The Copemeister

As my recent posts show, I spent Saturday night at the Citizen Cope show. Despite the fact that I spent 4 hours at the blasted place, it was an awesome show.

For those of you unclear with the modern concert going experience, allow me to illuminate the goings-ons. First you go online and buy tickets, complete with massive processing fee and shipping fee and other related bullshit fees that make a 20 buck ticket cost somewhere near 4.7 billion dollars. Then, the tickets come and you see printed right on it, "doors open at 8" which is code for "show starts sometime mid-23rd century."

But, being the good little concert goer you are, you get there for close to 8 because even though you know with every fiber of your being that the show won't start anywhere close to 8 PM, you're a hopeful sort. You get there and see that there's parking right under the theatre, wahey, but it's more than double what you usually pay when you park downtown, boo-hoo. Unfortunately, you don't know the area very well and even though your super cool van can get you home from even the deepest reaches of the oceans, you fear getting lost in a hellish nightmare of one-way streets and panhandling hobos. You pay the 15 bucks and head up to wait in line.

This being an all ages show, you're surrounded by teenagers which do nothing but make you think ahead to when your kids are teenagers and you have to sit your daughter down and tell her that only when the blackist, hottest pits of hades are touched with the icy finger of winter will you let her venture out into the world dressed like a whoring slut monkey. As you look around at everyone who apparantly walked out of either a J Crew or Hollister catalog, you look down at your own Nintendo t-shirt and Old Navy cargo shorts and feel as if perhaps there was something else printed on the ticket in regards to a dress code and you just missed it. You think back to when you were younger and single and used to go to rock shows and how it never occurred to you that perhaps you should dress nicely because you might meet someone there. Then you remember that you used to go to rock shows with Pete Childs and he used to make you smuggle a microphone in your pants so that he could illegally tape the Robert Plant show.

Eventually you make it inside, check out the merch table with it's substandard selection of t-shirts and then find your seat. The concert hall was very nice and small so there really weren't any bad seats. Plus there was ample floor space for those that wanted to rock out on the floor, thereby enabling those of us who were tired from day 2 of their son's birthday weekend to sit and be mellow. Usually I dance at shows, but not that night. I was tired, and I wanted to just sit. Thankfully, for the most part I could, except for the times where all of the teenage girls in front of me kept getting up to go to the floor and then coming back and then going and then coming back and then texting their friends on the floor so that they could find them when they went and on and on and on.

At 9:30, Alice Smith took the stage with Cope's band. She's a very good soul singer. Great pipes, nice stage presence, good songs, the whole nine yards. The only annoying thing was that they did this echo, reverb thingy on her voice when she held notes at the end of her songs. I would have preferred she just sang, but that's just me. If you see thet she's coming to your town, perhaps in a headlining for Cope capacity, and you like funky soul music and great vocals, I highly recommend seeing her. Her album dropped at the beginning of September, so perhaps some Googling might be in order.

Finally, at around 10:30, Cope took the stage. Most of the stuff he played was from his last album, not his new one, which I thought was kind of strange. He did play "Brother Lee" from the new joint, which is one of my favorite Cope songs evar and did a fucking awesome job on it as well. His band was really talented with not just one, but two guys on keyboards. When they played "Son's Gonna Rise", to much crowd excitement by the way, they traded in the guitar solor for some pretty badass organ/keyboard work giving the song a whole different sound but not reducing the intensity one bit. It was really quite impressive.

Once the show was over, I left so that I could watch the encores from the stairwell, thereby allowing me easy access to the parking garage. The garage's layout was such that I knew that waiting until the show was completely over would result in me being trapped there for all eternity so I decided to trade a little of my rock soul in for a quick departure. I watched pretty much all of the encore, until the usher told me I couldn't stand in the stairwell anymore. I took that as a sign that the show was about to end and hightailed it on out of there. In truth, by that time, I had heard all the songs I wanted to, including "Picasso's Theme", "Penitentiary" and "D'Artagnan's Theme" so I was satisfied. Plus, at this point it was after midnight and I had been there for 4 hours. I was tired and had a 30 minute drive ahead of me, so I bid Cope, the theatre and the pimped out teenyboppers adieu.

Despite all of my complaining, I had a great time and heard some really good music, so it was all worth it. I would definitely go back to see a show there as it's a nice theatre and all of the seats are great. Maybe I'll even dance next time. To answer Andy's question, yes I was photo blogging from my fancy doodad wotsit directly from the show, and yes, it was dope. That's me, dope at Cope. Heh-heh-heh.