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Toronto (2)

Two Reduced Price Toronto Tickets

Posted by Emily on April 4, 2012 at 3:46am

My friend in NY  has two extra tickets to the Toronto Show.  They are the interchangeable paper tickets from Ticketmaster, so they can be mailed out to you (I recently used the same type of ticket for the Glendale show I bought from someone and they work just like paper tickets).  If anyone would like to attend that concert or want to buy 2 more for your friends, let me know, as I said- she is willing to sell at a loss.

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TORONTO Rainbows... thank god there is a Greyhound bus afterall....!

Posted by inez on August 18, 2008 at 11:30pm
So it’s over now. The Toronto gig. The East Coast leg. Which is why making it (and the most out of it) has reached a ‘no matter what’ priority level… as I was watching flight cancellations at JFK for 6 nerve-wrecking hrs, I have long departed the land of reason. THANK YOU ALL for numerous ‘keep safe’ messages in response to my Greyhound Bus blog!! It really isn’t (WASN’T) that bad in my particular case. Exhausting – yes. And COLD. I wasn’t exactly dressed for a spontaneous overnight trip. No sleep. Arrived in Toronto around 9AM, I dropped of the bag at my brother’s… He wanted to drive me downtown, but I figured - YOU HEAR THAT, THOM? - I figured, I was conscious enough for a subway/tram combo. And, while we are at it: in theory (hmmm), I did NOT travel long distance JUST for the gig. I have lots of family here and my parents arrived from overseas… blah-blah-blah. True, I may have blown off this reunion because of the crazy work schedule… (should my family be thanking RH for the pleasure of seeing me…?) But I DID have an unrelated perfectly legitimate reason for being here… ARE WE ALRIGHT ON THIS ONE, THOM? ;-)12:45pm – perhaps 30-35 pit people at Molson closed doors. Was ok. A few people were a bit neurotic at line-watching – which really is a pointless endeavor as those first 80 will invariably get reshuffled through the security checks etc, and will ultimately end up at the rail anyway. I understand: sitting there since 8am and all… I’ve been on the road for 22hrs and had no energy for being neurotic (which would otherwise be the baseline). I settled with a nice group and embraced myself for a 5 hr wait. The rumor spread that the doors open at 5:30pm, earlier than expected. So things were fine, until nature started fucking with us. The sky was getting progressively more intimidating and finally exploded with a storm. Within seconds, it was pouring. Not everyone had umbrellas, newspapers were soaked instantly. A little gift shop 20 ft away sold umbrellas and ponchos – so while holding each other’s stuff and places in line we all made trips there – still, we were drenched. Forget rain, it started HAILING (!) - “fucking special”, indeed! I took pix of a rather miserable bunch under pouring rain → on my page. I was amused at how this whole adventure seemed to be someone’s revenge on too easy a time I had getting to All Points West! Besides, a healthy sense of humor kinda helped us through it - fortunately, it stopped raining before the latter drowned completely ;-). I quite appreciate the Canadian crowd immediately around me (coming from the South of the Border ;-) ) – we chatted about all kinds of things to pass the time. The sound check started around 4pm (right??). Morning Bell, Talk Show Host, Like Spinning Plates... - definitely lifted the spirits triggering a round of applause after each song, as if they could hear us ;-)… Finally at 5:30pm, like a clock, Molson people tightened the line (a couple of hundred people by then?) and set up security stands. I have to say, I admired Canadian organization! For at least half hour prior, they were making sure that every person in line was standing for the pit, picking out and relocating those who were seated elsewhere… I hear stories of some US venues, when after standing in line all fucking day, people are suddenly told that they have to RUN (whoever’s fastest?!?) to an altogether different entrance... Then, everything went into a VERY HECTIC motion; security checks: some go right through, others get stuck – which is why WHERE EXACTLY you are within the first 100 is kinda meaningless. THOSE ON THE WEST COAST: No problems with umbrellas or (at least little) cameras – no matter what the venue ticket says. Everything WAS allowed in. Now, just HOW MANY GODDAMN DOORS AND BARRIERS are there in Molson?! We must have been channeled through a dozen! But –that was it!! A bunch of ecstatic people at the rail, a few feet from the stage. Some RH equipment boxes were piled up – I could read weights, dimensions and a fucking small print on the shipping labels! I took a few snapshots just for the hell of it ;-)Grizzly Bear came on at 7:30pm. “We are just a support band”… They were really sweet. Half way through their gig, I noticed Jonny at the far right end of the stage watching them. I pointed it out to a couple of guys around me, and everyone got so psyched and eager to take pix of jonny that they completely forgot about the Bears. I actually felt bad… Between the songs, I looked back at the crowd behind us; it was raining on the lawn again (most of the seated area at Molson is covered) and the sun was peaking out – and THERE IT F*CKING WAS! – a BRIGHT RAINBOW crossing the sky. It soon doubled. In fact, that rainbow again attracted so much attention that the Bears had every reason to be upset. They seem to have taken it well though. Even announced the aforementioned rainbow for those missing it! All in all, they played a rather short act – 45min or so…Ok, now, I shouldn’t really be describing RH gig itself. I mean, you can go to the Toronto page and find a dozen descriptions and I’m sure they are all correct. And everyone experiences these things through their own personal lens… skin? heart? Afterall, this is not a critical review – neither is it a fine piece of literature. This is just me, spilling over feelings and emotions that end up being so profound that it has taken me days to recover… so… In my opinion, the set-list (I posted a picture of the actual physical entity thrown off stage at the end) was incredible. Not just because the non-obligatory (non In Rainbows) part of it varied wildly from that at APW2 I saw a week earlier, and not only because the two songs I craved almost physically (Climbing Up The Walls and The Wolf…) both made it to the main set (YES!!), but the whole feel and the compound energy was a knockout. The sheer intensity of it. You can’t really swallow Jigsaw ---> Idioteque ---> Climbing up the Walls sequence and expect to retain any level of sanity and a normal pulse rate. The Walls alone with thom screaming into his guitar and the green evil lights breaking into bloody red – I mean, this is OUT THERE, who needs drugs?! Same goes for The Gloaming ---> Wolf at the Door or Airbag ---> Talk Show Host ‘combos’. Curiously, the printed set-list left an option of doing Talk Show Host OR I Might Be Wrong – they picked the former ;-) And the mood of the gig was …odd, unexpected. Idioteque 'delivery' was like I've never seen before. Instead of frantic dancing, thom froze in place, completely MOTIONLESS for that entire segment – which was freaky in its own right! Through the gig, he did not speak, almost AT ALL, till the encores… But his singing was outrageous. Several songs featured vocal outbursts different not just from recorded versions, but from his ‘traditional’ live delivery. And god, there was so much fucking raw power in this – it blew my mind. It really seemed as though he embraced the Toronto audience, he must have gotten something out of it (I sure hope so!) and whatever he felt was expressed through music only, no chatting no talking… I think (and I could be totally off base!) that there was this openness in his singing, the “all in” emotional commitment that does not happen every gig. I cried to Street Spirit.Now, standing at the rail directly in front of jonny was a treat. We all know he’s amazing, but my god, he looks ICONIC, I can’t find a better word to describe it! (Sorry, Jonny, but you MUST have heard this enough times by now to just accept it as a fact of life). Seeing him in action is unbelievable. AND HE SPOKE! (Thom: “Jonny speaks!!”) He thanked Grizzly Bear (he also wore a Grizzly Bear T-shirt /as did Coz/ with a 3-eyed cat on it, and it took me some time to grasp what the heck was wrong with it… I’m slow). How many of us heard jonny say ANYTHING at a gig?!I am also thrilled by what this gig turned into ‘cause of the Morning Bell incident early on when the organ thom was playing began to die. ...he repeatedly tried fixing the plug on the keyboard while singing, motioned to jonny for help (who tried and failed as well), then the roadie ran onto the stage, started messing with the cable on the side… they played the song to the end, but thom’s distress was anything but subtle... seeing it ‘close and personal’ was painful and it freaked ME out big time – as if I was right up there (oh shit… oh, no! what will this do?). Of course, these things do happen, and they can sure handle them (and most of the crowd likely didn’t notice a thing!), but I was relieved that it didn’t color the rest of the gig. Hope not. Isn’t it peculiar how we feel so connected with these guys that we go through the motions and feel for them as we would for our close friends?? ;-)OK... On this note, guys, I will stop. Tons of pix and videos on my page… hope you like the pix, 'cause I was torn between photographing and simply absorbing IT with every cell of my body – so I feel like I stole something from myself… Was it worth it? THANKS to you all.
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