Wow, what a great concert! Having seen Indigo Girls primarily at Northrup Auditorium on the U of MN campus, a concert at the Orpheum was a treat! We'd
been to the Orpheum once before, but our seats this time, row 10, far right end, were vastly superior to the second balcony we'd had before.
The acoustics in the Orpheum were far superior, owing in large part to the
vast central dome of the auditorium.
The opening acts were exceptionally good. My wife joked that Michelle Malone was Emily's opening act, and
Shannon Curfman was Amy's opening act. I'm used
to ignoring opening acts, but both were really engaging, and Emily came out and performed with Michelle Malone on a couple of numbers. Malone had a
Michelle-Shocked-esque bluesy feel, while Shannon Curfman rocked harder and louder than seemed possible for a fifteen-year-old from Fargo...
To tell the truth, my wife and I had SEEN a TV story about Shannon Curfman only six weeks ago.
Sapphire did not make the connection at all. I kind of made the connection -- I had an idea this might be the same person -- until
she started playing. Then I was totally convinced I must be remembering incorrectly, because there was NO WAY this power, music and energy was pouring
out of a fifteen-year-old girl. So I sat there, utterly convinced that she could not be who she was -- she was THAT impossible.
When Indigo Girls came on the stage, of course, the house went wild. Do I need to describe them? No. Suffice to say that they were rested from a
couple of days off, had a couple of flubs that were entertaining for showing how relaxed and real they were, and were overall full of energy and joy,
without the weariness I've seen coming off an uninterrupted two week run of shows before reaching Minneapolis. They played for nearly two solid hours
without interruption, and it was a thrill
The setlist:
Peace Tonight
Gone Again
The Wood Song
Scooter Boys
Soon to be Nothing
Ozilline
Least Complicated
Romeo
Trouble
I Don't Wanna Know
Power of Two
Go
Philosophy of Loss
Faye Tucker
Closer to Fine
Shame on You
Ghost
Chickenman
Encores
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Galileo
All in all, a fantastic set of songs. Emily lent power to Philosophy of Loss by discussing the prior night's execution of Gary Graham and the homophobia
of most organized religions. Also, some twist of fate had kept me from hearing "Wood Song" in concert, and it was so beautiful and so unexpected
that when she began playing I wept. I also got a little misty listening to Power of Two.
The only shadow on the concert were the PEOPLE. I've never been surrounded by a bigger set of dingbats than I was last night.
Whining follows, feel free to skip.
In front of us, on the aisle, was a woman with a bad knee. She was NOT a dingbat: the dingbats were
plagueing her more than anyone else.
First there was the Rabid Fan. She was a six-foot-tall dork who was clearly fanatical, not merely a fan, of the Girls. She plopped herself down in
front of Bad Knee, and weaved constantly from side to side, preventing those behind her from using look-over-one-one shoulder to see the stage.
Bad Knee went to all sorts of exertions to compensate -- getting a chair from the ushers, standing as much as she could, etc. We even offered to
switch around some seating with her, but to no avail. Rabid Fan kept snapping flash photos (most of which will feature only back of the six-foot-four hairy
giant in front of HER), scooting up to the stage, getting shooed back, and dancing from side to side.
When Rabid Fan wasn't dorking around, we had the Kudro Twins in front of us: a pair of preppy girls with their frat-boy dates who had
apparently come for Shannon Curfman and stayed because they actually owned "Come On Now
Social." At least, those were the only songs that engaged them: they stood like trees during the others. The Kudro Twins wouldn't have been so bad,
except that they and the Frat Boys kept running to get drinks, or pee. And each time they did, Bad Knee had to get up, dislodge her leg from the
the support chair, move the chair, hobble into the aisle, and let these
dingbats past. She probably had to do this about ten times during the
performance, despite the fact that the dingbats were in the middle, and could
have exited from the other aisle!
Those were the worst. More common annoyances were the Screech Sisters behind me, who
sang every word in every song using only the flatted-E note that they were screeching at birth. There were the
Curfman Fans to our left, who stood
patiently waiting for the concert to end after Curfman left the stage. An audience energy sink, they were courteous but astonishingly unmoved by the
Indigo Girls music pouring over them. And the Front-row Twit Sisters, thirty-something fanatics who stood for the entire concert (doubtless to the
consternation of the people in the second row), signifying and gesticulating and waving their arms dramatically through EVERY SONG. They looked like
a pair of incompetent ASL translators who didn't know which way to face.
All these I could have ignored, except the batter of my annoyance was already
risen and these guys became icing on the cake.
By the encores, Rabid Fan had shoved her way up against the stage where the ushers could no longer shoo her back, and after the show she cajoled the
setlist out of one of the engineers doing cleanup. Meanwhile, Bad Knee was pale and almost in tears as she hobbled out of the auditorium.
So that was a lot more content than I had intended, and the bitching at the end was probably a bit over the top. The concert was great, especially when
I was able to concentrate on Indigo Girls and their music, and wasn't being distracted by hobbling, giggling, screeching, spazzing, drunken fans all
around me.
Really, these concerts would be perfect if it wasn't for the audience...