In Rain

This weekend I went down to D.C. to visit some friends and see Radiohead play at the Nissan Pavillion. The visiting was very fun and relaxing; the show was a horror.

Any of you who were feeling bitter or jealous about missing the show this weekend will be happy to hear that you were better off at home. This was without a doubt the worst concert experience of my entire life.

We knew going into it that the forecast was calling for rain. However, the radar seemed to predict that the worst of it would be early in the evening and that it would potentially slacken later on. No. Our generous and extremely helpful friends, Jason and Heather, who we were staying with, outfitted us with rain gear in preparation for the worst. They had given us hats, ponchos, wind-breakers, fleeces, and dry socks to change into. Before going to the show, we had spent much of the afternoon phoning local retailers to find a pair of cheap rainboots for me to wear since I only had my Chucks, which will get soaked in a drizzle in about 5 minutes. With a quick stop to Macy's on the way out to where our friends would pick us up, we got a pair that had been put on hold. We then met up with Dan and his friend Steve and got on the road. This was around 5:30 pm.

We arrived at the concert close to 9 p.m., after driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic down the one-lane road that takes you to the Pavillion and ends in a disorganized mess of gravel parking lots. We could hear Radiohead already playing when we got out of the car. It provided a nice soundtrack for trudging through the gravel, mud, lake-sized puddles, and then what seemed like hundreds of stairs to get to the actual venue. All around us were the other late-arrivals, in varying degrees of preparation for the weather. Some were more prepared than us with heavy-duty tarps; some were only wearing shorts and flip flops. Luckily the temperature was not too too cold in the low 50s, but the rain was bad enough. It did not slacken as we squelched our way through the slippery, demolished hillside to get to a place to stand for the show where our feet would only sink in ankle-high. Those rainboots turned out to be the best $20 I've ever spent in my life because despite standing in a mud puddle for an hour, my feet remained (mostly) mercifully dry. The rain continued throughout the entire concert in a steady, demoralizing downpour. We had our huge golf umbrella up and so did most of the rest of the crowd, which accounts for me not having seen the stage even once the entire time I was there and only getting a few glimpses of the screen. It kept us from getting further drenched while we stood still but all areas not covered by the ponchos (like our legs) were completely soaked through. We stood out there for close to an hour. We heard a couple of really good versions of some songs (I barely remember the set list, but I do remember singing along with the "rain down" portion of "Paranoid Android"), but overall it was frankly a lackluster performance. At one point Tom Yorke took a stab at being a human and said something of a diffident apology for all of us having a terrible day. Usually I go to a concert with a hope that I'll get to hear a few favorite songs, but all I really wanted to hear from him were two words: "Thank you." Just a "thank you" to all of these psychotic people who came out in the pouring rain just because they love their music.

Immediately after the last song we left. We could hear them playing "Karma Police" as we found our way back to the now almost completely-flooded parking lot, incredibly grateful to be in the car again. That was a sensation that was to wear off as we spent the next THREE HOURS (no joke) sitting in the car, waiting to leave the parking lot. It was a complete and total clusterfuck. No movement whatsoever for 2 hours, followed by an hour of jockeying and 4 cars trying to merge into one ill-defined lane, with no traffic control except for one cop in a poncho perfunctorily waving a club in the direction of the exit. Still pissing rain outside, now trapped in the car in various states of undress, wet clothes sealed to our clammy skin, cramped joints and muscles, we slowly began to become deranged. The collective brain damage suffered by the 4 of us in that car is beyond description.

FINALLY we got out of the parking lot, onto a highway where some more cops were forcing traffic in the opposite direction of the one we needed to go. Luckily the car we were in had GPS and we were able to navigate into free-moving traffic. We ended the night with a crazed search for a 24-hour-McDonalds and a frenzied pigout. It was the best moment of the entire night.

We got back to our friend's apartment at 3:30 a.m. We had left at 4:30 p.m. The entire commute time for the concert (that is time in the car, not counting the one hour of actually watching the show) was almost 8 hours to get to and from a venue that was approximately thirty (30) miles from the city. We realized that our friend could have driven us home to New York and back home again in that amount of time. All in all, it was a truly impressive experience on many levels. Impressive amounts of rain. Impressive amounts of dementia. Impressive lack of foresight, planning, caring, or intelligence on the behalf of the builders and proprietors of the Nissan Pavillion. Impressive that Radiohead was suggesting that people take public transportation to the show in order to reduce the carbon footprint of their tour, while at the same time booking the performance at a place in bumfuck Bristow, VA, which is impossible to reach via any other mode of transportation than car. Impressive amounts of (at least seeming) indifference on the part of Radiohead to the devotion of their fans. But, there was also an impressive amount of fun with the company I had: many thanks to Robert, Dan, and Steve for sharing this horror with me and for all of us ending the night with smiles on our faces.