Day Tripping

Corbett | September 9, 2006 11:07 PM

I had some well deserved down time this afternoon, so spent some time with a guitar, Youtube, and Day Tripper. (Youtube is great for learning old songs, because unlike today's videos, guys actually played instruments in music videos back then, so you can watch how they play.) I was trying to figure out how to position the dom7 chords like the original, and it took me a while to understand that Lennon was using his thumb over the top rather than playing the standard barre chord with his index finger. That revelation made things a lot clearer for me.

Then Tony called and told me to walk over to the park and check out the Beijing Pop Festival and the cool snowboarding exhibition they were sponsoring. So I packed up, threw another shirt on (it suddenly got nice and chilly in Beijing - feels like football weather) and started walking.

A half hour later I'm in the park watching guys do flips off of a huge Burton and Motorola sponsored snowboarding exhibition, complete with tons of shaved ice, when I see a guy with a familiar scraggly beard. I tap him on the shoulder, and it's Dave Fraiser from Pots Magazine. I think he was kind of surprised to be tapped on the shoulder by me in a huge park in the middle of a huge festival in the middle of Beijing, but that's the way things always seem to work. I didn't bother looking for Tony because we'd find each other eventually by osmosis, and sure enough two minutes later Tony walks over, hands out some VIP stage passes, and we're all off to see Placebo perform on the main stage.

I was really impressed with the stage set up, the lights, and especially the sound. It was excellent. They really spent a lot of effort to get it right, and I don't know if other people noticed, but I did, having heard enough crappy outdoor shows in Taiwan. I could hear every nuance of the cymbals, a nice crack and reverb on the snare, different effects on different songs, great solid chest thump on the kick, clear snap of the bass strings, and nicely compressed and crystal clear vocals for once. I guess there were three thousand people milling about, but my attention was on sound quality, the light show, and the 75+ year old guy in front of me who was the only person near us who was dancing around in a combination of tai chi and the cha cha to good grungy rock and roll. He arrived in a wheel chair, and was having a great time. He even had a flag on a stick that he swung about.

I'm so old I had no idea who Placebo was, but they put on a great tight show, showing local rockers how to sound like a rock band.

Category: Music

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