Stop the show...

A little bit of background...Back in my freshman year of college, I had a roommate who loved Built to Spill. I mean fucking LOVED them. It made sense...he played guitar and smoked a lot of pot...Doug Martsch plays guitar that seems to sound better after smoking a lot of pot. Now I'm not that great at math but that seemed to be a pretty simple equation to me. However, what I never could understand was his inexplicable love affair with his CD player's repeat button. As a music lover, I get wanting to listen to a particularly excellent album again and again...however, as someone with ADD, I cannot understand how someone can listen to the same album 15x in a row...especially if you owned as many albums as, well, pretty much everyone I know. Well, as the year dragged on, his obsession slowly became the bane of my existence. I began to lose it. One by one, beloved albums (as well as their creators) fell victim to my knee-jerk backlash. Dinosaur jr.'s Without a Sound, Weezer's Blue Album and, most notably, the incredible There's Nothing Wrong With Love by Built to Spill.

I didn't want to hate these bands, I didn't want to hate these albums...I was driven to it! Time passed and slowly the horrible memories of their undue overexposure faded. They crept back into my collection and eventually Built to Spill returned to its rightful place in my "Top 10 bands of all time" list. Songs were caught up on, missing records were eBayed, and shows were attended. BTS was back at the center of my universe, and all was well with the world.

Jump forward to September 11th, 2001. The world was poised to end, as far as we all knew. All my friends and I could ask eachother was "Well, is Built to Spill still playing this week?" We wanted it...no, we needed it. They're one of those bands that, if the world ended tomorrow, I'd be like, "At least I got to see BTS one last time." So the day of the show rolled around and sure enough the 9:30 Club was packed wall to wall with screaming fans. We were together in a single mind. There was no way in hell we were going to let a little thing like a potential apocalypse get in the way of our God-given right to Pac-Northwest stoner-rock! And they played...and it was good. Amazing, actually. They played everything we could have possibly hoped to hear...including a full 15 minute cover version of Skynrd's most tragic mistake, Freebird (I think that shouting "Freebird" at a show at this point in 2005, should be an offense punishable by death...or at least a public flogging.) It was one of those shows that after you leave, no matter what's going on in the world, you know that somehow, it's all going to be alright.

In the years that followed, BTS dropped further and further off the map. There were no new albums, no new tours. There were rumors of a breakup. Doug Martsch went solo (his album, Now You Know is actually a pretty excellent folky/bluesy/old timey record. I'd definitely recommend it.) It was sad, but we all eventually accepted it. Built to Spill was no more.

Then, a few months ago, I was surfing around and stumbled across a headline. "Built to Spill to release new album, tour." So I dug deeper. I found a copy of their schedule online and noticed something different from every other BTS schedule I'd ever seen...it included Baltimore. I lost my shit right there. Finally, after years of having to go to hated DC to see them, they would be playing right here in my hometown! This was a huge deal for me and I decided that no matter where, when, or how expensive it was...I would be there.

And there I was at Sonar (a place that should never, ever have rock shows,) packed into their former "main" room with a couple of hundred kids who, like me, were all grinning like retards and singing along to their favorite indie/stoner-rock jam band. I'll admit, the show wasn't perfect...there were a few minor hiccups along the way. One of the backup mics fed back something fierce when the other guitarist (formerly of the NW outfit Caustic Resin) tried to take over lead vocals for a cover of one of Resin's songs, driving him visibly crazy (which is no small feat considering he already looked like the president of the Unibomber Look-Alike Society.) The other problem was the lighting. I still don't get why it was a problem, but apparently Sonar's lighting has exactly two settings: "I'm tripping balls" and "off." When, about 3 songs in, Martsch announced to the guys in the booth that the "...laser show is giving our drummer a headache" Sonar's response was to shut down everything except for the blinding spotlight. Brilliant. When it began to make the band noticeably uncomfortable, they finally managed to figure out how to turn off the laser show and put on some nice purple sidelights that didn't seem to blind or irritate anybody. The problem was, this all took far too long and I hope the incompetents responsible were given a proper talking to. Anyway, yeah...like I said, not perfect but pretty fucking good. They played, from what I can remember:

• Big Dipper


• The Plan


• Carry The Zero


• Sidewalk


• You Were Right


• Strange


• In Your Mind


• I Would Hurt A Fly


• Built To Spill


• When Not Being Stupid is Not Enough


• Conventional Wisdom (new one)


• Stop the Show


• Alien Fugue (Caustic Resin song)

I might have forgotten ore or two (the memory ain't what it used to be) and this definitely wasn't the order they were played in, but I do know that those are some really good songs, and made me very happy. However, what made me even happier is that when we were standing outside after the show we ran into the aforementioned Unibomber-esque guitarist and he agreed with my opinion that from now on they should play Baltimore from now on, whenever they tour. I guess we'll see how that one pans out...

My only regret? I didn't bring my camera. If I had, however, the picture probably would have ended up looking pretty much like this, so I don't feel too badly...