AtomJohnson Blog

We arrived in Telluride this morning about 10:30am.  Even this early hour is too late to secure a parking spot in the parking garage.  So, we claimed a bit of the roadside, loaded our gear onto our backs and decided to bike down the road and into town rather than line up for the Gondola.  The ride down was exhilarating (read…shorts-soiling scary).  The ride into town was beautiful, but challenging (read…constant vomit burps, cramping and occasional pockets of oxygen).

Somehow we found enough room for our butts and gear in just about the same spot as yesterday.  The crowd was already twice as thick as yesterday.  There were alot of very rough looking people also trying to recover from the prior dayda.  The sun seemed to have moved a bit closer to festival grounds for a better vantage point, which did not expedite the recovery time at all.

After about an hour, I decided to head into town to catch the Croatia vs. Turkey match.  Once again, there was a hard-core contingent of soccer fans willing to trade in the scorching sun for some manufactured shade and European Championship football.  Two of the guys at the bar were from Norway and had made the cover of the Telluride newspaper that day.  They are from a town of 7 people in Norway and are doing a bit of research to help them facilitate the bluegrass festival that they’ll be putting on in their hometown (population 7) later this summer.  They expressed their surprise to find any soccer fans at all in America.  They somehow missed the irony that they are Norwegian bluegrass fans.

The musical highlight of they day was Paulo Nutini.  He is a 21 year old Scottish musician that has enjoyed some success on popular American radio stations this past year.  While his radio releases are good songs, they only scratch the surface of what this kid is capable of.  He did the best version of “Worried Man” I have ever heard.  If you like Scotland, or even music, check out some Neutini.  Unfortunately, they cut his set 20 minutes short in order to give a surprise presentation to honor the 20th year that Craig Fergusen and Steve Szymanski have been running Planet Bluegrass.  While it was a good presentation, I believe that Paulo Neutini’s command of the microphone had more of a beat you could dance to.

Scott and I closed out our last day at the festival with Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby.  It is one of those weird combinations like peanut butter and pickles that you don’t think would work, but somehow strike an amazing harmony.  The bluegrass version of “That’s Just The Way It Is” seems to be the way it was meant to be played this entire time…better late than never I guess.  To take in this music along with a Colorado sunset against the surrounding peaks was almost too much to take, yet we’d gladly take it again.

I can’t say enough good things about our experience at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Thank you so much to Nikki, Jeff, Sandy, Darren, Billy and Marybeth for letting us share the lawn space that they worked so hard to secure.  You all made us feel more welcome than you could possibly know.  I wish we could have hung out for another couple days.  Thank you too to The Bergers for your generosity and amazing hospitality.  Every time I come down to Ouray, you make it feel like home.  Thank you to Scott for making the trek out from Atlanta to share my first bluegrass festival with me.  Hopefully we just started a long and growing tradition.

“Peace, Love and Get the F’ Out of My Way!”  Those are the words that Nikki, our tarp mate, used to describe the hippy sprint each morning at the opening of the bluegrass festival.  This group of fellow-man-loving people line up hours before the 10am opening of the gates with enormous tarps whose sole purpose is to lay claim to this conquered plot of festival lawn.  As the gates open, one would swear they were witnessing the running of the bulls.  In a matter of seconds, this lush green lawn transforms into a patchwork of brown and blue plastic tarps with proud, but exhausted hippies heaving for every bit of oxygen they can find at 9,000 feet above sea level.

Scott and I had every intention of arriving early enough to make this sprint, but ended up getting to the festival grounds about half an hour later.  Since it was only two of us, I found a small area at the rear of the front lawn that crept slightly onto another tarp.  Fortunately the tarp owners were very generous and were more than willing to share the back of their property with us.

The festival itself would seem to be a fairy tale if someone simply described it to you.  The approach to the festival grounds is a winding trail that passes over a raging river, through a grove of quaking aspens, beside a children’s fishing pond, and finally opens onto an enormous field surrounded by 11,000 foot snowy mountain peaks and nearly vertical, tree lined hills with about every shade of green represented.

The group that was kind enough to share their tarp with us grabbed their first beer at 10:30am.  As we joked with them about the early hour, they reminded us that you can’t drink all day unless you start early.  With that, we went and grabbed our first beer.

The rest of day was spent watching one world-class musician after another take the stage.  It is rare to be in setting where the musician facing out is in more awe of their view than the thousands of fans taking in the music.  The only break we took from the music was a bike ride into town to watch the Germany vs. Portugal quarterfinal match of the Euro 2008 tournament.  We were not the only die-hard soccer fans willing to sacrifice some of the value of their ticket in order to watch the match.

The people watching at the festival is top notch.  Folks from every walk of life have put their lives on hold, checked their egos at the door, liberally applied sunscreen and congrated on these festival grounds to further validate the stereotype that white people can’t dance.  Somewhere in the mid-afternoon, I alerted Scott to check the guy in the Black Sabbath t-shirt, skinny jeans, high tops, ratty red bed head and Buddy Holly spectacle frames.  With a slight snicker, we forgot completely about this guy…until we later saw him singing into the microphone during the Ryan Adams set to close out the first night of the show.

After a surprsingly smooth day of festivities, we found that the most painful part of a day at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is trying to get back to your vehicle.  Funneling an entire festival of folks at the same time through a single Gondola leads to a bottlenecked line of immense proportions.  “Exhausted” doesn’t do proper justice to how we were feeling on the drive back to Ouray.  The king-sized bed at The Bergerhoff is exactly what I needed to recharge the batteries for Day 2 of the festival.

We got our first big snow storm of the year here in Boulder yesterday. Over the course of the day and night, it dropped about 8 to 10 inches of the cold, white powder onto our cars and streets. This would have been incredibly welcome any night that I did not have front row center seats for Iron & Wine at The Paramount.

After much debate, we Ben, Amy, Jess and I decided to brave the storm and drive down to Denver for the 9pm show. After seeing this show, I could not have imagined missing it. We were literally front row, center for an all acoustic performance from Iron & Wine. They are traveling with an 8 piece band this tour, but the bad weather prevented all but the lead singer and his acoustic guitar from arriving. After listening to the show on NPR’s live concert series today, I realized how lucky we were to hear acoustic versions of the new album. You can get a sense of some of the songs at this NPR In Studio session.

His rendition of The Trapeze Swinger will forever give me chills. Here is a version of the song performed earlier this year.

I was supposed to go see the concert of the music from the movie Once on Saturday night. I bought the tickets months ago when I first heard that they were coming to Denver. I took Jessica to see the movie so she would know the music when we went to see it.

Today, as I was searching online to remember where it was playing, my heart dropped as I noticed that the show was this past Tuesday. We missed it. : (

I recently went to two incredible concerts….Josh Ritter at The Fox…and Brandi Carlile at The Gothic. You’ve never seen anyway as happy to be on a stage in front of a crowd as Josh Ritter. He is 100% smiles and the rest is pure gratitude. How many is that?

I almost didn’t get to see Brandi play. A bunch of us had pre-concert dinner at Watercourse in Denver, which is when I realized I had left my ticket back in Boulder. We went to a closed Office Max and begged at the window to use a printer. When that failed I went to the grocery store, the auto parts store and a hardware store asking them each if I could get on the internet. They all gave me the same look. Its similar to the, “please-get-out-of-my-store-before-I-have-you-arrested” glance….

In the end, The Gothic was able to look up my ticket and all was good. It was standing room only when we arrived, but I found a secret passage to the front of the concert. If Brandi sneezed, it was to land on my head. I was happy to discover that Brandi is the most beautiful and talented female musician in the entire universe. To make it even better, her band consists of two tall ball-headed twins with really high voices who like to sway….

Last night’s Polyphonic Spree concert at The Gothic Theater will be very tough to beat. If you’ve never heard of The Polyphonic Spree, they are a 23 piece self-described “choral symphonic rock” group from Dallas, Texas.

The show starts with a red curtain stretched across the stage. Scissors cut a heart into the middle of the curtain while the harp plays and then snips a jagged line up the center to reveal a 7-person choir, a pair of keyboardists, as well as a percussionist, drummer, bassist, guitarist, flautist, trumpeter, trombonist, violinist/violist, French horn player, a pedal steel player, theremin player, and an electronic effects person.

From there all you can do it prepare to be completely amazed and hope that there will be another chance soon to smile that big for a solid 2 and a half hours…

Here is a video of The Polyphonic Spree covering Nirvana’s song “Lithium”. This version is from their June 30th performance at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC (where I first saw them perform). They performed the same version last night. For me it was one of the highlights of the show.

I had the unexpected opportunity to see Dave Matthews last night. When I say I had the opportunity to see him, I mean that I had the opportunity to see up through his nostrils all the way to his brain. That is how close I was last night for the show at the Pepsi Center.

One of my realtor’s other clients ended up with some extra tickets and was looking to get rid of them. I am usually not big on Arena shows, simply because the tickets available for a popular band in an arena are usually not the best. We saw Pearl Jam this year at the Verizon Center, and even though I had signed on for tickets minutes after they went on sale, the energy of the show failed to carry as far back as we were from the stage. It is a different scenario when you are only three rows back. Dave Matthews could fill an entire planet with the energy from his shows, so needless to say, there was no trouble feeling the energy thirty feet away.

The entire night was actually pretty great. The guy who had the tickets lives in downtown Denver and is also from Virginia. He invited me over for some beers prior to the show. His one bedroom condo is on the fourth floor of his building and has an incredible view of the downtown skyline. I couldn’t think of a better place to have some beer before the show. The icing on the cake is that we were able to walk to the Pepsi Center from his condo for the show. The next four hours were spent thirty feet from stage, followed by more beers and conversation while taking in the Denver skyline. It was definitely a concert that I will not soon forget.

I love music! I listen to the stuff all the time…in the car…on the computer…when my cell phone rings… In my eyes, there is nothing better than discovering a new artist who just blows you away. I had this experience most recently with Josh Ritter. OK, go ahead and giggle, and think….’gee, that sounds alot like John Ritter’…compose yourself….now go out and buy the album. Start with The Animal Years and then buy Hello Starling. Or, just listen to this story on NPR.

Yesteday, a friend at work pointed me to Pandora. Pandora is a web application put together by The Music Genome Project that allows you to enter an artist that you like and then proceeds to suggests other artists that have a similar musical genetic structure. What do they mean? The Music Genome project is a group of musicians and technologist who came together in order to break music down to its genetic structure. From their website:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

So, please check out Pandora. It promises to put an smile on your face and an echo in your wallet.

There are two types of people in the world…those who like Wilco…and crazy people. If you think you might be of the type ‘crazy’, perhaps this Jeff Tweedy solo performance will help you reclaim your sanity. (Thanks to David for sending me the link)

I was torn this morning when I woke up between going to play soccer and staying home to order Pearl Jam tickets. Since soccer was the option most likely to give me the opportunity to wear my new Manchester United soccer socks (thanks Scott!), I chose that option. So, after suiting up in all of my protective gear and support-providing undershorts, I drove into DC for practice….only to find the entire city taken over by marathons and cherry blossom festivals. Come on people….we’ve got some soccer to play here! Unable to find an accessible field, we cancelled soccer and headed home.

Option B: Pearl Jam tickets. At 9:45am, I connected to my neighbor’s wireless network (I usually use mine, but his is faster), opened both browsers to Ticketmaster, and got ready to fight for my place in the virtual ticket line. At 9:58am, I began hitting refresh on my browsers. This went on for exactly 2 minutes, when at 10am, I was faced with the option of purchasing tickets. I realized that I hadn’t thought about how many I wanted. So, I put in 2 tickets on Internet Explorer and 4 tickets on Firefox. I don’t have enough evidence to draw a conclusion, but in this case at least, the 2 ticket option gave me much better seats in less time. So, I dropped my credit card and laid out the $135 for two tickets. We actually have really great seats…center stage in the first set of risers.

Just for kicks, I searched for 2 tickts again at 10:05am to see what would have happened if I had waited just a bit longer. I was pleased to see that this would have taken me from section 106 to section 417. Those folks better bring some tissues…cause there is sure to be some nosebleeds.