The past few weeks, Betty Please and I have gone to a couple of excellent concerts. Our concert going usually seems to happen in spurts, kind of like how things, usually bad things, happen in threes. First we saw Uh Huh Her play in Chicago, then we saw Tegan & Sara play in Indy. Now we just need a third show to round it out.

I'm trying to talk the usual suspects into going to see Lez Zepplin in mid June, but we got distracted by talk of going to Bonnaroo instead, cause Lez zeppelin are playing there the day after the show we'd go to, and then by the thought of going to Lollapalooza. And that's where the thought train jumped the tracks of our attention span and left us with out a plan.

Anyway, the shows. One of the things I noticed while at these two shows is that I don't know when we got so old. And we aren't that old, we're only mid-30's, but I would guess that we were a good 5-10 years older than the average concert goer, at both shows. Do people our, my, age not go to concerts any more? Or, do I just listen to music that most people my age don't. I love live shows, so I hope to never give up going to concerts. But, it does make me wonder, did I miss some sort of memo you're supposed to get upon entering your 30's that says you can't listen to new music and you must stop going to concerts unless you are chaperoning your teenage children and their friends. It's sad to say, but the only people who we thought older than us at the Tegan & Sara show, we assumed were chaperoning kids. It was a nice surprise when Tegan & Sara started playing and the "older people" started dancing and singing along, proving my judgment wrong.

I was pretty right on with my assumptions of what the crowd at the Uh Huh Her show would be like; predominantly female, mostly lesbians, L-Word fans. Honestly, I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that there were, maybe, 5 men in the audience of the Uh Huh Her show. All but one of those men were there with their girlfriend/wife, and somehow we ended up talking to the one guy who was there by himself. He was a really interesting guy. I mean how can you not get hooked into a conversation with someone who labels them self omni-celibate? He reminded me of the character, Lisa, the male identified lesbian, from The L Word. The whole conversation just left me wondering how someone gets to be like him. It was interesting.

With the Tegan & Sara crowd, I was a little less than on target . I think that was most interesting and eclectic audience I've ever seen, except for maybe at a music festival. It was largely a female audience, and maybe 50 or so percent were gay, but that was not the unexpected part. I expected to see lots of women, gay and straight. And I expected to see guys there with their girlfriends/wives. I expected to the young tattooed and pierced crowd, but mostly I expected the average Jane. What I did not expect, were the guys who came with their buddies, no girlfriends, and who I would have figured some for heavy metal, some for hard core rap, and some for country music fans. There were two guys who when they took their seats next to us, I turned to Betty Please and asked if there was another show going on in the venue because surely those guys were in the wrong place. But I couldn't believe it, one of the two knew every single word to every single song. Every song. He was dancing and singing along like he was their biggest fan. It still baffles me.

Since the Tegan & Sara show, I can't thinking about how I so completely misjudged these guys. How many times must I sum people up in a glance? And now I wonder, how many times must I be completely wrong? A small life lesson in not judging a book by it's cover, I guess.

Audience observation tangents aside, Uh Huh Her and Tegan & Sara were great shows. Uh Huh Her is a lot edgier sounding live. They interacted well with the audience and they looked like they were having fun playing. After the show they stayed and signed autographs. We waited in line for almost 2 hours to get our posters signed. Leisha and Camila were super, super nice, even after two hours of meeting fans and signing autographs, which only made me like them even more.

Alright, so I know that Leisha Hailey is really known for her role as Alice Pieszecki in the L-Word......but Jesus Christ she is an amazing musician[...]The whole band was excited to be playing together! Although the vocals were difficult to decipher, the sound of the band is fresh, upbeat, and rockin.
Read full post, Yep, Right. Uh Huh, Uh Huh Her by Jen Bryan

wrmarsolek posted videos, Uh Huh Her videos from Varsity Theater, Dinkytown
on her blog, Information Access Avenger, that she took at the Uh Huh Her show. It's some of the better audience shot video I've seen.

Tegan & Sara were also fantastic. They sounded great live. There was a lot of funny banter and story telling. They played a lot of songs from all of their albums. There was a lot of audience interaction. They messed up I Know, I Know, I Know so bad that they had to stop the song and go into this story about how Tegan didn't want play the song because she had been messing it up lately, and not that she was intentionally messing it up, but...anyway they never could recover the song but they turned it into a funny kind of a thing.

...when I arrived the lights were dimmed and a crowd was eagerly waiting. Tegan and Sara took the stage and the show began with the beginning strums of "Knife Going In". They played a good mix of "So Jealous" and "The Con", playing such favorites as "Where Does the Good Go", "Speak Slow", "The Con", "I know, I know, I know" and one of my personal faves, "Dark Come Soon". Between songs the girls joked and bantered at each other and the crowd, making the show seem more like friends hanging out in someones basement.
Read full post , I Heart Tegan and Sara by Kassidy at Broken Cookie Jar.

I highly recommend both Uh Huh Her, and Tegan & Sara if they come to your town.  Who are you wanting to see this summer?