We started by grabbing some water and (in my case) a chocolate milkshake (because I wanted some ice cream, dangit! and drinkable made it easier), then wandered through the arts and crafts displays, where they showed prize-winning jewelry, crochet, display models, dresses, origami, etc.

Al’s Brain

Then we made our way to the back of the fair, where they had set up a portable theater for Al’s Brain (in 3-D!). There was a huge sand sculpture out front of “Weird Al” Yankovic holding out a brain in his hand. An animated question mark and exclamation point would occasionally pop out the top of his head, and smoke would pour from his ears.

“Weird Al” has actually had a long association with the Orange County Fair, often doing free concerts on multiple nights during the run. We’ve seen him there at least twice, possibly three times. One year there was a “Weird Al” museum of sorts. This year, he got involved in a short 3-D educational film (comedic, of course) about the brain.

There’s a waiting room where staff hands out 3-D glasses and handi-wipes, with displays of various brain facts or various famous smart people (“Brains that Changed History.”) Once the doors closed, they ran a short film in the style of the fake educational films he sometimes runs at concerts — designed to look like educational films from the 1950s, but mixing in truisms (“dirt is dirty”) and ridiculous non-sequiturs (“so never let a dog eat your hair”). This one advised you to never, ever eat ice cream or else you might fall victim to the dreaded condition of brain freeze, the only cure for which is setting yourself on fire.

Then they ushered everyone into the theater to run the film itself, which was maybe 10 minutes long with a mix of live-action and computer animation. Mostly it featured Weird Al and an animated owl answering questions about the brain. Then there was the musical sequence, set to a song that sounded very much like a They Might Be Giants style parody.

Katie picked up a T-shirt for the “Totally Awesome Corpus Callosum,” and we went looking for dinner.

Totally Fried

I don’t know if I just hadn’t noticed in previous years, but the deep-fried EVERYTHING trend has gotten completely out of hand. Forget deep-fried Twinkies and Snickers bars. We saw deep-fried Moon Pies, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried M&Ms…

And then there was the Zucchini Weeni.

It’s a hot dog stuffed inside a hollowed-out zucchini, coated with breading and fried like a corn dog. Katie actually bought it for dinner (and for her one hot dog for the year), and was disappointed that there wasn’t more zucchini.

So, yeah, one deep-fried Twinkie dog a year isn’t going to give you a heart attack. The whole appeal is that it’s so horrendously unhealthy — sort of a rebellion against continuing health food trends. Which also explains the obsession with bacon. And the other item of food that made enough of an impression for me to photograph it (or at least the poster): chocolate-covered bacon. We didn’t try this one, but only because the portions were too big. Though they weren’t anywhere near as big as the “Mexican Funnel Cakes” — basically funnel cakes made from churros — the same booth was selling. They promised that you’d want to eat it all, but wouldn’t be able to…and if you could prove them wrong, you’d get it for free. We saw lots of people buying them, some of them getting double and triple sizes!

Then there was this place that seemed to be trying too hard:

I’m impressed that they’re all-meat (though I really shouldn’t have to be), but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the words “hot dog” and “healthy” in the same sentence without the word “not” in between. And then there’s the question of what kind of meat is in it. I mean, “meat” is a pretty broad category.

Tower

We wandered by a stage with a very impressive acrobatics show. In one act, they set four wine bottles on a table, then set a chair on top of the bottles. Then a woman climbed up and balanced on the chair. Then they handed her another chair, which she stacked on top of the first, and she climbed onto that one.

Then they kept going.

By the end of the act, she was supported by the table, the wine bottles, and six chairs. She then tilted the top chair a bit, and did a handstand. Then lifted one of her hands so that she was balancing on top of the entire tower with only one hand.

Concert

This is actually the second time we’ve seen Melissa Etheridge in concert. The last time was right here, during the 2003 OC fair, when Katie came up with a parody of “Bring Me Some Water.” Apparently, that was the last time she was here as well.

It was a great performance — just her and her guitar (or on a couple of songs, a piano). As with a couple of Tori Amos concerts, it ironically reminded me of the scene in one of the Sandman spinoffs starring Death in which Foxglove’s manager insists that beyond a certain sized venue, audiences don’t want to see “a girl and her guitar” — they want a full band. Once you get enough of a following, though, it’s clear that you can go back to just you and your guitar and have it work.

One of the funny parts was when she talked about the fair. In particular, fair food. And what stuck in her mind for her to mention it between songs? The chocolate covered bacon and the Zucchini Weenies. They actually became a running gag.

Another funny bit occurred when she was tossing out guitar picks between songs. The front rows were filled with almost all women, but there was one man up there trying to get a guitar pick. She joked that “it takes a brave man to be a Melissa Etheridge fan!”

Nighttime Carnival

After the concert, as people were leaving, the theater made an announcement that our concert tickets were also good for a free ride on the Ferris Wheel over in the carnival area of the fair. Katie was all for it. I wasn’t so sure. (Let’s just say I’m not good with heights.) Usually for things like this we just split up, she’ll do the ride and I’ll check out the games or something, but the announcement mentioned the nighttime view of the fair…and I really like being able to see scenery. I’d love to have the super-power to jump straight up 50-100 feet, hover in place for a while, and float down. It’d freak me the hell out every time I used it, but I’d love to just be able to see.

So after we went back to almost try the chocolate-covered bacon, we started the long trek to the opposite end of the fair and La Grande Wheel. Or rather “La Grande Whee” as the sign proclaimed.

I think it was around 11:00 that we got onto the wheel, and while I did freak out, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I managed to look at the view, pick out landmarks, and even take some photos until the camera started demanding a new battery and I refused to consider changing it for fear that I’d drop it and it would go skittering across the floor and out the 1 1/2″ gap in the door and then land on someone.

Katie, meanwhile, was just fine. Which really helped when we got off and I needed to lie down for a bit, and she went to get me hot chocolate. <3

Cross-posted to Facebook and to LiveJournal.

Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, turned out to be a great concert!

Historic San Diego

We drove down after lunch on Saturday and hit Old Town San Diego on the way in. (More Highlander Grog!) I could swear I don’t remember having trouble finding it before, but the last few times it’s been hard to get to even following a map. At least we managed better than we did in December, when we ended up several miles inland before we could find a place to cross the inlet.

I don’t remember much going on the last time we were there, but this time Old Town was in full-on living history mode, complete with tour guides dressed up in 1800s outfits and a horse-and-buggy ride.

I’d booked the Courtyard San Diego Downtown because it’s literally next door to the House of Blues. It took a while to negotiate the one-way streets, but once we arrived, we stepped inside and were blown away by the lobby. It turns out that the hotel used to be the building for the San Diego Trust & Savings bank. After the bank closed in the 1990s, Marriott bought it and converted it to a hotel. The vault, safe deposit rooms, and other rooms on the first floor became a conference center, and the offices on the upper floors became guest rooms. They’ve preserved as much of the old look of the place as possible, down to keeping the mail slots on the former office doors. (Don’t worry, they’re blocked.)

We ate dinner at Chopahn (6th Ave. near F St.), an Afghan restaurant we first visited during last year’s Comic-Con. It was empty when we got there, which I hope was just because we were there on the early side, because the food is great. Another couple arrived while we were eating, but they were the only people we saw other than the waitress. She had started pushing tables together as if they were expecting a larger party later on.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslamp district for a while. I kept making notes of where various hotels or restaurants were located. Eventually I realized I was basically scouting for Comic-Con next month.

Around 7:00 we made our way to the House of Blues.

Concert

That’s when we discovered that we’d been under a misapprehension about the nature of the venue. The only House of Blues we’d been to before was the one in Anaheim at Downtown Disney. It’s a big room with a stage, a balcony, and bars around the edges. I expect the main hall here was probably the same, but Butterfly Boucher was playing the “small room.” I assumed that meant a smaller room of the same type, but really it meant there was an 8-foot-wide stage in the dining area of the bar (the “Voodoo Stage”). Which would have been great if we hadn’t just had a huge dinner. So we ordered drinks, sat and talked, and eventually ordered some sweet potato fries and nibbled.

Note for next time: Arrive at the printed time, grab a table and order dinner there.

From the back of the stage to the edge of the bar can’t have been larger than our living room, and we don’t have a very big living room. It was like listening to someone play at a coffee house, only with better acoustics and most of the people were there to hear them sing. It was a huge contrast to the last time we saw Butterfly Boucher live, from the top section of what was then the Arrowhead Pond (primarily a hockey stadium).

The first opening act, Dawn Mitschele, played a half-hour set starting at 8:00, and the second, Derek Evans, started after about a ten-minute break. They both had a more country-folk sound, which kind of surprised me, since Butterfly Boucher is more rock. They’re both locals, and I wondered whether they might be following her up to LA.

All through the evening, teenagers in formal wear would come walking down the hall past the stage. It turned out that a high school was holding its prom in the main room at the House of Blues. At one point one woman in the audience (of two who did quite a bit of dancing later on) shouted out, “Hello prom people!”

Butterfly (yes, that is her real name) came out around 9:30, spent a few minutes setting up her equipment (including the loop pedal she jokingly referred to as her backup band) and tuning her guitar, then launched into about an hour-long set of music mostly from the new album — though she did break into “Another White Dash” (with an audience participation section) and “I Can’t Make Me” in the middle.

She clearly hadn’t expected to do an encore, but we all kept applauding, and she came back out to sing “Life is Short,” explaining that she hadn’t rehearsed it in over six months and might need help on the lyrics…

After the show we waited in line to meet her, bought a copy of the CD which she signed, talked to her for a few minutes and posed with her for a photo.

Nightlife

After the meet-and-greet, we headed down to the Ghirardelli shop. Ever since the one in South Coast Plaza closed, I have this thing where if I’m in a city with a Ghirardelli store, I have to go there. Neither of us was up for dessert, but they do have a wider selection of their chocolate than you can find in the grocery store.

As typical for a Saturday night, 5th Avenue was absolutely packed with people of all ages and levels of dress going to and from clubs, bars, and restaurants. We dodged over to 6th street on the way back up, but even then ran into a huge crowd around Sin Niteclub [sic] and the Double Deuce. Through the latter bar’s windows we could see a guy trying to ride a mechanical bull. Some of the women we saw walking around had given up on their shoes and were barefoot. Though walking barefoot on the streets of any major city doesn’t sound like a great idea, no matter how much your feet hurt. Eventually we made it back to the hotel.

Sunday Morning

Cafe 222 (2nd Ave. and Island) has quickly become one of our standard spots for breakfast in San Diego, at least when we’re staying downtown. Afterward we hit the farmer’s market (every Sunday morning at 3rd Ave. and J St. — take note, Comic-Con attendees) where we picked up some blueberries and cherries to bring home. Nothing much in the way of stores were open yet, and we had make it up to the LA area for lunch, so we checked out, made another quick stop at Old Town to look for a store we’d stumbled on last December, and got back on the road.

More photos at Flickr, mostly Old Town and some weird stuff in the Gaslamp area.

• Lunchtime observation: Why is it that whenever I put Vienna Teng on random on the iPod, “Passage” always seems to come up when I’m driving? #
• Just saw Vienna Teng in concert at the Roxy. Fantastic! Opening act The Paper Raincoat was good too. #
  

I’m not sure I’d ever heard it before, but Train covered it at the concert we went to last Friday (we went for the Wallflowers, who played after the intermission), and I just heard it on the radio this morning.

Talk about timing.

In the past, when we’ve gone to the Anaheim House of Blues, we’ve tried to eat at Downtown Disney. It always proves problematical, with restaurants either not taking reservations for parties of two or not having any reservations left. This time we just ate near home and drove up after dinner. We got there after the doors opened, but before most of the audience arrived, and managed to claim a spot dead center in the main floor, much closer than we’d ever been to this stage.

The opening act was Rebecca Pigeon. She was quite good, and a good match stylistically. (Too often, you only get one — or neither. We still joke about “Corn Mo” who opened for TMBG a few years ago.) She started with “Tough on Crime,” which Katie figures has to have a Heroes video in it somewhere. Interesting fact: it turns out she’s married to David Mamet.

By the end of the opening act, the house had filled up considerably, and was respectably packed by the time Aimee Mann took the stage. This was actually the third time we’d seen her in concert, and the second time we’d seen her here. This felt a lot more like the last time in terms of audience interaction, what with her taking requests and making jokes. She actually opened with “Freeway,” which was kind of a surprise since it’s not exactly complimentary toward Orange County.

She told a funny story about how “Borrowing Time” started out when she was approached to do a song for Shrek III. At first she thought, “Oh, you must know me from my songs for Magnolia!” So she and her writing partner (whose name escapes me) watched the scene, found a song in it, brought it to the producers, and they kept trying to make it faster, more upbeat, etc. By the third draft she was starting to hate the song. As it turned out, they’d asked a whole bunch of artists to write songs for the same scene, so she didn’t feel too bad about dropping it. They wanted a happy, encouraging, “Come on, you can do it!” song, and she remarked that she’s not very good at that kind of message. (Yeah, I know, understatement of the year.) So they picked up the original version of the song, threw out the lyrics, and went with the sort of creepy seven-dwarves sound.

She finished the main set by opening to requests. Someone kept shouting “Stupid Thing,” which I don’t really know (I started listening to her with Magnolia and Bachelor No.2, and I’ve only picked up I’m With Stupid of her older albums), but she didn’t play it. Finally she said something like, “Tell you what. We’ll do one more song, then I’ll go offstage and pretend I’m not coming back. I’ll have a drink or water and you’ll cheer. Then I’ll come back on and play ‘Invisible Ink.’” After the next song, she announced she was going away “and never coming back, ever again.” A minute later, she came back and did another two or three songs.

In the end the concert was about half songs from @#%&*! Smilers and half older songs. Aside from “Freeway” and “Borrowing Time,” off the top of my head I remember “Phoenix,” “Thirty One Today” (which should be played right after the Gin Blossoms’ “Twenty-Nine” for a birthday disillusionment duo), “Medicine Wheel” and possibly “Great Beyond” from the new album and “Goodbye Caroline,” “Invisible Ink,” “You’re With Stupid, Now,” “Red Vines,” “Save Me,” “Wise Up” and “One” from the back catalog.

We went to Tori’s concert on Saturday at the Grove of Anaheim. The standing-room show was good, though there were some snafus getting to it, made worse by the fact that they opened the doors about 45 minutes late. So late, in fact, that they gave up on security checks and just started letting people in. By the time it started moving, the line snaked all the way along the side of the theater and down at least one side of the (rather spacious) parking lot.

Her current album, American Doll Posse, is based around a fictional quintet of singer/songwriters, each based on a different facet of her personality, and she performed as three different personas: Pip, Santa (no relation), and Tori. Which should have been more fun, but there was just a bit too much self-parody in the performance.

She brought a band again, which I think helps keep her from the slow-everything-down tendency she showed on the Originial Sinsuality tour (Katie calls it “elf disease,” after the way the elves of Lothlorien speak in the Lord of the Rings movies). Except for an endless vamp at the end of “Waitress,” this concert moved much more than the last two we’d seen.

It was good to hear stuff from Choirgirl Hotel again. It’s been notably missing from the last few concerts we’ve been to. And there was a surprising amount of stuff from her first two albums as well. (Full set list at Undented.)

I’ve seen Tori in concert 6 times: Once in 1999 at Irvine Meadows, when she toured on a double bill with Alanis Morissette, twice on the Scarlet’s Walk tour from 2002-2003 (Universal Amphitheater & the Pond), twice on the Original Sinsuality tour in 2005 (Royce Hall & the Greek), and this show at the Grove. My favorite was the Scarlet’s Walk tour. I reviewed the Universal show during the first few months of this blog, though I don’t seem to have written anything about the one at the Pond.

Update: The Beat has more on the comic project, including a title, Comic Book Tattoo and additional contributors.

(Being off to the side put us right by the speakers, which was an odd experience, as the drum beats resonated at the frequency of the human ribcage. On percussion-heavy songs, it was sort of like having an audio pacemaker.)

As always, he put on a fun show. If you haven’t seen him in concert before, all the major songs are done in full costume, with comedic video clips (mostly from his mid-1990s TV show) running between sets to allow time for costume changes. In the middle of the show, he always does a medley of other songs, just to get as much in as possible into a 2-hour concert.

As for being near the front, thankfully he didn’t come to our section for the audience-walk during “Wanna B Ur Lovr,” (a truly annoying song). We did get covered with red and white streamers at the end of “Canadian Idiot,” and (speaking of Monopoly money) fake $100 during “I’ll Sue Ya.”

One surprise: A couple of minutes into “White and Nerdy,” he suddenly stopped, said, “There’s no reason to do this song. Radio, Radio”—and the band proceeded to do a straight cover of Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio.” During the encore, he explained they’d had some technical difficulties, and did the song from the beginning (though without the costumes and the Segway).

Another surprise: He performed “Albuquerque.” All 10 minutes of it. *shudder*

After the concert we explored the fair a bit, then left to go to Borders to pick up Harry Potter, leading to the second part of this story…

For now, I’ll leave you with this final thought: We all have cell phones, so come on, let’s get real.

The concert was great, and very different from the last concert we saw at Royce Hall just by virtue of having a full band behind her (Tori Amos performed solo last time we were there). It was also very different from the last time we saw Aimee Mann, at the House of Blues last summer. For one thing, she was focusing on songs from her new album, The Forgotten Arm.

It was also much more interactive than either of the other two concerts. What stuck in my mind was the request section. She had everything set up so that people would write the request on a piece of paper and leave it on the stage, but when she got to the break, people were shouting out titles. One guy came prepared with what looked like a balsa glider and wrote his request on that, adding that it was his birthday. I don’t remember his request, but she improvised “Happy birthday to the paper airplane man.” I’ve seen singers who get talkative, and singers who improv silly songs, but it really felt like the house was much smaller than 1800 people. (Of course, you could still make a drinking game out of the number of times she says “Thank you so much” after a song.)

Another funny moment was when someone shouted out a request for “Voices Carry.” “Voices Carry?” she said. “Why not ask for a Cyndi Lauper song? ‘Time after time…’” Surprisingly, after performing “King of the Jailhouse” for an encore, she finished up with none other than “Voices Carry,” altered to fit her current style.

The one thing I didn’t like about the concert was that the amplification was up way too loud. The couple sitting next to us left partway through because the woman kept covering her ears.

Of possible interest to my brother: the bio in the program was credited as labeled as “Courtesy of Wikipedia.”

The concert let out at 10:00, which was just as well, since the drive back was…interesting. Since we’d had to eat early to make it up to LA by 7:00 (and we just barely made it—the opening act had started singing), our plan was to grab a snack in Westwood and eat on the way back. We were surprised to find that there were lots of place open at 10pm on a Sunday, but I got frustrated trying to figure out which parking lots were fair game. We just got on the freeway, figuring on stopping in Manhattan Beach for a McDonald’s we knew of next to the freeway. The rain came back as we drove south, and then we started seeing lightning. When we stopped for food, we just parked the car facing southeast and watched the light show. There was a fantastic lightning bolt that snaked sideways across half the sky in front of us. The rain got pretty heavy for the rest of the drive, but for some reason it cleared up again by the time we got home.

We got tickets for this one because it was a new tour, and we figured there was a chance it would be a different type of concert. Eventually it became clear from her newsletter that it was going to be the same type of show—just her, a piano, two organs and a synthesizer—but hey, we liked the last one, and we already had the tickets!

As it turned out, it was the same type of show, but a very different selection of songs. I tried to write down everything I remembered her playing last night, and compared it to the list from the last concert, and there are only 5 songs in common, all from the new album!

Some of the interesting bits: Leading into “Carbon,” she added a verse about this crazy redhead driving around the same streets as you, and flicking you off, and yes, that was me. She covered “Nights in White Satin” and a Pearl Jam song I didn’t recognize (Edit: “Black”), and mixed “God” with a Kate Bush song (Edit: “Running Up that Hill” a.k.a. “A Deal with God”).

Her performance of “Winter” was a great example of how to professionally deal with mistakes. In theater, particularly music theater, we’re taught that if you make a mistake, you act as if you meant it, because the whole thing is to present the story. You don’t want to break the fourth wall. But with a concert, you don’t have to worry about the fourth wall—some singers especially want to make a connection to the audience. In that case, it’s often better to acknowledge the mistake, then pick up the performance again. Well, she got one line into the second verse, and suddenly stared at the audience and gasped, “Oh my God!” She kept playing the piano, though, and started ad-libbing about forgetting lines, and joked that she sometimes feels like she’s in winter herself, then went back to the beginning and played the whole song through.

So, in the style of the last review…

The Good:

• More good “quiet Tori.”
• Good acoustics again. The Greek is one of the few venues I’ve been to where singers’ voices aren’t distorted by the sound system.
• Several ad-libs and covers that you won’t hear anywhere else.
• Two of my three favorite Tori songs: “A Sorta Fairytale” and “Winter.”
• Great backdrop of hills, trees and fog, with a nearly-full moon slowly rising above the amphitheater.
• Not all of my shivering was from the cold.

The Bad:

• Still don’t like the Hammond organ. At least she only used it on a couple of songs.
• Her tendency to slow… some… songs… way… down… on this tour got on my nerves this time.
• For some reason her variable accent bothered me more than usual, or maybe it was more pronounced last night.
• It was colder than we expected. We had jackets, but could have used heavier ones.
• Still no “1,000 Oceans.”

The last time I heard “1,000 Oceans” in concert was in 1999. For some reason I hadn’t actually picked up To Venus and Back yet, or hadn’t had a chance to listen to it, and the song just hit both of us.

We actually have a recording of the last concert we went to. It was one of two that were recorded and released as official “bootlegs” through the Tori Amos Bootleg Boutique. The newsletter that announced them said that they plan to release more. I hope this one is on the list!