More healing has occurred.
Yes, I have finally attended an entire Jimmy Eat World
show - no leaving early, no arriving late - and it was great. (Yes, it did
involve attending alone.)
It's so appropriate that they came to the Crystal
Ballroom, because so many of my makeup shows ended up happening there. And,
some of the unique properties of the Crystal made me more appreciative of the
show, because the reverberations were felt.
First of all, the place was packed. There was a fair
amount of variation in age, and a wide variety of t-shirts for cool bands, but
probably the most interesting thing to me was the bros? the dudes? There were a
lot of guys there together. Some male concert attendees had female dates, but
that was not the norm.
When I was reading Greenwald's Nothing Feels Good
(in which Jimmy Eat World plays an important part), I seem to remember that one
of the important functions of emo was male bonding, and Tuesday night that made
sense. There was back-slapping and pumping and dancing, and no, it was not
great dancing, but there was an ecstasy to it, and it was nice to see.
The show overall had a good mix of older and newer
material, but even with some songs off of their debut album being played early
on, there was a switch later, where it became just the older songs.
(I think the band came on around 9, and the switch
happened around 10.)
Now, one way that I know I am with a devoted fan base is
that every opening riff starts off cheers - the crowd knows every song and they
are excited for every song. That was the case for Jimmy Eat World, even with
playing songs from all over twelve years and eight albums. That being said, it
built to something more.
Maybe it was that the energy had been building throughout
the entire show; certainly no one was winding down. You would think people
would be getting tired, but not that you could tell.
I think though, it was a few different forces at work,
building momentum. The songs that had come before did get us pumped up, that is
true. Also, we knew we were getting closer to the end. That was inevitable
based on the time, and the band themselves was telling us by moving into these
songs that they had saved for later.
These were the songs that let us know who they were. They
are the songs we remembered as striking such a chord, whether we were college
kids, or working stiffs, or seriously, the guys next to me were probably in
junior high when they came out. But there we were, and if we hadn't been
singing along already, we had to start then, or to clap along, because how
could we not?
A Praise Chorus. Sweetness. Bleed American.
Everyone knows that the Crystal Ballroom has a
"floating" dance floor. You feel a little spring when you jump, and
when everyone jumps, you feel it. As we built up towards the end, there was
just a wave of movement and energy all across the crowd. I seriously considered
working my way towards the walls, out of the middle, just to have something to
hold on to, and to not be feeling the full force of it.
So I was still there in the thick of it when we got to
"The Middle", which is where we knew it was going to end. We didn't
want it to, but we knew it had to, but first we had that song for every person
who has been on a delayed schedule coming into their own.
When they finished that we just screamed and cheered our
heads off for them for a few minutes. Seriously, one of them (Rick?) took out
his phone and filmed us. (Walking out, two other guys were talking about that
next to me. The one was saying, "I heard him. He said 'This is f-ing cool!")
We appreciated them, but they appreciated us too.
I realize I haven't done much musical analysis here. I am
actually going to be listening to them more in the near future (more on that
probably on July 31st), so I may return to the topic. For now I should say that
the new album, Damage, is pretty good, and yet there is still an amazing
attachment to that self-titled debut. I want to talk about that because even
though it's from 2001, it still feels so fresh and real and relevant, maybe
because it is so personal.
The band has aged remarkably well. Singer Jim Adkins may
actually be a little slimmer, but certainly does not appear to have aged a day,
and somehow that seems really appropriate. That's not to say that they can't
age, or they will hold it off forever, but it feels like there's a part of our
youth that is still out there untouched. I guess it's his hair, and the way it
flops. He can go gray, or white, but I hope his hair will always flop like
that. It has sentimental value.
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