The diary of a mad man.
Four nights. Five gigs. Could I do them all? Well, no. But I tried. I really did.
It loomed like my Mount Vesuvius.
I was Sir Edmund Hillary standing at the bottom of Mount Everest, Frodo sizing up the scale of Mount Doom.
The gigs kept coming, the bands kept getting announced, the dates kept piling up on top of each other.
They were all crashing together on one massive, monumental weekend full of rock, grunge, pop-punk and prog-metal acts.
Queens of the Stone Age. Mogwai. Blink-182. Dinosaur Jr. The Melvins & Mr Bungle.
Five big gigs over four big nights. The climax of a New Zealand summer concert glut, the likes of which the country has never before seen.
I have done Coachella.
I have done Lollapalooza.
I have done all the Big Day Outs.
I even survived the infamous Whitianga festival in which punters wanting a wee found themselves sliding down a bank covered in their own urine.
I know how to pace myself.
I could handle a weekend of rock concerts.
Couldn’t I?
There was only one way to find out.
Queens of the Stone Age, Spark Arena, February 29
Josh Homme knew it. He knew all about it.
In the middle of the group’s excellent Thursday night show, the Queens of the Stone Age front man admitted his band was kicking off a weekend full of carnage.
“I heard stories that there were so many bands coming to Auckland this week,” he told the crowd of 7000. “There was the Foo Fighters, Blink-182, the Jonas Brothers …
“Mike Patton is coming. The Melvins.”
At that point, another band member yelled out, “Dinosaur Jr”. Homme didn’t hear him. He needed to move on. He wanted to rock.
I don’t know if all those shows kicked off some kind of competitive spirit, but Homme and co seemed revived and revitalised on their first show here since 2017.
This was the best sound, the best stage, and the best vibe of any of Queens’ frequent New Zealand visits, a show that came with a spectacular stage setup that looked like it could jet off into the sky at any moment.
I loved the shit out of this show.
Read my full Queens of the Stone Age review here.
Mogwai, The Powerstation, March 1
No one moshes at a Mogwai show.
No one takes their phone out of their pocket either.
Instead, Mogwai fans nod their heads and sway their bodies. They close their eyes and they drift, letting the expansive, ever-shifting moods of the Scottish prog-metallers wash over them.
To my left, one man flicked his hands in the air like a conductor. He seemed to be trying to grab the soundwaves, then bring fistfuls of noise closer, like he was trying to force more of them into his head.
To my right, Dr Joel Rindelaub’s impressively styled mullet bobbed and twitched.
Then there was the woman behind me. She sat on The Powerstation’s leather couches with her eyes closed and her arms open, like she was in a meditative state.
She didn’t look at the stage, didn’t watch the show. Instead, this woman seemed to be digesting Mogwai’s intense musical smorgasbord in a different way.
I became obsessed with this woman.
Was she getting more out of the Mogwai show than me?
Was she experiencing it on a different level, reaching an emotional state I couldn’t quite find?
Were the band’s gentle melodies, tunes that morphed into deliciously heavy bursts of layered noise, hitting me as deeply as they could?
Should I be sitting on that couch, next to that woman, my fingers in the Gyan mudra position?
I kept wondering, kept looking at her, kept worrying.
Then, deep into the show, her eyes popped open. For a brief moment, she stared back at me, her eyes were piercing me, like she was looking right through me.
It sent a shiver down my spine. It felt like she could see my soul.
That moment will haunt me for a long time to come.
Blink-182, Spark Arena, March 2
I didn’t go.
Dinosaur Jr, Auckland Town Hall, March 2
If there’s a sure sign your band is getting on a bit, it’s probably when the singer needs giant lyric prompt cards placed in front of him before every song.
That appears to be where 58-year-old J Mascis, the permanent grunge slacker responsible for some of the genre’s scuzziest moments, appears to be.
But who am I to complain about a band being old?
I was standing in the crowd feeling the full effects of heading out to three rock shows in three days.
My feet hurt. My knees ached. It felt like a bag of rocks had replaced my shoulder blades.
Aside from the cue cards, this was a quintessential Dinosaur Jr show: two-minute bursts of grunge-rock that were approximately 10 per cent Mascis’ mumbled lyrics and 90 per cent guitar solos delivered on a bare-boned stage full of Marshall amps.
“That gig was so loud,” texted a friend after the show.
She was right: it was likely the loudest show the Town Hall has been for a long while. If you didn’t have earplugs, you were probably hurting the next day.
But was it the loudest show of the weekend?
(More on that below.)
Mr Bungle & The Melvins, Auckland Town Hall, March 3
Okay, I’m going to be honest here.
I had every intention of going to this show.
Mike Patton is one of the craziest stage performers around.
But I’m 45 now.
Something has to give.
(Mostly, my knees.)
This show was a step too far.
Instead, I stayed home and watched Enemy, the 2013 Denis Villeneuve film in which Jake Gyllenhaal tracks down and confronts his exact doppelgänger.
If I had a doppelgänger, it would have been at this show.
For the noise nerds among us, I have an interesting anecdote about the weekend to share.
On Sunday, I received an alert from my watch.
When I dived into those stats, it gave me a daily decibel count.
I could use them to decipher the loudest band of the weekend.
Mogwai is known as one of the noisest bands around, and while they pushed the Powerstation’s sound system to its limits, they only registered 106 decibels.
At 108 decibels, Queens of the Stone Age came in second.
And at 110 decibels, Dinosaur Jr were indeed the weekend’s loudest band.
“Sounds higher than 110 decibels can cause instantaneous hearing loss,” warns the Hearing Centre.
I’m glad I had earplugs for that one.
I’m going to need a couple of days to recover.
But can we do it all again next weekend?
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