Saw Dead and Company at Jiffy Lube Live last night in VA. I’d never been to that venue before and neither had my friend. He picked me up at 4:45pm in Rosslyn. He had cued up a live recording of the Radiohead show in DC from June 3, 2012 [11 years ago, to the day], which both of us attended as our first Radiohead show, but separately, because we didn’t know each other until a year later, haha. It was only an hour drive to the venue, so I figured that we’d listen to about half of that show on the way and then finish the other half on the ride home. I was wrong.
We got in a line of cars around 5:45ish to get into the parking lot for the venue. We were barely moving. The show started at 7 so we figured that we’d still have plenty of time to get to the show. We were very, very wrong.
We sat in that damn line of cars for more than 2 hours (in addition to the hour that it took to drive out there). We finished not just that whole radiohead live show from june 2012 but also made it halfway through the nov 2003 live at earls court radiohead show (and we finished the rest of that show during the drive home). We sat in the car refreshing setlist.fm as people at the show posted the each of the first eight songs from the show that we missed. When we finally parked and got into the venue, the band wasn’t even playing because their first set had already ended.
It seemed like the venue had massively oversold tickets and far exceeded the capacity of both its parking lots and the actual venue. We were directed to parallel park up on the curb on a grassy hill that was at like a 30 degree angle, like from left to right. Once we’d walked the quarter mile from our “parking spot” to the venue, it took us about an hour to find an unoccupied scrap of grass on the lawn to stand on.
But my single most important hope for the show was that they’d play “One More Saturday Night” - and it was, in fact, Saturday night. And once we’d worked our way down the lawn through the crowd to a spot with a decent sightline of the stage, they did close their second set with “One More Saturday Night”. They ended the whole show with a singalong of “Ripple” which was another one that I was hoping to experience. They sounded incredible throughout the show, too. Really wish we’d been able to experience it at literally any other venue on earth, but closing with those two songs evened things out for me and made it all worth it.
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P.S. I’d seen people walking around with a cool looking poster from the show but they were sold out of it when i got to the merch tent. I considered buying one of the other posters for $65 or a tshirt for $50 but they didn’t even have my size for the shirt so I just gave up. But then today I did some googling and found a site selling prints of the poster I wanted for $25! Huzzah!
