Once in a while, one of those days comes along, where everything clicks into place perfectly and becomes a fantastic memory. Yesterday was one of those days. Yesterday, the music gods and the karma police were all smiling on me in a big, big way. I’m so happy that I am so impulsive and such a childish fool. Because if I wasn’t, I would have missed one of the best times of my life.

I’m not going to get into too much detail about how I got there, because I already wrote that and it was a dissertation. So let me just say I arrived at the show with two people I didn’t really know, after quite a few emails, several phone calls, and a bottle of wine poolside at the Best Western on Highland Boulevard in Hollywood, equipped with a ticket for a seat in the second row in the pool section of the friggin’ Hollywood Bowl for a band that I totally worship, Sigur Ros. When just that morning I’d been ticketless. That is the shortened version of my dissertation.

My new friends Lloyd and David had seats in the 200 section of the garden boxes, one of which was previously mine until the pool ticket materialized. It was really trippy to be around people after all those solo Hollywood shows of the summer. It was especially awesome to be with David, because he worships Sigur Ros too. We all ate french onion cheese spread and crackers and watched the opening band, Anima. Then I went down to the pool seat. Being very close to the stage in a huge venue is a pretty cool experience, and I sat crammed in with a predominately Asian audience while a now familiar scrim was lifted. It was awesome – as much as I didn’t want to leave the garden box, it was pretty spectacular being right below the stage. It was LOUD – loud as I could want, perfect, not too loud but really really loud. The band was so close I could see expressions and all the Asians lifted their cellphones constantly to take photos. Two girls in front of me – in the front row of the entire venue, got up and left after the second song, then came back around the fourth and proceeded to have a lengthy conversation. Me and the Japanese guy next to me both shushed them at the same time, then looked at each other and giggled, and at that moment I completely forgave him for his incessant cellphone photo taking. The light in his eyes when he smiled was all love for this band, and all love for anyone who loves the same way. It’s one of the best things about music, that light.

Eventually I went back up to the box to give my ticket to Lloyd, who seemed as hesitant as I was to leave the garden box. “Dude,” I said. “You HAVE to go down there. You can see Anima’s BREASTS from there.” I so did not mean this in any sexual or sexist way, but only as an observation of the eye/back of the stage where Anima were playing violins ratio. While the garden box was close, the pool seat was imminent. In my excitement telling Lloyd all this, the woman in the box in front looked back at me, and I looked back at her with an I’m so sorry I should shut the fuck up look. She smiled, and then, again, there was that light. So all of you readers who hate L.A. crowds, take note. Certainly there are some pretty lame ass people at an L.A. show. But I think we always look for the bad ones, when really, there are people like you and me EVERYWHERE. We just don’t see them too clearly unless we really look hard. It is just too much easier to notice the jerks.

Lloyd took off and I took his seat in the box. As much as I loved the pool, the sound, and the vibe, in the garden box was so much better. The band sounded lush and intense, everything bouncing off trees and the sky and people, instead of confined in a indoor space like the Avalon or Copley Hall. David and I kept looking at each other with jaws dropped, even though we’d just both seen them two nights before. I can’t even describe how beautiful it was, but if you’ll listen to Bradley’s files, and imagine yourself in an almost perfect setting… he was in Boston and we are in Hollywood, but the set list is almost exactly the same. The feeling? Almost exactly the same. Almost.

I can have no complaints, since I had already seen the band twice; and I was so totally lucky all day with the navigation of tickets and seats and new faces, that I did not, possibly even could not, let dickheads in the audience bug me. But this is only because I saw the Avalon show and the Copley show, where for the most part the audiences were perfect. Having all that space around in a garden box also helped. There is much internet chatter about an incredible moment of silence during Sigur Ros’s “Vidrar Vel Til Loftarasa.” In Boston, as Bradley’s file shows, the silence was unbelievable. In my experiences at the Avalon and Copley, someone had to yell. But at the Hollywood Bowl, my god! There were not only people yelling but there was some freak black dude dancing by us that kept screaming “JOHN CAGE! JOHN MILTON CAGE!” Dude, this is so not about you, or John Cage. This is about Sigur Ros, their music, that silence, and our relation to both.

In the end though, freaky dancing guy just added to a perfect night. Just before the encore, Lloyd came back from the pool. “That was SO unbelievable,” he said. We both looked at David. “You have to go down there,” we said together. I had a sublime mixture of wine and joy running through my veins. There was a panorama of cellphones in the air, a sea of little lighted boxes. It was like a cellphone ballet on a perfect autumn night, danced to one of the best bands in the world.

Another thousand quiet wows. Another two hours of perfection. Thank you, Sigur Ros.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Adventures in Rock and Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.