Top 10 Live Shows, 2000-2009: part the first

In no order whatsoever, here is the first half of my live music retrospective on the decade that was. Part 2 will run later in the week. These aren’t necessarily the 10 best shows I saw, but for one reason or another they were the 10 most memorable.

(Editors Note—part 2 currently only has 4 shows. If you attended a really memorable show with me in the last 10 years that didn’t make it in this post, please send me some inspiration!!!)

5/03 Built to Spill in LA—I’ve seen these guys more than any other band, and one show had to go on the list. This was easily the best show I’ve seen them play. They closed with a 15 minute version of Cortez the Killer during which Jim Roth did things with his guitar the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since. Epic. I have a poster of this show on the wall of my apartment.

4/06 Daft Punk at Coachella—I was there with several great friends Berkeley friends, to include the Kaplans and Anna Utgoff. DP wasn’t why I went to this festival, but it’s the one thing I’ll never forget about Coachella. This was the first show DP did with their giant laser pyramid (top left). It was as cool as everyone says it was.

12/05 Wrens in SF—I love the Wrens, and they’re always great live. I had seen them maybe 6 months earlier at the Pitchfork Intonation Music Festival in Chicago. At that show, for one song, they brought fans up on stage to play percussion with the band. When that song came up at this show I left my friends (Dan and Kelly) and pushed to the very front. I had a Bruce Springsteen/Courtney Cox moment with a member of the band, and he pulled me on stage with several fellow fans. When the singing came in I did what I do at shows—sang along. The band member, seeing I knew the words and wasn’t a completely awful singer pulled me into the mic so I could sing along with the band. We did it up, back-to-back 80s hair metal style, for the rest of the song. It was probably the coolest moment I’ve ever had at a concert, hands down.

3/06 Magnolia Electric Co/Okkervil River in Austin—At SXSW I won an MBA music case competition with Any, April Chris and Sung Hu. We had no passes (the guys at McCombs let us down) but a couple of us managed to hop the fence at this outdoor set and enjoy two really nice performances.

9/06 Silver Jews in SF—This was a good but unspectactular show on September 10th 2006. I went by myself and had made plans to try to meet up with David H, but he got held up doing other stuff. The show was memorable because I got my letter in the mail from Uncle Sam the next day calling me back to the Army. I saw a few other good shows before I cut myself off from music in 2007 to go overseas (Islands and Phoenix in SF come immediately to mind) but music wasn’t quite the same for me after this show, not for a long while at least.