Who: Alana Davis • Ben Harper • Paula Cole • Marcy Playground • Barenaked Ladies • Blues Traveler
It's been exactly 12 hours & 3 minutes since I got home from the HORDE Festival, so hopefully it will still be pretty fresh in my mind. I have to tell you right now that the best part of the concert was all the extremely hot guys wandering around. Who knew guys like that lived in Ohio!? I think I spent more time looking at them than the concert. Yummy. OK, enough of that, here goes:
The concert started at 3:30 PM, so my friend Dawn picked me up at 2 PM & we headed for Polaris Ampitheater in Columbus. (I live about 45 minutes away from it.) We got there way early & NO ONE was there yet, so we put our blanket down on the lawn & sat down. A hot security guard came over to talk to us, but he only wanted to ask us to keep our feet off of the stairs leading up to the lawn. (Darn.) A few minutes later some college girls came over to talk to us about the injustices in Tibet. We listened to their spiel & signed their petition in exchange for some Tibet stickers. A few minutes later, a guy with a bag full of Coors paraphernalia walked past Dawn & me & offered us some "blinky buttons" & keychains. He asked if we would be drinking tonight & we told him we would if he was buying. That didn't go over well, so he continued on. Dawn couldn't figure out how the buttons worked, so I had to get it started for her. The Coors guy walked by again when she got all frustrated & was handing the button to me & he laughed at us. (Don't you just love how I tell you EVERYTHING that happened?)
OK, well, Alana Davis was onstage first & there was still NO ONE there, so all the people with lawn seats were invited to come & sit in the "hard seats". Dawn & I had never ever heard of Alana, but we moved up anyway. It turned out that Alana was pretty cool & we both decided that we liked her laid-back style. When she was finished, we were able to stay up in the amphitheater for the next act, too. Once again, neither one of us had heard of Ben Harper, but by the end of his performance, I think we were both in love with him. We were forced back out to our lawn seats for Paula Cole, but we could still see everything up close thanks to the huge screens Polaris has. I've liked Paula for a while, but I've never been a huge fan. (Maybe it's the armpit hair that kind of scares me off, I'm not sure.) Anyway, I thought her singing was amazing as usual, but I don't care too much for the whole breathing-into-the-microphone-to-make-weird-noises thing. Overall, though, she was pretty cool.
As soon as Paula was done, they announced that Marcy Playground was on the second stage, so the entire crowd got up & ran over there. We were really far back, but we soon discovered that plenty of guys are willing to move aside for girls. (Haha, I love men.) We kept inching closer & closer toward the stage, but I wasn't willing to mosh right then, so we had to stay back a little. After Marcy Playground sang the only song everyone knew, "Sex & Candy", a ton of the crowd went back to the main stage. (How rude is that? Come on, people.) Dawn & I ended up standing 15 or 20 feet away from the guys! (John Wozniak is such a cutie!)
Well, as soon as MP was finished, we heard the Barenaked Ladies start singing "Old Apartment" on the main stage. The entie crowd ran back there, everyone singing as we went. I've seen BNL before, so I didn't want to miss a minute of their performance. It's not really the music that makes it so great; it's the little stories the guys tell during & in between songs. They sang crazy songs about buying two female connecters at the Radio Shack on High Street in Columbus across from City Center Mall & only paying $2.49 & the huge zit on Ed Robinson's (seconday vocals, acoustic & electric guitars) forehead that the entire crowd could enjoy thanks to the big screens. They sang "One Week" & "If I Had a Million Dollars" close to the end, knowing that we were all waiting to hear them. The best part of BNL shows is always the last song, I've found. The first time I saw them, they sang exerpts from a bunch of popular songs at the time so I wasn't surprised when they did it last night. The songs they included this time were: "Spice Up Your Life" by the Spice Girls (yuck), "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion (yuck), "The Way" by Fastball (good song, just overplayed) and some others that I can't really recall at the moment. Luckily, BNL sang the songs better than those other disgusting whatever-you-want-to-call-thems. We were all sad to see BNL leave the stage.
OK, finally the headliners of the show, Blues Traveler came on. I have a BT CD, but I've never listened to it all the way through. I don't think that they're a bad group, I know they're very talented, but that's just not the type of music I'm interested in. Dawn & I stayed long enough to hear the songs we liked, then we packed up our stuff & headed to the McDonald's where Dawn works to flirt with her cute co-worker.
OK, well, that's about it for my concert experience. Long, wasn't it? If you made it this far, I'm very proud of you! Thanks!
Note: Do any of my loyal A Day in the Life readers find it odd that I thought this review long back in '98 when I wrote it? I'm amused with myself.
Where: Polaris Amphitheater • Columbus, Ohio
When: 1998