Yes I know I am way way behind in my posting of my NIN weekend. I’ve been deathly ill ever since. Coincidence? I think not. I was going to do one entry for all three shows but I think that’s not going to work after all so will probably combine Atlantic City and Manchester, and do a separate one for Worcester.

Until I can keep my head upright for more than 10 minutes, here’s one of the pictures I took in Worcester. You can click through to Flickr to see a lot of other ones from that date plus the other two shows. I will be back, really, with my *totally* journalistic and unbiased disinterested reviews of all three shows.

This was the only time Trent Reznor looked right into my camera, during Head Down. I didn’t think it was that good of a picture but people seem to like it. I think it’s the one eye.

If all goes well tonight, you’ll be able to see a few pictures during the concert.

Also check my Flickr for large individual shots.

Edit: the Kyte thing below was a little difficult to manage during the show but uploading from iPhone to Filckr is super easy. Thumbnails below.

Incredible concert, well worth the drive. This was a stripped-down club show, much different from most of the rest of the tour with the amazing light show they’ve been doing. This was standard club lighting and a small stage. Reminiscent of the 2005 With_Teeth club tour, which had been scheduled due to worries by Trent Reznor that NIN couldn’t sell out large venues anymore after having 5 years go by since the last album (double-album masterpiece The Fragile) and TR writing for the first time completely off drugs and alcohol. Ha, that was an issue he should have not bothered himself at all with. If they did another club tour I think people would convert to the religion of whatever god got that to be set up.

Trent was on fire and/or had chugged espresso for hours. He seemed extremely happy to be up there and his voice had no sign of the recurring throat problems he’s been having, which has caused several show cancellations. He looked great and didn’t appear to stop giving it everything for a second. Robin Finck was a joy to watch and listen to as usual. He really knows how to make it a visual experience as well as an aural one. I somehow made it to the rail just to bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen’s right, which was unexpected because I was in the regular GA line for this one. This was the first time I’ve seen him performing since he joined NIN and he was definitely the right pick for the job. Peter Murphy (Bauhaus), who gave Trent one of his first breaks in choosing NIN to support him during a 1990 tour was a surprise guest and did a fantastic rendition of Reptile, duetting during part of it with Trent. I unfortunately could hardly see Allesandro Cortini or Josh Freese from where I was. I hope tonight to get on stage left instead of right so will have different angles. I have people waiting in line already and will join them pretty soon. Yes I suppose that’s a little crazy but I keep saying, this could all end tomorrow. For Worcester I am going in on the list so I don’t need to be there early, thankfully.

A nice end to the day while driving back was the … um *really nice scenery* on the Garden State Parkway. Use your imagination.

Pictures were okay considering I was being jostled by 1,000 people. I didn’t use flash for any of them but I think I’m going to start (only when using my little cameras, of course, never when shooting from the pit) because it is maddening to see people who barely know how to turn a camera on getting better less-noisy shots.

Just a few thumbnails here; click on any of them to go to Flickr and see the whole set.

Go to Flickr tonight and live vicariously by watching for Manchester’s as-it-happens pics!

I just noticed that my scrobbling on last.fm is not working. It hasn’t scrobbled me for 2 days. Or rather, it says it’s scrobbling but it doesn’t show up in the list on this page nor on my last.fm page.

Anyone else having this problem?

Edit: well that was weird. As soon as I wrote this, it all of a sudden showed my scrobbles. On my actual page anyway; I think it will refresh here soon.

I can’t have people thinking the ONLY music I listen to is NIN and The Pogues! I have just a few more CDs than theirs … XD

Technology is really annoying sometimes, isn’t it?

Lez Zeppelin, an all-girl Zep cover band, at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge (Boston)

Lead singer Sarah McLellan

I wasn’t too sure how this was going to work out–an all-female band playing Zep?? But it was surprisingly and nostalgically good. And they sold out the Downstairs, which is a pretty impressive draw. They played the full Led Zeppelin 2 album, start to finish, plus a couple of encore songs. Really interesting to watch and listen; you’d not think someone (meaning a female someone–there must be a million male Zep cover singers) could do Robert Plant so well! Sarah has a really nice smooth voice, and I loved watching Steph Paynes work her guitar. I could see the individual muscles in her hands up close and it made me realize what a bad guitar player I myself must be. Sigh.

Continue reading for more pictures, full gallery, and shooting notes

All pictures and content are copyrighted, All Rights Reserved. Please don’t use without my permission.

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Ireland’s own Bell X1 at The Paradise on 18 September

Bell X1 (that’s bell ex one, not “bell eleven”) traveled all the way from County Kildare in Ireland, with a few stops beforehand, to greet a full house at The Paradise. I was actually surprised it was not completely sold out in advance; the band is one of the biggest in Ireland and regularly get crowds (10,000+) that wouldn’t fit into the venue even if they broke every fire code in the city. Ah well, U2 dude and his one-word name. All things in good time.

Continue reading for more pictures, full gallery, and shooting notes

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L

Laura Marling at ICC Church in the Allston neighborhood of Boston on 13 September

Currently touring North America from her native UK on her “Fee Fie Fo Fum” tour to promote her debut album “Alas I Cannot Swim,” Laura drew a large audience who seemed to be quite familiar with her music. Formerly singing backup for Noah And The Whale until she struck out on her own at barely 18, Laura is influenced by Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and other rock-folk legends and brings her own interpretations to the genre with her angelic voice and unassuming guitar, backed by a several-pieced (the number seems to vary) band including a gorgeous upright bass and violin. Her music has a trad-Appalachian sound to it at times that belies her UK place of origin.

Continue reading for more info, gallery, and shooting notes.

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Sigur Rós must be what Iceland sounds like, deep inside the quiet and fury of the earth

Smoky-cold, misty thermal clouds of steam rising. Mist off a glacier, silence of snow falling. Slowly melting sharp-smooth shards of ice running faster and faster down a frozen sluice on their way to rejoin the sea from which they came.

These are a few of the things I thought of while listening to Sigur Rós on Friday 19 September at the Bank of America Pavilion. If you weren’t there you might think that imagery means they’re playing music to get a massage by. You know, New Age-y soothing relaxation music. Like what they play on those subliminal tapes you are supposed to listen to while you are sleeping to make you stop smoking or become more alluring to the gender of your preference. The nice people beside me (who kindly agreed to watch my stuff while i was shooting) said at the end of the concert, “You know what they are? They’re a ‘crescendo’ band.” And I knew exactly what they meant.

Continue reading for two photo galleries, show impressions, and shooting notes.

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Do you feel like I do, right here right now? Live-blogging from the stage.

I am setting up a system to do live-blogging from the concerts I go to.

When shooting a concert on a photo or press pass, you are generally allowed to use your pro (DSLR) camera for a strictly defined time period. This is usually the first three songs; sometimes 4-6 or the last three. Depends on the band. Other than those specifically allowed times, you have to put the camera away and they get very testy if you don’t. Some smaller places let you continue but medium-large venues almost always have this “no pro camera” policy outside of the agreed-upon time frame.

However, they don’t much care about point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones and don’t usually bother telling people to stop unless they’re using flash or otherwise making a pest of themselves. (N.B. Flash is very bad 99.9% of the time, do not use do not want!) I always bring a P&S (Canon G9 or Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18) with me to use after the photo-pass part is done. Haven’t been stopped yet. But, there is no immediacy with those. They take beautiful pictures but the time required to go home, get the images off the card, process even a tiny bit, watermark, and upload, takes forever in today’s ADD society. People want to see NOW. I don’t mind doing it but the ability to post in-the-moment is very interesting to me, both for the ability in itself and to see what others are doing. Back in March I posted several times from the front row of The Pogues and I can’t tell you how many hits I got from those brief descriptions of what was happening right at that second.

I kind of vaguely knew that it was possible to take pictures with a cell phone and have them sent to a blog right away but didn’t really look into it until I was reading over at Nine Inch Nails. They have got this process down to an exact science. NIN is probably the most technologically savvy and computer-literate band in existence today: I bet they’d not even hire a part-time coffee lady who didn’t know how to use a Mac inside and out. Most or all of the band members and tour staff have an iPhone and email addresses set up so they can take pictures at a moment’s notice and have them upload immediately to the tour’s photoblog. It’s really fascinating to see these pictures as they happen vs. what happened at the concert 4 hours ago or 2 days ago even. Someone will post a picture of them entering the stage and within 30 seconds it’s up and being viewed by people as the concert progresses, who are waiting until the next live picture appears.

Well anyway, after seeing some of the pictures posted there it gave me a right kick in the ass to figure this out. Possibly will have it working for tonight at Sigur Rós. The posts would not show up here though, until I figure *that* out, or if that’s even possible; they’ll go to a separate Blogger account. There’s probably a Wordpress widget somewhere that would feed the Blogger posts here but I have no time to find it right now.

And they’re cell phone pictures from my BlackBerry, so don’t be expecting quite the usual style that I get from my Nikon. There’s a tradeoff in quality for speed. Nothing’s perfect … until Nikon or Canon figure out a way to send pics direct from the camera via satellite link. Hmmm, something new for them to work on now that they’ve got video integrated in a DSLR??

Will update here with the Blogger URL when it’s set up. Check back!

The Faint get the crowd moving, almost wreck my camera

The Faint played their own brand of techno-electronica at The Roxy in Boston on Wed. 20 August to a highly enthusiastic and energetic crowd. (More on that later.)

Hot on the heels of their fifth and latest CD, “Fasciinatiion,” (yes those double i’s are intentional, the product of a broken typewriter) and touring from their Omaha base to California, Boston, Europe, and from what I can see ending up in Tokyo–if not going beyond–they played to a charged-up audience who was obviously very familiar with their music. Not having seen them before, I don’t know how they usually show up but this time lead singer Todd Fink appeared with a set of goggles and a doctor’s lab coat, which taken together were vaguely reminiscent of a mad scientist or possibly an alien frog. (No disrespect to Todd, scientists, or frogs intended.) It worked somehow though, especially against the scrim backdrop onto which various images were projected at hyper speed all night. I think sometimes there were lyrics and other times reels of past shows, or possibly even images of the band on the stage that very night. It was hard to tell. But it all made good pictures, which is naturally something I appreciate.

Some pictures below. For full galleries:
Click here for The Faint
Click here for Jaguar Love

All pictures and content are copyrighted, All Rights Reserved. Please don’t use without my permission.

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Hot Stove Cool Music puts on yet another foot-stomping roof-raising barn-burner of a show

Back from an incredible concert with the astonishing Buddy Guy; the proudly self-proclaimed “best bar band in the world” George Thorogood and the Destroyers; and the fund-raising fun-raising side project of ESPN sportswriter & Baseball Hall of Fame honoree Peter Gammons with help from some guy named Theo Epstein. You might have heard of him ’round here; he manages some kind of socks team that I hear has been pretty successful … or something like that.

In the spirit of the concert’s philanthropic purpose, the Red Sox Foundation along with the Foundation To Be Named Later (which was founded by Theo Epstein and his twin brother Paul) auctioned off several pieces of Sox memorabilia, one of which was a jersey signed by the team including Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. It started at I think $100 and went to $3,500. Some guy made himself very happy with this tax deduction, and with the current state of the team it’s probably the last thing of Sox that Manny will ever sign, except for his trade contract.

I took more than 500 pictures and couldn’t go through them all last night. Click on “read the rest” below to get to the start of the gallery. I have more to put up later.

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