9:06 a.m. - 2006-01-10
Holidays: More
Oh, and of course we went to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra over the holidays.
"But Geoff", you say, brow furrowed with confusion, "I can no more imagine you at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra show than I can imagine George Wallace giving a talk at the Urban League. How did this come to be?"
Kia's mom Barb got free tickets to the Madison show of the touring Christmastime Rocktacular as reward for a charitable donation. Mistaking the ensemble for a, you know, orchestra, she thought Kia and I would be interested in attending and bequeathed them to us. We already knew that they're a new-agey, sort-of, kind-of rock band that plays Christmas music with lots of complicated lighting, and when Barb mentioned the tickets, we knew we had to go. Our anticipation of the event was somewhere between morbid, train-wreck curiosity and genuine excitement. In other words, we expected it to suck but were still looking forward to hearing Christmas music the way it was meant to be played: in a two thousand seat arena, loud, and keep the fog machines running. We were not disappointed.
The concert was at the Dane County Coliseum, and we went with younger brother Craig, his wife Liz and their pre-partum child. Walking through the parking lot, we carefully noted the make-up of the crowd. Someone had told us that we could expect wall-to-wall mullets (it IS a hockey arena, after all) but there were surprisingly few mullets to be seen. In fact, the crowd was extremely varied in terms of age, size, fashion sense and apparent socio-economic status. It was also overwhelmingly white. Even by Wisconsin standards. Although, remember, the Dane County Coliseum was built for hockey, so it's possible that no one who isn't white has ever noticed it being there, let alone thought to go inside. That, or Pat Boone was somehow involved in the show. I chased the latter possibility out of my mind as we walked inside and found our seats.
We bought beer and nachos and settled in for all the rocking. The musicians came out to a pre-fog-filled stage and tore into their first number, which had all the same qualities as the music they play at the movies between the coming attractions and the feature, the thing where there's a brief montage of film clips and they list all the rules, no smoking and so forth, and the music is really HIGH-ENERGY and meant to PUMP YOU UP, with lots of synthesizers and slick, generic guitar licks. The fog kept coming and the lights went berserk and the guitarists had much hair that was whipped about freely and we in the audience were made aware that, yes, we were at a ROCK SHOW; a Christmas rock show, sure, but mostly ROCK.
There were about thirteen musicians on stage: a drummer, a bassist, two keyboardists, two guitarists, an electric violinist and about six string players who I believe were local hires, not part of the touring act. The keyboardists both had multiple keyboards. One played with them stacked, so the boards were parallel and on different tiers. The other had them on the same plane at right angles. At some point, I thought excitedly, he's going to play two keybords AT THE SAME TIME AT RIGHT ANGLES! This is the keyboard equivalent of drummers' stick-spinning. Speaking of which: the drummer SPUN HIS STICKS, often and with skill. The two guitarists had the youthful vivacity of hair-metallists at the top of their game. One played a Les Paul, the other a Tele or Stratocaster. The electric violinist was an attractive, youngish woman with a short skirt and tons of dark hair that she swung about with abandon. Her violin was black and pink.
(DISCLAIMER: My intent here is not to mock the individual musicians of the T.S.O., but to illustrate the schlockiness of the enterprise as a whole. The players were all very skilled and just doing their jobs. I'm not putting them down for it, and it would be hypocritical of me to do so, having done worse things for a lot less money than they were making.)
After a few minutes of the high energy Tonight We're Gonna Rock You music, they got into the meat of the program: Christmas music...that rocks! Actually, it was pretty great. Something about holiday music lends itself to this kind of treatment, and their version of Carol of the Bells had all of us making the overbite rock face, the rock head nodding, and the rock hand making with the three fingers poking out. There was also a whole big Nutcracker number, which was very effective. Seriously, I think Nutcracker-type music only gets better with more exaggeration, and what better way to exaggerate something than with 25,000 volts of amplification and a big pile of drums? And the fog, MY GOD MAN, the fog!
Of course, nothing this good could last long, and soon enough the show got bogged down in some boring narrative and they started playing severely non-rocking original music. Singers were brought out, ballads were sung, a narrator with a deep and mellifluous voice told a story I didn't follow. One particularly harrowing number consisted of only acoustic guitar and a male singer dressed...as...a homeless man. This was the point where you could feel the freely wandering attention of fifteen hundred people. For all twenty-six minutes of this maudlin travesty, all I could think was BEER, OUT OF BEER, MUST HAVE MORE BEER, GOD COULD I USE A BEER. I looked around and determined that my getting up would be too much of a challenge, since others would have to stand up to let me out. We were all stuck in this slowly sinking boat together.
Eventually the song ended, they got on with the story, and we all learned the true meaning of Christmas in about ninety blinding minutes. Curiously, it never got very loud, but the many many lights were often blinding or spastic or both. They must have done market research and determined that people who see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra prefer blindness to deafness. But anyway, so the Al Pacino looking guy who sang a little and was their leader introduced the band and we thought the whole thing was winding down. He introduced the fetching violinist and mentioned about all the playing she'd be doing in the second half, which caused us to do a double take. "Second half? Did he say SECOND half?" An unspoken cloud of dread fell on our party. Worst of all, Al Pacino intimated that the second set would be the one with all the old-time rock-n-roll. Yep, that's a cloud of dread all right, not fog machine run-off.
About ten minutes into the highly anticipated second set, we four determined that none of us wanted to be there and made our exit. Safely in the car and driving away from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Liz confessed that the words "second half" had nearly made her cry. Also, the as-yet-unborn Karlen really dug it. It was an ordeal, but that night the sugar plums dancing in our heads rocked harder and were more fog ensconced than ever before.
