last nite. hazy shade of winter. aragon theatre. gorillaz in concert. special guest dan the automator.

i don't see much live music these days. i'm not sure why this is exactly. it is possible that i have seen that episode of wkrp about that WHO concert too many times. more likely, it is a psychic not physical fear of the crowd. the last band i saw live was travis at the riviera last fall(?). it took awhile to get my bearings upon our arrival at the venue. one look at the crowd and i was convinced we had stumbled into a dave matthews show. more baseball caps and banana republic separates than a corporate office picnic. a far cry from the scrungy brit-rocker hangers-on that populated the audience the first time i saw travis in january of 2000 at the bottom of the hill, a space roughly the size of a shoebox where incidentally i also saw chicago legend wesley willis. the makeup of this mob hampered my enjoyment of the performance, which gave me pause. how important is the crowd in defining the energy of live show? exceptionally. maybe this is why concerts leave me cold these days.

that said, i've been jonesing to see gorillaz live since clint eastwood first weaseled its way into my heart, more than a year ago. add the british music press raves about the shows and i was fired up. and it's good, that. interesting that the coldest evening of the entire winter should coincide with the one night i had plans not even illness could break. i'd have shown up with an IV and an oxygen tank if need be. turned out i needed a ski mask and some thermal underwear.

this being my first experience with the aragon, i was fascinated by the decor, a spanish mission meets eastern mosque via grimm's fairy tales sort of thing. arches, minarets and balconies, complete with twinkling stars in the ceiling. it has been quite some time since i've been somewhere that screamed "old movie house" so loudly. it set an otherworldy tone that was dead-on for the evening.

arriving shortly after doors guaranteed choice seats. upstairs, in chairs, first balcony on the right. the crowd was mixed and it was heartening to see such diverse fans.

once dan started spinning, the whole thing broke wide open. his set ran the gamut from busta to mary to house of pain to humpty. when one of the track's rhymes referenced 1975, it occurred to me that the kids in the balcony next to us weren't even ALIVE in 1975. when i mentioned this to chris, he observed that their parents probably hadn't even met in 1975.

on the pathetic side, these two lincoln park trixie wannabes were trying to flirt their way into our coveting viewing slots. they seemed to be going on about our (empty) seats and when chris asked if we should offer them to them, i replied "if they were enid-styly maybe". but these girls stunk of powdery perfume and kept scowling at us like we were denying them some god-given right, while clutching their louis vuitton knockoff handbags.

as for the gorillaz, the visuals were spectacular, the cartoon vignettes a hoot and damon's achingly beautiful delivery of Slow Country's chorus, "can't stand your loneliness", was heartbreaking, worth the price of admission in itself. 5/4 stood out with SchoolHouse Rock style visuals spelling out the chorus and my favorite lyric from the entire album, "she made me kill myself, come on", while 19-2000 was a cacophony of sound, definitively delivering the "cool shoeshine".

baby, it was cold outside but in the aragon, shit was on fire.