« She said, "I know you - you cannot sing" | Home | Music Will Provide the Light You Cannot Resist »
Pour yourself a Guinness and get comfortable - this is a long one.
We're just three days into our Ireland trip and it already seems like we've been going for a week. We started in Galway on Friday, where Maura showed me around her old stomping ground. It was a fun city, but we were completely wiped out after dinner, so we just retired early and got a good night's sleep.
The next day we worked our way east across the country towards Dublin. On the way, we stopped at Clonmacnoise, the ruins of an old monastary on the banks of the Shannon river. The ruins there included three Irish high crosses, which have been brought out of the Irish rain into their own building.
After that, we got back on the narrow Irish roads (I don't think Maura liked the bushes swiping the side of the car too much), found the highway and made it to Dublin around 4:00. There were some issues with parking and finding the hotel, and the lift here is a bit creaky, but once settled in everything was fine.
At this point, it was time to explore the Temple Bar area and find something for dinner before the first show. We settled on a nice-looking Italian place and got a good table looking out on the street, which was great for people-watching. The people-watching proved to be quite good, as about five minutes after we sat down Peter Buck walked in with three girls. There was my answer to whether we'd catch any of the band wandering around while we were in town. We saw the girls later at the show sitting in one of the Statler & Waldorf boxes on the side of the stage, so they were probably relatives or some of R.E.M.'s Athens office, all of whom were there. Well, we decided that we didn't need to stalk him and wait for them to finish dinner, so we made our way over to the Olympia Theater and found ourselves sitting in the third row of the first balcony. The theater really was as small and beautiful as I'd been told - I could tell that this was going to be a great place to see the band.
I chatted with the guy next to me, who had come from Nottingham to see the first two of the five shows, just like us. He had seen them first on the Reckoning tour in 1984, which of course made me a bit jealous. Anyhow, we got along great and had a lot of good music chats during the evening. The opener wasn't too spectacular, but I don't think that anyone was really there to see him. After he was finished, a projector started to flash "THIS IS NOT A SHOW" on the screen behind the stage. They were making it very clear to us that these were the band's "open rehearsals" and as Michael Stipe pointed out to us at the end of the show, they were doing this as much so they could get a reaction to playing these live in front of an audience as they were for our entertainment.
R.E.M. made their way onto the stage at about 9:15 and launched right into two brand new songs. If these are any indication of how the new album will sound, as it should be, we'll get to hear another rocker. It's not a Monster-type rock, but rather a modern-sounding classic R.E.M, if that makes any sense. They didn't introduce any of the new ones with titles, but Michael always had something to say about the old songs. I was hoping that they might pull out some gems that a fanclub audience would get really excited about, but I wasn't prepared for what they hit us with. Along with the 10-12 new songs, we heard (in somewhat of an order, as best I can remember) "Second Guessing," "1,000,000," "Letter Never Sent" (how about that, Jess!?), "Little America" (quite a Reckoning theme early in the show), "Maps and Legends" ("We didn't even bother to rehearse this one"), "These Days," "New Test Leper," "Electrolite"...I think that's all of them. I was blown away by the selection of songs that we heard. They didn't even play something I'd heard them play before until the end of the encore, which is quite an accomplishment with this being my tenth show. The last note about this first show was that, although I didn't see them, Michael made a point to specifically thank Bono and The Edge, who were somewhere in the house.
After the show we ended up at a pub around the corner who were advertising an R.E.M. afterparty, playing lots of good indie and R.E.M. tunes. We stayed there for a while and Maura told me some good stories about having been in this pub before. We tried one or two more places after that before making it back to the room for a good night's sleep, which we did until 11 a.m.
On Sunday we got a slow start, but made it out for some shopping around noon. Maura located the Denby stuff she was on a mission to find, and we made our way across town to the Old Jamesons Distillery for a tour and a drink. On our way back from there, I wanted to poke into the Clarence Hotel and see what it was like. There wasn't much to see on the ground floor, but on our way out, we passed Scott McCaughey, who's all but a member of R.E.M. by now, in the hall. I said hi and complimented him on the show (oops, should've been "rehearsal") the night before, especially the selection of old ones. He told us that he was on his way back to the theater and they were hoping to give us a different selection tonight. Which brings us to now...it's time to head to dinner and go back to the theater for night #2. My only regret so far is that I didn't put in a request with Scott ("Wolves, Lower," if I woulda thought of it), not that I expect to need any help in enjoying what they play again. So, time to get back out of the hotel room...more reports later.
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (0)
www.flickr.com
|
