Sonic Youth in Burlington last night!!!

[i_like_lectric_motors]

Wow, what a show I got to see last night at Higher Ground.

Blir, you've been there. Imagine 750 people in that tiny place - it was insane! I did a little advance research and found out that Thurston always sets up on the right side of the stage so we got there early and made sure to get a spot up front, directly in front of where he'd be. Note to Stella, if you're still lurking - we didn't even have to trample any senior citizens or babies to get there.

The opening act was Wooden Wand, a folk act consisting of a guy on acoustic guitar and an insanely hot chick backup singer. They have a record coming out in May on Thurston's Ecstatic Peace label, produced by Lee Ranaldo. Go figure. They were OK, but a half hour of that was more than enough.

SY took the stage at 9:10 (they ended up playing just shy of 2 hours)with Thurston saying "We are The Sonic Youth. It's Sunday and we missed church so we could be here tonight."[:D] After introducing everyone, they started off with "Candle" from Daydream Nation. I had never had the pleasure of seeing The Youth live before and it's incredible how similar to the records they sound live. They all looked great - other than Lee Ranaldo's gray hair and Kim's slight paunch, you'd never guess these guys had been around for over 25 years. The energy level was off the charts. The sound was amazing (Blir can vouch for the acoustics in the place) and the band was dead on the whole night. They're touring with Mark Ibold (ex-Pavement) to lessen the amount of bass Kim Gordon has to play (carpal tunnel [:(]). When Kim wasn't playing bass, she was on guitar or just dancing and when she did play bass, Ibold jumped to guitar. Yeah, that's exactly what SY needs. MORE GUITAR NOISE!!!

They played 7 songs from Rather Ripped and even though I would have rather heard "Tom Violence" or "Death Valley '69" than a few of the newer songs, it was still cool because the new record is damn good and sounds awesome played live. Thurston absolutely killed the solo during "Incinerate" and the crowd reaction to the new material was surprisingly rabid. I even enjoyed "Do You Believe In Rapture?", a song which I'd been unable to get into before last night. It helped that they did this really cool noise intro that had Thurston tuning a radio and manipulating the static before finally tuning into a few seconds of Thorogood's "Bad To The Bone". Still, the highlights were "Schizophrenia" (Lee!!!), "100%", and "Teenage Riot", which was the set closer and ended with an extended feedback/noise jam that was absolutely sick and finished with Thurston going out into the audience.

The biggest surprise of the night for me was the amount of kids that were there. Burlington's a college town but I was still expecting the crowd to be made up primarily of 30-something former college dj types and old fuckers like myself. It was awesome though - the kids were into it, even (especially?) the ear-melting feedback parts. There's hope for the world after all. [:D]

Sorry that was so long [B)]. It's not every day you get to be in the presence of such greatness.[8D]

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