Frampton had covered it on The Voice earlier this summer. We became a fan at the Panhandle performance.

The Panhandle Stage has always exposed us to great new artists. That’s one of the joys of going to Outside Lands. A couple of years back, we were introduced to Bat For Lashes on the same stage. I really do applaud Outside Lands for having something for everyone and a great mix of artists no matter what stage you plop down in front of.

After the Christina Perri set, we headed to Twin Peaks and saw Sia (with Adam Christgau, sometimes member of The Paper Raincoat, on drums). Sia was okay and did a great cover of Oh Father which I somewhat recognized but my wife really liked. Too bad her vocal was too low in the mix at the time. The crowd included Vau De Vire stiltwalkers, who lost their drink can on the roof of the soundboard tent. Oops. They did some dancing and left about halfway through Sia’s set. I would have probably left about halfway through too. I’m not big on normal pop acts and had Adam Christgau not been familiar to us, I may have taken a break for part of her set. (Rebuttal from Michele: the second half of Sia’s set was dance fantastic!)

Post-Sia, walking past the Panhandle again, we saw a DJ performing and I needed a break. There was free space on the hay bale so we stopped and relaxed and listened to an amazing set by Eskmo. Eskmo is Brendan Angelides, a local electronic artist who also plays as Welder in a welding mask.

Eskmo is awesome. He sampled a bunch of percussive instruments, like a pan, a cowbell, a shaker, tearing pieces of paper and also his voice and mixes all of that live with some prepared stuff from his laptop. It is a cool thing to watch and a great thing to listen to. I’ve proceeded to download almost his entire catalog since we got home!

After Eskmo, we headed back toward the main stage area, where The Black Keys were playing and we could hopefully get dinner. The crowd was HUGE.

We retreated to the Sutro Stage area and got some I <3 Spicy Pie from there instead, one slice pepperoni and one slice combination pepperoni, sausage and onion ($6 each) and sat at a picnic table and relaxed and ate in peace as the sun went down. The crowd for the Warren Haynes Band started to file in and looked a lot like Deadheads. Once an actual (I assume) Deadhead walked by in a Grateful Dead tee shirt with some odd bling, a frame with medals in it, attached to a lanyard around his neck, like Flavor Flav's clock but weirder, I had to check out exactly who Warren Haynes was. Turns out he is a guitar legend of some sort who plays shitty jammy music. I can tell it is shitty because we retreated from Sutro shortly after his set started. The guitar was bad, the vocals worse. Scary stuff. Keep it away from me!

Day Two ended with a massive headling performance at Lands End with MUSE. We got a decent spot behind the fill speaker again and again the crowd was awfully chatty. During Plug In Baby, the first encore, I hurt my right leg, which sucks. The MUSE show was great. That normally goes without saying. They brought their usual A-Game to Golden Gate Park and I was very happy to be there to experience it.

We got out of the park, onto the shuttle and to the BART station at Civic Center fairly quickly. On the way to the car at Daly City, I twisted my right ankle after stepping on to the curb wrong, likely due to compensating for the already painful leg issue I had had since MUSE's encore. My ankle doesn't hurt this morning, but my foot hurts on the side by my little toe.

Once again, Outside Lands brought great food, great music and surprisingly, one good comedian. I'm glad to have enjoyed a second day of Outside Lands action with my wife in Golden Gate Park.

The esurance shuttle was well worth the $30 premium. The convenience of taking BART to Civic Center, walking a couple of blocks to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and boarding a shuttle that dropped us at the main entrance just south of the Polo Fields far outweighed the cost savings of taking MUNI. The organization and line control setup was handled very well and it was a pleasurable ride through town to start the day and end the night.

Food:

We ate some good food, one great food and some not so good food throughout the day. Outside Lands has an amazing sampling of local eateries, many of which we are introduced to by the yearly festival.

When we first arrived, we tried out American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. They weren’t ready to take orders yet when we arrived, so we stood patiently while the crew working their booth ate their lunches in front of us. Doors for the event were supposed to be at 11:00AM. They let us in after 11:30. Why wasn’t the business prepared to serve customers more than half an hour after the venue should have opened?

The Classic Grilled Cheese sandwich with tomato and bacon that we ordered ($9) was below average in taste. My wife and I both commented that we could make better grilled cheese sandwiches on our own. I did enjoy the smokey tomato soup in a cup ($5) we ordered with it.

Our next food adventure took us to Homeroom Mac + Cheese ($5), which serves, as you guessed it, macaroni and cheese. We had the Gilroy Garlic Mac + Cheese and it was the culinary best experience of the day. It was hot, creamy and fresh and had great taste. Homeroom were overprepared with line control when they didn’t have enough patrons yet, but that overpreparedness was a charm, not an inconvenience like we experienced at American Grilled Cheese Kitchen.

Later in the day, we journeyed into the Choco Lands and I was disappointed that Epic Cookies’ booth was closed. We ended up trying Straw Carnival Faire’s “Flying Saucer” ($5), which was a strange combination of peanut butter mousse, chocolate chunks, candied bacon and caramel. Their line control was a bit odd, but they seemed to know what they were doing. On first bite, I didn’t know if I liked it, but several bites in, I got just the right mixture of ingredients to have a good taste. Unfortunately, it was only good for that one bite. A “flying saucer” is a unique dish, but if I want carnival faire, I think I’ll just go for a funnel cake somewhere or something deep-fried in the future.

For dinner, we had a barbecue pulled-pork sandwich from Maverick ($10) with strawberry lemonade ($4). It was a perfectly edible meal, supplemented with chips and cole slaw as a topping on the sandwich. It wasn’t a huge WOW THIS IS SO GOOD experience but also not a bad experience like the grilled cheese earlier. The service was fast and with a smile at the busy dinner rush.

For dessert, we ate at Loving Cup, a small stand near the Twin Peaks stage. I had the chewy chocolate pecan with vanilla frozen yogurt sandwich ($5) and my wife had the vanilla/coconut rice pudding ($5). Outside of the cookie being hard to chew, my sandwich was a great dessert and just the sugary pick-me-up I needed to get through the last couple of hours of the day. My wife enjoyed her rice pudding, even though she doesn’t care for coconut. The service good, especially considering there was loud music blaring out of a fill speaker when I ordered both items.

Music:

We started out our sonic experience with New Orleans Klezmer All Stars on the Lands End Stage. They were great background music while we ate lunch and explored the culinary options on the Polo Field. They played all-instrumental Klezmer numbers with a wide variety of instruments. We didn’t really see the band at all, but they sounded good from our eating points.

The majority of our afternoon, we were entrenched at the Sutro stage, where the acts we had expected to see were playing. Sutro is located in Lindley Meadow and the stage setup was good this year.

Our first Sutro band was The Joy Formidable. I had listened to their albums and not really cared for their recorded experience. Live, they were a bit better. Their drummer put in an outstanding performance and was entertaining enough to carry the guitar/vocalist and bass player, even if they were stumbling with tuning issues and even if the songs weren’t otherwise noteworthy. I still wouldn’t seek out The Joy Formidable to see on their own, but as a festival performance, I was entertained and the music certainly wasn’t bad.

Up next was Phantogram. The placement of apple bongs and tall people around us and my earplugs being in a bit too tight dampened the performance for me. The outstanding part of their performance was their generous use of synthesizers. They were another female vocalist three-piece band and during their set, I thought a combination of the vocals and drums from The Joy Formidable with the synthesizer and bass from Phantogram would have been a much better show than the two actual sets.

So that brings us to Foster the People, who put on the show of the day. The six-piece band incorporates lots of percussion, keyboards, guitar and bass with catchy vocals and a ton of energy. The crowd showed up in huge numbers, so the secret is out and I don’t expect to see Foster the People in any smaller venue than The Fox in Oakland by the time they come back to the area in the future. Their cover of “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer, accompanied by the story that Rivers Cuomo taught Foster the song when he first moved to LA, and Weezer had begun covering “Pumped Up Kicks” was the highlight of their truly standout set for me.

I took a bit of a walk/water/bathroom break after Foster the People. I bought the refillable water bottle from the OSL tent ($15 with unlimited refills all weekend and future OSL events). I stumbled upon a K Flay show just starting at the Toyota Free Yr Radio booth and watched for a couple of songs. For just a girl with a laptop and a drummer, she was putting on a great show. I also liked the atmosphere. It was a tent with a disco ball going and a small stage with a small PA. Very intimate compared to the huge sprawl of some of the other stages.

When I returned to Sutro, Ellie Goulding was partway through her set. Ellie is a pop singer. Her set was very much a dancey pop set. Katy Perry did a soldout show elsewhere in the Bay Area. Ellie Goulding’s music is about on par with Katy Perry’s. I’m not interested in either, but I’m sure Ellie will do fine if her songs get regular airplay.

After a dinner break, we headed to the Twin Peaks stage to close out our night. We passed by The Limousines playing on the Panhandle stage. They had a good crowd and their performance of their big hit “The Internet Killed the Video Star” was good. I had heard a bit of MGMT from the Lands End stage while I was in line for water, and I’d say I have the same basic feeling for both MGMT and The Limousines. They are two bands who had popular singles that I just didn’t care about. Unfortunately, when you listen to the radio, you have to end up at least somewhat liking what you hear or else you change the channel. Live 105 does a great job of forcing these bands down my eardrums. I’d never pay to see either band. Hearing their music while walking through the park is just like listening to Live 105 on the radio. I don’t want to change the channel, but there is probably something better on another station.

We finished dinner and Big Audio Dynamite were already partly through their set on the Twin Peaks stage when we arrived. Mick Jones was already a legend as the singer and guitarist for The Clash before he formed Big Audio Dynamite. Even as a legend and reuniting with BAD for this tour to cash in on the 80′s nostalgia craze, Mick is taking things seriously. They had new material and played through their 80′s hits as well. The band seemed to have a great time on stage and definitely put the passion and energy into putting in a great show. I’m glad we got to check them out and glad Outside Lands was one of their destinations on their very brief US tour.

The lengthy break between Big Audio Dynamite and Twin Peaks Friday headliner The Shins was filled with us sitting at a picnic table and resting. A couple of guys sitting at the table noticed the girl from The Joy Formidable walk by and took off running after her. They were definite fans, both having on The Joy Formidable tee shirts. They ended up taking photos and a short video with the band. That’s a cool fandom tidbit for the night.

The Shins didn’t sound like they were half a band different than when we last saw them. They didn’t sound like they were doing their first show in several years. They sounded like The Shins. Their hits sounded like their hits. Their new stuff sounded like it was by The Shins. The very chatty crowd around us and the exhaustion that had set in, as well as my choice to not go deep into the crowd and make a quick exit after the set probably dampened the experience, but it was a good way to close out the night.

Something happened near the fill speaker we were standing near. A guy either fell or intentionally tried to take out the fence around it. Security got him up and away from the fence and put it back together quickly. No idea the fate of the guy that went down.

Our exit from the festival was a lot faster than I expected. We heard Phish’s jammy closing number that had a line that said “Whatever you do take care of your shoes” in it. Odd advice, but with rocks and foliage all through our shoes, it was good to stop and empty them out before our long walk to the shuttle.

Technology:

In this now high-tech world we live in, cell phone apps and connected smart phones are the norm. The Outside Lands Festival’s many sponsors have booths to try to connect you more to their products and are using social networking and apps to reel us in.

Foursquare is the app of choice for Intel. Visiting the Intel Cube and checking in got us a flash drive and a tee shirt. Probably the best technology swag available at the festival.

SCVNGR is the app selection by esurance, who seem to really only be giving out bandanas. Lame. The app is also lame.

Foodspotting seems like a cool app. I took photos of some of my food selections but I can’t say what I may or may not get out of it.

esurance also has a cell phone charging lounge but the stations were mostly full most of the day.

American Express is pushing their Serve (PayPal-like) program with a cool looking Barcade. I don’t want to sign up so I passed at the free tokens and $10 credit.

I bought a jammypack ($40) fanny pack with built-in amplified speaker. I wanted something almost exactly like that, and it had good build quality so I jumped at it even though I am sure it was a tad too expensive. (http://jammypack.com/)

Wrap-up:

Overall, Day One of Outside Lands 2011 was exhausting but well worth it. We had good experiences throughout the day and I have to hand it to Another Planet Entertainment for bringing together such a diverse set of artists, food vendors and a great atmosphere. They also contracted out to street artists to add to that atmosphere and it really helped with the experience as well. Outside Lands 2011 is already a winner in my books and we are only 1/3 of the way through it!

Tony Head and the cast of Merlin
Nathan Fillion and the cast of Castle
DOCTOR WHO and his companions

…and not much else.

I’ve met Tony Head and Nathan Fillion. We had two concerts in the Bay Area to attend. Which would have turned out better?

Sunday was a difficult day for me. I woke up with a horrible headache as the result of tooth grinding in my sleep and just overall was exhausted. I ate a turkey burger and it gave me enough of a boost to get ready and travel to San Francisco, to the venue where plans for the previous day’s dinner party had been finalized.

We went to see Amber Rubarth at a house concert. Also in attendance were three people who we had seen hours earlier and played Rock Band and Cards Against Humanity with, and one friend who sadly was on a flight home from New York and missed the dinner party experience.

It was great to see all of them again.

The show opener, Bobby Jo Valentine was a happy man, excited to be opening for someone as great as Amber Rubarth. He did a song on ukulele that I kind of liked. Otherwise, nothing remarkable. He was a tolerable opener.

Now I am going to mention something many may or may not know about me. I don’t really care for Amber Rubarth. Some of her songs are okay, but I can’t really say I’m a fan. The crowd at the house concert still made it an enjoyable experience and their energy and expression made her show that much better.

I don’t know the names of her songs, but Amber played Rough Cut and In the Creases which she co-wrote with Alex Wong of The Animators, a song she co-wrote with Jason Mraz and several other songs like Washing Day which I had heard before. She even did one she thought she hadn’t ever played but remembered suddenly while playing another song. For an Amber Rubarth show it was a pretty good show.

Even if I had hated the show, I won the raffle between acts and got free tickets to see David Berkeley at Cafe du Nord on August 20 out of it. We had seen David Berkeley at the same house concert venue a couple weeks back… when the dinner party became more of a reality and less of a dream.

After the show was over, we were all hungry, so we took a walk down the hill with two of our friends and ate at Queen Malika, a small creperie on 18th. I had a crepe with spinach, ham, cheese, green onion, mushroom and egg in it and it was honestly the best crepe I have ever eaten. I tipped the guy $5 extra because I was so happy with my meal. If you’re ever in the area, definitely check the place out! I’ll even go to really bad house concerts in the future if it means I’ll get to eat there again.

We said goodbye to that set of friends after they were nice enough to drive us back up the hill to our car, and headed to Berkeley (the town, not the singer, I realize that may be confusing but this whole entry kind of is for me at this point) to see another friend in another band in yet another concert.

We went to Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse, one of our favorite venues, and saw Circus Bella All-Star Band, lead by Rob Reich and featuring Dina Maccabee, a couple of Japonize Elephants and several other familiar faces from great local bands. We saw Dina on the way in and bought a pinwheel and a cd from the merch table before taking our seats.

Almost two hours of great 1920′s sounding but written in the last few years circus music ensued, complete with gymnasts, juggling, a unicycle and a contortionist. It was a miniature circus with a BIG band.

I really loved ending our huge extravaganza of Not@Comic-Con with the happy sounds of the circus. I have to thank Dina and our other friend, the production manager at the venue, for giving us the opportunity to experience such a fitting finale to our adventures.

We said goodbye and see you soon to Dina and headed home.

Not@Comic-Con Weekend was officially over.

Would I have rather been at Comic-Con Sunday… nah.

On Saturday, we weren’t at Comic-Con. We did however have a very cool genre fandom related event, and we didn’t even have to leave home for it!

What we missed at Comic-Con:

Chuck Panel
Joss Whedon Panel
The Guild Panel
Fables Panel
Mythbusters Panel

I’m certain either reviews or in the cases of Chuck, Whedon and The Guild, the full video of the panels are online and ready for me to catch up on. I don’t really know any other details as I’ve been a bit busy!

What we did instead:

“This is from Vienna’s Eclectic Arts fanzine interview:

Mark: When you were talking about cooking, it reminded me of like a dinner show where fans could pay, like, $200 to have a meal cooked by you (laughs)

V: (laughs) That’d be kind of amazing. I was actually thinking….Alex is an amazing cook. He’s much better than I am, and I was thinking at some point we should do some kind of event where there’s a show, and then there’s also a separate event where people come over and we cook for them or something (laughs). That would be really funny. We both enjoy food a lot. If there’s a way to make it a part of what we do musically that would be pretty fun.

I was thinking at some point like what if I did a show in which I was singing songs that I grew up with, like Chinese songs that I grew up with and maybe there’d be a story behind each one accompanied by some kind of food. So it’d be like a series of, like, a tapas kind of dinner (laughs). With songs, you know, to go with each one. I thought that’d be kind of cool. It’s one of the projects that I’ve decided to set aside time to develop a little more over this summer.

OK Bay Area Tengsters, summer’s here, and Vienna’s here, by good luck – it’s time to make this dinner party happen! We may not get a typical performance, but we do have Rock Band 3. \m/

The guest list is closed; this is a thank you for your dedication over the years! But we need to know how many people to cook for, so if you need to +1 please let us know in advance. The address will be sent to attendees.

The party starts at 5. Dinner will be served at 6:30pm. If you have dietary needs, let us know and Vienna will be happy to work with it.

If something comes up with Vienna’s schedule, we hope you’ll still join us for a fan get-together. It’s been a while!”

Vienna Teng was going to cook for her fans and we were hosting the party at our house.

My wife’s grandmother was excited about the prospect of us hosting the gathering and truly did almost all of the preparation work to get the house ready for holding slightly under 30 guests at once for dinner and a couple of other activities.

My wife discovered (through some browsing of Kickstarter) a truly disturbing party game called Cards Against Humanity and we ordered one of the 13 remaining copies of it and had it shipped in time for the party.

On Friday night after the Ben Folds show, we bought some “emergency food” in case we didn’t end up having enough to feed all of the guests a proper dinner. That food consisted of a party size Stouffer’s four cheese lasanga, a vegetable tray, some Newman’s Own Lemonade, chips and salsa.

On Saturday morning we put table cloths on the dining room and kitchen tables and the “open” rooms in the house actually looked ready to serve our guests needs. My wife’s grandmother did a wonderful job preparing things.

We celebrated by going to Popeye’s Chicken and Batter Up for lunch. Popeye’s is the same sort of low quality chicken you can get at any of their chain locations. No need for me to describe. Batter Up on the other hand seems to be unique to one hole-in-the-wall location. They have gourmet batter coated corndogs made with tasty sausage combinations and also had some interesting battered and fried desserts. We tried the Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter cup desserts and my wife had a lemon chicken and turkey with sun-dried tomato sausage combo. The deep-fried and battered Snickers was the highlight of the experience for me. In this case, Snickers actually really did satisfy.

We got home and got ready for our guests to start to arrive. They started arriving at 4pm.

We had lots of food.

A couple of my favorite dishes at dinner were Vienna’s combination of cauliflower and nectarines seasoned and cooked together and a tasty pasta dish made by another friend. Favorite dessert, despite there being MANY great desserts (I tried to sample as many as I could but was too full still from that deep fried Snickers to eat too much) was the simple batch of oatmeal cookies from Vienna’s sister.

After the crowd ate and started to settle in, we opened up Cards Against Humanity and somewhat to my surprise, everyone kind of embraced the idea of playing along. We laughed and cringed depending on the combination of black and white cards and ultimately had a fun time learning which of us was most horrible, even though we all seem like such nice people.

The game wrapped up at 9:50, ten minutes before the party was supposed to officially end. We said goodbye to some of our guests and were sad to see them go. The energy of having twenty-some people in our living room/dining room/kitchen and hallway was pretty amazing.

Someone asked for a song. One of the guests had brought a guitar but he wasn’t yet ready to play. Instead, we started up Rock Band 3 and took rotations amongst many of the remaining guests on the different instruments.

Fifteen songs later, it was time for another break. Some people went for more dinner. Others departed. It was already well after midnight.

A small group of us were talking in the kitchen when it suddenly got quiet. Vienna had picked up the other guest’s guitar and started playing.

She played three songs on the guitar:

Cranberry Lane (Ari Hest cover)
Don’t Be Afraid (The Paper Raincoat cover)
Seedling #4

The guest that brought the guitar then did a short set of his own. He has some really great song fragments and I hope to one day hear the finished product from him. It was really nice to have him share with us like that.

We talked a bit about our piano. One of the other guests attempted to play it earlier and a couple of the keys no longer made sound when they were pressed. Vienna told a couple of road stories and I shared the tale of Ben Folds and the broken sustain pedal from the night before.

Eventually this lead to Vienna Teng playing four songs on our piano in our living room.

House
In My Arrival
Boy at the Piano
Winter (Tori Amos cover)

When Vienna sang Winter and many of the remaining guests lent their voices to the song as well, it really felt magical.

The party winded down with a two song encore, our traditional closing numbers of “The Final Countdown” by Europe and “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey on Rock Band.

After that, almost everyone said their goodbyes. One friend stayed to help us decompress from the excitement a bit.

The party officially ended around 5AM.

In the eight years or so that we’ve known Vienna, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a house concert with her in our home. This was a far better experience than any house concert I’ve ever been to. It was a personal, social and warm and interactive event. Everyone could play as much of an active role as they so chose. We all shared what we wanted to and in return got to experience what each of the others shared.

It was really one of the best social experiences of my life.

Host a dinner party with great friends and warm strangers: Achievement Unlocked

Instead we saw Ben Folds in concert. Read on to see if we made the right choice.

On Friday, after a full day of work that ended with me RAGE quitting a data query, I headed to Blondie’s Pizza and met up with a friend for a quick meal before we and my wife went to The Warfield to see Ben Folds and his latest incarnation of a band perform songs in support of Lonely Avenue.

The pizza was good and even though my wife got stuck in traffic, she still had time to grab some chicken tenders at Carl’s Jr. and scarf them down quickly before heading inside for the show. I stayed with her outside while our friend went in and kept the panhandlers from accosting her. Despite my valiant efforts, one almost slipped by me.

When we got inside, we bought the deluxe edition of the album which I thought we already owned but definitely didn’t. We headed upstairs and discovered our friend was literally sitting right in front of us. This meant we were spending a second night in a row with the good company of our friend at what we hoped would be another great concert.

Kenton Chen opened up the night with a short set. He was the dorky Asian guy who masterminded the creation of The Backbeats, a Los Angeles based Acapella group on this past season of The Sing Off, a reality show that Ben Folds is a judge on.

Kenton’s set was adequate for an opener but he really is a dork and doesn’t just play one on TV. He started off with a looping vocal version of the Linda Perry classic “Toxic” that was written for Britney Spears and balanced that out later in the set with a looping vocal track about how he hates pop culture, particularly women using sex to sell CDs or something like that.

He was very excited to have been on the tour and encouraged everyone to stop by and see him and get his CD at the merch booth.

It wasn’t a horrible trainwreck but Kenton didn’t do anything to make me want to buy his CD.

Ben Folds and his band took the stage and something magic happened. It was the last night of their tour and the band was very loose and did some jams throughout the night. They covered Ke$ha’s Sleazy at one point and midway through the set Ben mentioned how his son was 12 years old that day and he played “Still Fighting It” the song he wrote for Louis shortly after he was born. After the song, he mentioned that Louis’ twin sister Gracie was born the next day and that they were born “on the cusp of Asparagus and… I don’t know I’m not good with that astrology stuff”. He explained he had also written a song for Gracie and was about to play it when…

His sustain pedal was not working.

Ben Folds is a notorious piano abuser. This is the same man that in college was a drummer and got mad and literally threw his drum kit in the lake. Earlier in the show he had told a story of how a few nights before he had thrown his phone in the hotel pool and Ke$ha jumped into the pool fully clothed and retrieved it for him. He has a knack for destroying things.

While an army of piano technicians came out to repair the piano, Ben started out by doing an a capella version of Randy Newman’s “Old Man” which he added some Neil Young to at the end. He said he used to use the song as a lullaby for Louis and Gracie when they were young.

When the technicians reported the piano still wasn’t operable and Ben even tried the pedal himself, he proceeded to start an onstage drum circle and we watched in horror as parts of the piano were dismantled before our very eyes. But our ears were pleased by the percussion and later bass playing by Ben and members of his band. Ben also at one point in what could have been a disaster brought out a DANGER Wet Floor sign and put it on top of the piano.

Eventually the piano worked again. He played “Gracie” and then called out his kids and had the crowd sing “Happy Birthday” with him and the band to the two 12 year olds. They were presented with cakes and Louis asked if he could smash it into his face on stage and then decided to just go in the back and eat it.

Whether it be Lonely Avenue songs, tracks from other recent work, covers, jams to fill in piano repair, jams just to express themselves or concert staples, Ben and his band kept the crowd going throughout the night and played a nice long set and a two song encore.

We left The Warfield and I had a huge grin on my face. I like how talented musicians can create things that make me so happy.

Kenton Chen Setlist:
Toxic
Fierce Tears
Take Me Home
(Song about Pop Culture)
Anthem

Ben Folds Setlist:
Levi Johnston’s Blues
Doc Pomus
Gone
Belinda
Sleazy (Ke$ha cover)
Sentimental Guy
You To Thank
Effington
Not The Same
(Ryan Lerman bass solo)
Still Fighting It
Old Man (Randy Newman cover)
Drum Circle/Bass Jam
Gracie
Happy Birthday
Annie Waits
Bastard
You Don’t Know Me
Saskia Hamilton
Rock This Bitch
Landed
Zak and Sara
Hiroshima (Ben sang it in Japanese)
Kate (Ben Folds Five song)
Army (Ben Folds Five song)
Encore:
The Luckiest (Ben dedicated it to his wife)
Philosophy (Ben Folds Five song)

What we missed at Comic-Con:
Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson at the Adventures of Tintin panel. We would have missed this anyway and the big news was Jurassic Park 4 might actually be made in the next few years. Also, some lucky dude wore a shirt that said something to the effect of “I’d like to meet Stephen Spielberg just to shake his hand and tell him thank you.” He got to meet and take photos with the two directing legends.

Star Trek: The Captains panel which will be broadcast as part of William Shatner’s miniseries on whatever channel it gets picked up on… or YouTube whichever comes first.

The Locke & Key pilot, which didn’t make it to air and probably won’t be seen anywhere else. Not that big of a deal but it was filmed in Pittsburgh and was written by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill. Would have probably enjoyed this if we could have gotten into it.

Ballroom 20 had a huge Torchwood panel with Jane Espenson and all of the principle actors of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I saw what was probably a much better Torchwood panel several years back before they started killing people off. I don’t think I missed much at this year’s panel but may have attempted to go to it if I was at Comic-Con. This choice would have made me miss the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin panel.

We also missed apparently cool John Cho in Total Recall footage, Andy Serkis asking a question from the audience mic of Peter Jackson during the Tintin panel, Andrew Garfield asking a question in a Spider-Man costume from the audience mic, Adam Savage as Batman and one of the other principle actors from Spider-Man getting arrested for harassing and assaulting a Hall H security person.

It is very easy to say we made the right choice on Friday.

Instead on Thursday we saw The Mars Volta and SOUNDGARDEN at Bill Graham Civic. Read below to see if we made the right choice.

Here’s the Facebook note I posted to justify why Comic-Con isn’t where I am right now:
“Real American Heroes-
I don’t go to San Diego Comic Con anymore mainly because all that ends up happening there is 100,000 people fight for spots in Hall H to see the cast of some movie that will end up being shitty. They sit through Twilight panels and worse and in the end everything they wanted to see shows up on YouTube minutes later. Last year some dude even got stabbed in the eye. Apparently Marvel and their parent company Disney feel the same way. They gave the finger to Hall H this year and are doing their big panels at Disney’s own D23. So, Marvel and Disney, you two real men of genius, I salute you.”

So far, I’ve missed out on several angry mobs of people, like the 7,000 people locked out of the Game of Thrones panel because they were dumb enough to put the most popular show on Pay-TV in Ballroom 20 and not Hall H and they scheduled it after Sarah Michelle Gellar’s panel, which also turned thousands away because Whedon fans have a weird sense of entitlement and probably camped there starting Monday.

I regret not being able to attend the following panels:

The TV Guide Fan Favorites panel included Zachary Levi (Chuck), Matt Smith (The Doctor), Jorge Garcia (Hurley), and a bunch of people from other shows. Would have been fun to be there for but I’m sure it will show up online.

I wouldn’t have attended the WWE/Mattel panel but there was a cool three minute “angle” between CM Punk and HHH that took place and was captured on video and posted to YouTube. Would have been cool to have been part of the small crowd for that three minutes, but not a huge deal.

I also wouldn’t have attended but would have enjoyed watching the Awake pilot as the premise seems pretty cool.

Where we would have been for Comic-Con Thursday:
Ballroom 20 Line: 7:30-10

Burn Notice/Covert Affairs/Psych panels we wouldn’t have really cared about, while camping in Ballroom 20: 10-2

Ringer Panel with Sarah Michelle Gellar (BUFFY) (Ballroom 20)

Game of Thrones Panel (Ballroom 20)

TV Guide Fan Favorites Panel (Ballroom 20)

Buffy and LGBT Comics Fandom (32AB) (second half if we could have gotten in)

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (6BCF) (if we could have gotten in)

What we did instead:

The Mars Volta/SOUNDGARDEN at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

We had fan club pre-sale tickets. My wife arrived at 4:30, got our tickets and had a nice shaded wall to sit next to. She was around 20-30 deep in the line, not far from the front. In contrast, the general ticketing line was in direct sun and started before noon. We were very fortunate to get the fan club pre-sale tickets and also got Soundgarden labeled venue wristbands for the show as a sort of keepsake.

I got there around 5:45, ate a quick Whopper sandwich and got ready to go inside. We were ushered in quickly. My wife ran up the stairs and got us front row center balcony seats. I got a bit lost but eventually caught up with her after calling to ask where she was when I was directly at the top of the stairs above her. She “saved” a bunch of seats for a friend and their friends but the friends sat somewhere else. Our friend had to make a choice between which group of friends to sit with and ultimately chose to sit with us.

I took a nice 30 minute nap during the majority of The Mars Volta’s set. It was incredibly boring. They seem to have a huge fan base and play 3+ hour shows to sell out crowds… but I didn’t see or hear anything to hold my interest. The lead singer writhed around and crawled across the stage a lot. They made lame comments about Full House, The Facts of Life and San Francisco in general. I enjoyed my nap.

SOUNDGARDEN came on around 8:45 and weren’t done until a little after 11. They opened with Searching With My Good Eye Closed, which is one of my favorites and played an awesome mix of fan favorites and tracks a bit deeper into their catalog. I didn’t remember Ugly Truth (which was on the album Louder than Love) and initially thought it might have been Black Rain… until they played Black Rain later in the set. Outside of those two somewhat unremarkable songs, the set was great. It was loud… and it was much better than I expected.

The show had visuals tied to each “era” of Soundgarden and a lot of the artwork from Live From I-5 and Telephantasm once they reached the middle of the set projected behind the band.

The lights were great. We remarked between sets that the stage setup was pretty spartan with just some amps, drums and monitors out there before the band came on. The lights and visuals made it MUCH more than the stage setup conveyed.

Hearing the monstrous sound of SOUNDGARDEN live was a really good experience and I’m very glad they reunited to bring this back to the fans. That said, you could tell throughout some of the songs that they were just going through the motions. On others, pretty much everywhere from Head Down through the end of the show, it seemed like they were really having fun. I kind of wish that “having fun” energy had been there the whole show, but SOUNDGARDEN has historically started off a bit rigid in their shows.

Chris mumbled the beginning of several of the songs. That may have been due to how he was holding the mic or just due to plain forgetting words here and there. The band debuted two songs they hadn’t played in 15 years in Drawing Flies and Head Down and they didn’t miss a beat on either track. Chris joked he had forgotten one word during Drawing Flies but I didn’t notice.

While the sound in the venue was a bit uneven, for example in our section it was extremely hard to hear Kim’s guitar part on many songs, based on Twitter comments it was hard to hear anything but bass in other areas, it wasn’t bad.

I was impressed that the band played for over two hours. Chris’ voice held out through plenty of screaming vocals. Neither Ben nor Kim self-destructed during the show and the whole band really showed that they love the songs.

Either that or it was an elaborate ruse to get people to buy posters and tee shirts, of which the band’s merch tables had plenty to choose from.

The highlight of the show for me was the ending, a giant climatic wall of sound delivered from vocal, bass and guitar feedback that kept rolling for what felt like ten minutes. Ben angled his amps to feedback off of each other and the bass and the boom and roll through my seated body was awesome.

Here’s the setlist for the night:

The Mars Volta:

1.Aegis
2.The Whip Hands
3.Molochwalk
4.Dyslexicon
5.Broken English Jam
6.Goliath

SOUNDGARDEN:

1.Searching With My Good Eye Closed
2.Spoonman
3.Room a Thousand Years Wide
4.Jesus Christ Pose
5.Blow Up the Outside World
6.The Day I Tried to Live
7.My Wave
8.Ugly Truth
9.Fell on Black Days
10.Loud Love
11.Drawing Flies
12.Outshined
13.Nothing to Say
14.Rusty Cage
15.Black Hole Sun
16.Black Rain
17.Burden in My Hand
18.Head Down
19.Superunknown
20.4th of July

Encore:
21.Beyond the Wheel
22.Pretty Noose
23.Like Suicide
24.Slaves & Bulldozers

That first show, hearing such a beautiful but filthy voice and a lot of original songs, made me a fan.

The next time we saw Storm was around a year later.  She was fronting the mashup heavy band The Balls, a couple of years before the concept of mashups was popular.  The unique take on each cover was a lot of fun and original songs like I Want You To Die showed that Storm’s own lyrics were not lost in the project.

We saw The Balls a few times and then Storm just sort of disappeared.  She’d play the occasional show in Portland but we couldn’t justify travelling up there to see her.

Then Storm Large got the biggest exposure of her career thus far as a finalist, ultimately placing fourth on Rock Star Supernova.

The Balls next show in San Francisco was at least a year after Rock Star Supernova, and suddenly Storm was riding a new wave of fans and while the band still did a lot of mashup style covers, the original tracks like Ladylike, Beautiful and Under were much more prominent.

The Balls were apparently working to release their third album, Blue, which would have featured Ladylike as the first single, before Rock Star Supernova.  Instead a Storm Large album, Ladylike: Side One came out featuring some of the house band from Rock Star Supernova.

That was the last we heard from The Balls.

Storm next emerged in Portland with a one woman show, titled Crazy Enough.  We were lucky enough to see the show in its entirety when we visited for another concert with Tori Amos the same night.  The show told the story of Storm’s life set to her own music and several selected cover songs that were incorporated into her life story.  It was a great experience.

Then nothing.

Until this week.

Storm Large’s return on Wednesday was more a casual run through of songs that the band hadn’t played in months and a normal Storm rock show than anything else.  It was wonderful to be there.  Eric McFadden guested on two songs and even though we have seen Storm and Eric many times it was the first time we had the chance to see them together.  Storm’s performance was full of energy and emotion and it was great to see a good rock show and forget about some of my own stress for a while.

They did a lot of songs from Crazy Enough but none of the story narrative to tie them together, divided over two sets with more covers thrown in.

One standout moment from the show was prior to Where is My Mind when Storm talked about how music got her through tough times and everyone has that one album that they can say got them through a tough time.  Storm’s was Doolittle by The Pixies.  Mine was Pearl Jam’s Ten.

I left the show exhausted but very happy.

Thursday night we did it all again.

James Deaton announced that the show was going to be very different from the night before.  The first set was to be the one hour cabaret version of Crazy Enough.  The second was to be a free-for-all with a bunch of special guests.

It started off strong with a good performance of an abridged version of Crazy Enough, but the bar crowd chatter made it not quite as good as the night before.

When they left the stage a good hour and twenty minutes or so after the one hour cabaret performance ended, I expected something pretty special in the second set.  I knew both Eric McFadden and Michael Cavaseno were in attendance and who knows what other special guests we might get?

Instead we got Eric McFadden on one song and a quick departure, a long false fan-pandering dialogue where fans would ask for a song Storm didn’t want to play because “she is in the present” and they are obviously living in the past, some short improv “children’s songs” and the same shit we had heard the night before.

She did a duet with current boyfriend Michael Shapiro of Anything Anything by Dramarama and she did a cover of Elliot Smith’s Independence Day which probably would have been great had the obnoxious crowd not kind of ruined both songs for me.

The free-for-all was more a Storm does what she feels like then leaves, which left me slightly disappointed but very happy we went to both shows and didn’t just make the choice to go to Thursday night’s show.

While I was exhausted on Thursday and Friday at work, the shows were well worth losing some sleep over and I am glad we went.