Today, a day of complete freedom – boyfriend gone for the day and night, nowhere to be, nothing to do. So what did I do? Clean out my closet, and mop my floors, in the early part of the day, while it was still foggy. Somehow, even with two huge garbage bags of clothes and shoes ready for the Goodwill, my closet is still full. I can’t figure it out. I’m not really a clothes buyer. How come I have all these evening dresses? It’s fairly bizarre.

Getting back to the cleaning, though, to help me on my way, I popped a bootleg of Radiohead’s South Park concert into my CD player, and this was the soundtrack of my Sunday journey. Even if I am cleaning, I am listening, at the same time, to a truly stellar show. Life in 2004 = pretty damn good.

The Radiohead South Park show was on July 7, 2001. South Park is in Oxford, England, Radiohead’s hometown. The band had taken a long break from touring, and this was their first show in Oxford in a long time, and the show was a huge deal to the local fans who had followed Radiohead since the beginning. And about 45,000 of those local fans turned up. 45,000!

I’d already seen Radiohead twice in the months before the Oxford show – once in L.A. when they played only three concerts in the Fall of 2000 (Toronto, New York & L.A.) and again in Verona, at the Verona Arena in May 2001. So I knew how fantastic it was all going to be before I heard this bootleg of the Oxford show. Radiohead in the studio makes music that you listen to lying on your couch, stoned, entranced. Radiohead on stage reaches out, grabs your spinal cord, and makes you jump around like a deranged puppet.

But this Oxford show is beyond fantastic. It is more like orgasm. Radiohead comes home, plays a hometown gig, before 45,000 screaming, ecstatic people. It is heart crushing for someone like me, who is just way too into it to begin with.

The South Park bootleg is two CDs, an hour long each. Two hours of bliss, but at the end, the final song, something happens that always makes me cry. No, not cry but totally break down. That is how powerful this moment is.

In 1993, Radiohead got their big break with the single “Creep.” People who don’t know who Radiohead is (like many of the people reading this right now) would probably recognize this song. It made Radiohead into the radio star, but the band got sick of drunken frat boys screaming “play ‘Creep!'” at shows and after a while, refused to play it anymore. (Even though it is a really GREAT song.)

Fast forward to the South Park show, when after the two hours of bliss, the band were about to depart with a song called “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a mellow, sweet love song. After ten seconds, they stop and Thom Yorke, the lead singer, yells “Fuck It!” After a minute, they launch into “Creep.” After years of not playing it.

Those 45,000 people go Totally Insane. The noise is like the roar of a thousand lions on Ecstasy. It is an incredibly beautiful sound – 45,000 people, all so totally happy. At that point, it was raining on them, but they could not have cared less.

And they were singing. They sing along all the way through the show, but they are louder here than ever – it’s as though Thom Yorke doesn’t even need to bother. They – the mass of people and the band – sing together:

I wish I were special
You’re so fucking special

But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.

But they all DO belong where they are at that moment. Sharing an evening of bliss with a LOT of other people, with a band who really cares. I had to sit down on the floor once again at the end of the CD and cry.

The house clean, and my tears dried, I went down to the beach and watched the ocean in silence for awhile. Thinking about the noise of the crowd, the whole time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2004 at 5:55 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.