Billy Talent

Last night I went on a date with Joelle to the Billy Talent concert. She actually treated me to the concert, because I've helped her move recently and am storing her stuff in my garage, but it was really nice of her to take me along nonetheless. The concert was really good, but the most eventful part of our evening occurred before we even left for the concert.

As I mentioned, I'm storing some of Joelle's stuff in my garage. However, she has been going through a difficult moving process (due to a breakup) and has stuff stored in several locations. She thought that the concert tickets were in a box in my garage, but we couldn't find them there at all. So then we went to Bindi's house, where Joelle has been staying the past little while, hoping the tickets were somewhere there. No luck. Lastly, we went to the lab, where Joelle had some mail in her desk that might contain the tickets. Again, not there...seems that she may not have gotten them from the ex after all...

We didn't give up though! We called Ticketmaster, and after being on hold for 15-20 minutes, we eventually talked to a person. Easily enough, they put replacement tickets on hold for us at Will Call, so we headed off to the concert, arriving an hour late. This wasn't a big deal, since we didn't know either of the two opening bands that we missed.

Once at the stadium, we had a little trouble finding our seats, but in the end figured it out. Turns out we were seated across from some drunk 16-year olds - oh wait, they were ALL drunk 16-year olds! Either that, or inappropriately dressed 14-year olds. Now, I'm only 25, but I felt a little aged in this crowd. Interestingly, I didn't get ID'ed when I bought a beer...

We watched the third opening act, a band called 'Rise Against'. Now, maybe if I were young and hip still, I would know who this band was, but I didn't. I did enjoy their music to a certain extent. It is punk rock after all, so it's sort of screamy and fast - hard to dance to, especially if you don't know the song at all. But they were entertaining and weren't on too long, so that was nice.

When Billy Talent came on, you could tell right away why they are very popular and mainstream as compared to Rise Against - the difference in the music style, the performance and the acoustics were profound. I ended up knowing even more of their songs than I expected, since I own their older CD but not their new one. My ears were definately ringing when we got out of there, and my right ear continued to be partly sound deficient this morning as well. It is better by now, though!

We were on the second level of the stadium, but the seats were really good and not that far from the stage. I had a hoot watching the crowd surfers playing around on the floor below - they had security personnel at the front of the stage, and those surfers that got too close would be helped down and sent around to the back. However, often the security personnel would drop the surfer or they would both go down at an awkward angle. I'm sure they were all fine, so it made it pretty funny to watch. Other than that, numerous people threw shoes onto the stage. Why, you might wonder? I wonder too. I mean, now you're walking around with one shoe on. Can you get the other shoe back after the show? Or do you walk home without a shoe? It was cold and wet in Edmonton last night, so I wouldn't have wanted to walk home with only one shoe. Maybe I'm just getting old and lame...