Last Week Part One - The Fair
Sep. 2nd, 2007 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkTuesday I took the day off and went to the Fair. I only do this every 3-5 years because I usually don't enjoy it much. This year I had a really good time, despite the highly dubious weather. Our strategy for avoiding parking congestion was to put our bikes in the van, park free on the far side of Como Park, and bike over to the fairground. We easily found parking less than 2 miles from the Snelling/Como corner, where we left our bikes in a guarded bike corral. And it didn't actually start to rain until we had arrived at the fair, parked our bikes, and dug our rain gear out of the daypack. So that part worked perfectly. It didn't rain for very long, either; just long enough for us to get full use out of the umbrellas we'd brought. So far so good...
Within 10 minutes of our arrival we commenced running into people we knew, always a fun part of the Great Minnesota Get Together. It always seems so unlikely, given the 100,000+ crowd, that you'll actually pick out a familiar face. Strictly speaking, we didnt' - other people hailed us. We may have walked right by dozens of people we know. We saw![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chasophonic, chirosinger and bonz_lizard in the Horticulture Building, carbonel in Arts and Crafts and long-time fan M.K. Digre running an antique printing machine in the Newspaper Museum. I also saw Rod Pullis (a former colleague from Network Systems) and a musician that I knew I knew but couldn't quite place until after the "Hey, how ya doin'? Is your band playing here?" conversation (John Sjogren. Duh. Although he has aged more gracefully than most, I haven't quite gotten used to the fact that he now looks more like Mark Stirling than like the John I remember from 20 years ago.)
We saw the usual sights: Horticulture Building, Crafts Building, a subset of the animal barns (chickens, sheep and horses this year), and one thing that was new to me: Heritage Square. As always, my favorite animals were the chickens and the bees. My favorite things in the Crafts building this year were the woodworking stuff and the hilarious sock monkey dresses. I greatly enjoyed Heritage Square, especially the back part with the vintage gas station and the wonderful newspaper museum. The rest of the Square is just Renfesty craft booths, which weren't all that interesting in themselves but they made a pleasant backdrop to the honky-tonk music from the stage at the far end. The best thing about Heritage Square was that it wasn't crowded. Relatively speaking, no place in the fair was truly crowded that day, it being a rainy Tuesday. But Heritage Square was downright sleepy, a quality I greatly appreciated by that time.
Finally we met up with friends Ed and Nancy to see the Allman Brothers concert at the Grandstand. I rarely go to live concerts, but I kind of got talked into this one by Ed, who's a huge fan. Turned out to be a lot of fun. The Allman Brothers Band was just so-so, but the opening act was smokin'! Something like "The Randolph Family." I'd never heard of them, and it's not the kind of music I usually like, but they just had so much energy that I was swept away! They played for a solid hour without stopping for more than 5 seconds between songs.
Still, much as Ienjoyed them, an hour of loud metal rock is a lot for me, and the more laid-back sound of TABB was welcome once they started up. Unfortunately, they seriously lost momentum in the middle, even before the interminable drum solo. The music was good but too monochromatic -- almost entirely instrumental, and all pretty much the same beat. The audience completely lost interest about 5 minutes into the drum solo and started talking to each other, going out for smoke breaks, and so on. Even the rest of the band seemed bored, leisurely wandering on and off the stage and then disappearing entirely for 15 or 20 minutes. Maybe it was intended as a sort of intermission, since the set was over two hours long. But I would much rather have heard a shorter, more focused set with better pacing. The songs after the drum solo were better and more various: one slow song with (at last) some vocals and then a high-energy one (Jessica?)
But the finale was strange. After way too long playing coy they came back for the inevitable encore. Then they seemed to be having an onstage musical argument over whether to play a second encore, with a couple of the band members trying to start songs with the others putting down their instruments and then picking them up again. After 2 or 3 minutes of futzing around like this, they finally swung into a final song. This struck me as weirdly unprofessional. Don't most bands kinda decide before the concert what they're going to do for the encore? And if you're going to stick with the "Hey, man, we're a jam band and we play it by ear" approach, shouldn't the band be a little better at communicating? Still, once they finally decided what they were doing, the final song was a nice rousing one, leading beautifully into the short but intense fireworks show.
We were seated on the main floor close to an exit, so we were able to scoot out before the main crowd (always a plus for crowd-phobic me), but we lost Nancy and Ed who wandered off to buy t-shirts. However, we all ran into each other again at the last open hot-dog stand and said goodbye, munching our final corn dogs. It had drizzled a little during the concert, but again we were lucky enough to have no rain falling as we biked back to our vehicle. All round, it was a great day, with every detail falling nicely into place.
Within 10 minutes of our arrival we commenced running into people we knew, always a fun part of the Great Minnesota Get Together. It always seems so unlikely, given the 100,000+ crowd, that you'll actually pick out a familiar face. Strictly speaking, we didnt' - other people hailed us. We may have walked right by dozens of people we know. We saw
chasophonic, chirosinger and bonz_lizard in the Horticulture Building, carbonel in Arts and Crafts and long-time fan M.K. Digre running an antique printing machine in the Newspaper Museum. I also saw Rod Pullis (a former colleague from Network Systems) and a musician that I knew I knew but couldn't quite place until after the "Hey, how ya doin'? Is your band playing here?" conversation (John Sjogren. Duh. Although he has aged more gracefully than most, I haven't quite gotten used to the fact that he now looks more like Mark Stirling than like the John I remember from 20 years ago.)We saw the usual sights: Horticulture Building, Crafts Building, a subset of the animal barns (chickens, sheep and horses this year), and one thing that was new to me: Heritage Square. As always, my favorite animals were the chickens and the bees. My favorite things in the Crafts building this year were the woodworking stuff and the hilarious sock monkey dresses. I greatly enjoyed Heritage Square, especially the back part with the vintage gas station and the wonderful newspaper museum. The rest of the Square is just Renfesty craft booths, which weren't all that interesting in themselves but they made a pleasant backdrop to the honky-tonk music from the stage at the far end. The best thing about Heritage Square was that it wasn't crowded. Relatively speaking, no place in the fair was truly crowded that day, it being a rainy Tuesday. But Heritage Square was downright sleepy, a quality I greatly appreciated by that time.
Finally we met up with friends Ed and Nancy to see the Allman Brothers concert at the Grandstand. I rarely go to live concerts, but I kind of got talked into this one by Ed, who's a huge fan. Turned out to be a lot of fun. The Allman Brothers Band was just so-so, but the opening act was smokin'! Something like "The Randolph Family." I'd never heard of them, and it's not the kind of music I usually like, but they just had so much energy that I was swept away! They played for a solid hour without stopping for more than 5 seconds between songs.
Still, much as Ienjoyed them, an hour of loud metal rock is a lot for me, and the more laid-back sound of TABB was welcome once they started up. Unfortunately, they seriously lost momentum in the middle, even before the interminable drum solo. The music was good but too monochromatic -- almost entirely instrumental, and all pretty much the same beat. The audience completely lost interest about 5 minutes into the drum solo and started talking to each other, going out for smoke breaks, and so on. Even the rest of the band seemed bored, leisurely wandering on and off the stage and then disappearing entirely for 15 or 20 minutes. Maybe it was intended as a sort of intermission, since the set was over two hours long. But I would much rather have heard a shorter, more focused set with better pacing. The songs after the drum solo were better and more various: one slow song with (at last) some vocals and then a high-energy one (Jessica?)
But the finale was strange. After way too long playing coy they came back for the inevitable encore. Then they seemed to be having an onstage musical argument over whether to play a second encore, with a couple of the band members trying to start songs with the others putting down their instruments and then picking them up again. After 2 or 3 minutes of futzing around like this, they finally swung into a final song. This struck me as weirdly unprofessional. Don't most bands kinda decide before the concert what they're going to do for the encore? And if you're going to stick with the "Hey, man, we're a jam band and we play it by ear" approach, shouldn't the band be a little better at communicating? Still, once they finally decided what they were doing, the final song was a nice rousing one, leading beautifully into the short but intense fireworks show.
We were seated on the main floor close to an exit, so we were able to scoot out before the main crowd (always a plus for crowd-phobic me), but we lost Nancy and Ed who wandered off to buy t-shirts. However, we all ran into each other again at the last open hot-dog stand and said goodbye, munching our final corn dogs. It had drizzled a little during the concert, but again we were lucky enough to have no rain falling as we biked back to our vehicle. All round, it was a great day, with every detail falling nicely into place.
