So we weren't able to do anything for our 10th anniversary because I had to work that weekend. We had planned to drive down to LA to see Swell Season at the Hollywood bowl but when that wasn't possible I noticed that they'd be playing the Oregon Zoo this last Friday and so I decided we'd take a day off and make a three day road trip out of it.
That was good. I've been annoyed at work and about 1500 miles of driving over three days helps reset the batteries.
Anyway, the concert was fine. To guarantee we'd have good seats (since we didn't know when we'd get in) I'd bought the reserved blanket seats. If you're in the Portland area and are thinking about one of the zoo's summer concert events I can recommend this. No crowding and the included dinner buffet was actually pretty good (and if you want you can end up taking a whole cheesecake back to your blanket).
The only warning would be about the rentable lawn seats. I'm fat so when mine broke I decided to not replace it. Once is mechanical failure, twice would be fatual failure. But the relatively slim guy next to me went through two and I saw three others break throughout the evening.
Anyway, unexpected to us was that Swell Season had an opener and it was Black Francis. I'd never heard of him but thanks to our modern communication age I could look him up while we listened. Apparently he was front man for The Pixies. I've never heard of them either, but being able to look that up made things much clearer later when Glen Hansard made several references to how important The Pixies had been to him.
The other thing they made reference to was something that will go into my list of missed significant events. Earlier this year I missed my chance to see a perfect game after Lani decided she didn't want to go and then an iffy weather report dissuaded me from going alone. I've had a couple other near misses on big things before too.
Anyway, the day after I bought the tickets for this concert I was riding home on BART and noticed an ad listing the events in a concert series at a nearby winery and what do I see? August 19 (just one day before our concert in Portland) - Swell Season.
I seriously contemplated Craigslisting our Portland tickets and seeing them local instead but in the end the lure of the road trip won out. During the concert Hansard made a couple comments about the night before having been a really weird night and how much they loved Portland and how good it was to be there, etc. We just thought it was "Hello, Cleveland" type prattle.
But this is what happened the night before at the concert we ended up not going to:
Frankly, if I were them I'd probably have taken the next day off.
ETA: Oh, and this concert immediately shot into the top five concerts for me. But that may be because I've now seen only five concerts. They make the top four because Natalie Merchant was really awful.