GET CONFIDENT, STUPID!

SHOW: Pavement at First Avenue

DATE: 06/08/1999

AGE: 18 years 8 months 21 days

MOST RECENT EPISODE OF THE SIMPSONS: “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” (S09 E23)

   This show is actually kind of hard to remember, mostly because Minneapolis was the first stop on Pavement’s tour to promote “Terror Twilight”, and they played most of the record, which I hadn’t heard any of.  I think I’d only ever heard “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” and a handful of other songs. “Summer Babe” is the only song of the whole set I’d ever heard, so that is about as much of a review I can give of the show.

   This show was kind of smack dab in the middle of a very transitional part of my life. I was living with my folks back up in Cambridge, having moved back from a failed attempt to move to Berkeley/San Francisco (to, you know, be a real punk) and somehow ending up in Flagstaff, Arizona for 3 months. I had just finished the winter/spring semester of community college and was planning on transferring to the U of M in the fall. I was back working at the grocery store I’d worked at in high school and living the lazy life of part-time student/part-time job, living at home, trying to show my parents I wasn’t the fuck-up I had recently demonstrated that I definitely was. “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” was one of the few tapes Ben and I had to listen to on the long drive back to Minnesota from Arizona and whenever I hear any song off of it, it always conjures up the view from the front seat of our shitty van. I remember there always being a Minnesota Twins cup from the Metrodome, full of change in one of the cup holders which we would sometimes buy the smallest amounts of gas with when we were broke in Flagstaff. Sometimes we’d put in, in nickels and dimes, under a dollar worth of gas (at that time gas was usually under a dollar per gallon) and upon leaving the gas station near our apartment, turn off the engine, put the van in neutral and roll down the hill and try to make it into our parking spot solely on momentum, you know, to save money.  Anyways, back to the transitions. Within 3 months of this show, I’d be living by myself in Minneapolis for the first time, and going to college, a year later than everyone else. Fortunately, my best friend Mike was a year behind me in school and would be attending Augsburg, right across the Mississippi River. Right on time. We’d start a band with a new friend we’d met in “the scene”, and that person would take us to our first Dillinger Four show.  At 18, I probably went to about half pop-punk, and half alternative/indie-rock shows, most of them at the First Avenue Main Room. Things were going to be different now.  Within a few months, I got a job at a record store, started skipping classes for work and eventually just stopped going to school all together. Mike would, too. We’d start going to less Main Room shows, and more 7th St. Entry shows and house shows; there’d be less indie rock shows, and more punk shows. That band we’d started would never play a show. It didn’t matter, there would  be more bands. We knew where things were headed and were starting to gain a confidence in what we were doing with our lives that we couldn’t get growing up in Cambridge. Once high school had started it became clear that we were supposed to live in a big city, we knew we were just biding our time.  It turns out we’re from Minneapolis.

THE SET-LIST (according to “the internet”):

        Here
        Cream of Gold
        You Are a Light
        The Hexx
        Billie
        Major Leagues
        Kennel District
        Platform Blues
        Ann Don’t Cry
        Frontwards
        Stereo
        Spit on a Stranger
       
Encore:
        Summer Babe
        Folk Jam
        Box Elder
        Sinister Purpose (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover)

badkidsjokes:

why did the man scream

his pet chiken pooped on his computer