Yes, I think you can imagine how disappointed I am, Brooke.
Since I'm not at home tonight I will tape it and watch it right after I get back home.
Yes, I think you can imagine how disappointed I am, Brooke.
Since I'm not at home tonight I will tape it and watch it right after I get back home.
Have you seen him? Great performance, especially the first song with Alicia Keys. I know he had voice problems lately and you could hear it now and then. Too many concerts I guess.Originally Posted by Brooke
When Al Gore announced him our stupid channel took a break for commercials and then switched over to London to the Beastie Boys.
I've read on NDR2 homepage they had to stop the live stream because of copyrighted reasons of LiveEarth. It also concerns the following reports today and tomorrow. Hopefully the live stream works tomorrow.
Here's the set list.
Once Upon In A Lifetime 6.26
Where The Black Top Ends 3.49
Shine 5.12
Faster Car 4.36
Raining On Sunday 5.09
Used To The Pain 4.15
You're My Better Half 4.29
Making Memories 4.02
You'll Think Of Me 5.51
Told You So 4.37
Days Go By 4.53
Somebody Like You 3.58
Got It Right This Time 3.33
Better Life 5.44
Everybody 5.32
Ok, Screamer Radio is on and all is working just fine.
Mine too
You can spend all your time making money
You can spend all your love making time
If it all fell to pieces tomorrow
Could you still be mine
Cool.
Brooke, where are you? Come in chat!
After listening to Keith together with Brooke and RG yesterday I wanted to post this. It's the most beautiful essay I've ever read and probably the best what a fan has written about feelings for a singer or a band.
I just copied it.
Hi!
I am posting an essay that a fellow Keith Urban fan wrote for one of her classes. This is one of the most incredible pieces of writing I have seen. I have no doubt that many of you will smile and nod your head as you read this essay. I know for a fact that many Keith Urban fans have teared up while reading this - filled with joy, awe and, perhaps, relief that they are not alone in their feelings. Julie wrote this essay and, in my opinion, certainly has put to words what many of us feel.
Oh yeah - and her description of Keith's guitar playing is...well, let's just say it is graphic and nearly as hot as his actual performance!
When you share this, all I ask is that you give credit to Julie. This is her creation and a gift too beautiful not to share.
One more thing - it is LONG. Very long, but soooo worth the read. So get a refreshing beverage, put the kids to bed and have the hubby take the dog for a walk.
Julie, thank you for such an insightful and loving description of "our obsession". You have given us "Monkeys" a very special gift with your words - and I don't know what grade you got on your essay - but you get an A++++++ from me!
***
Julie Farrar
St. Louis Writer’s Institute
June 25, 2007
Assignment: 2nd long essay
CHASING KEITH URBAN
On that hot August night in Wallingford, CT, I felt about to hyperventilate when the two deepest blues eyes on the planet turned my way. His smile started slowly, with the right side of his lips raising and spreading across to the left until it was so wide it made creases on either side of that luscious mouth. He had been working hard and was drenched in sweat, with that thick, straight mane of honey blond hair sticking tightly to the back of his neck. As he stood over me, his slightly crooked smile radiating an intense pleasure and directed straight at me, I could feel a light spray of sweat every time he shook his head and could see the droplets shine in the lights behind him. His slim hips were so fluidly but forcefully rockin’ to the rhythm, thrusting first forward then side to side. The thin, hole-filled t-shirt stretching tightly across his chest read “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” I sent up my own oblation that he was, too. Exercising great restraint, I simply stared at the familiar scuffed brown Frye motorcycle boots beating time 18 inches in front of me instead of reaching out to grab them – and all to which they were attached (my first inclination). What had made me – a relatively sane, responsible, and highly educated woman – during the summer of my 20th wedding anniversary leave behind a husband and two teenage kids to follow across the country this man standing above me?
I live a life that makes sense. I am almost 50 years old. I have a Ph.d in rhetoric. I have walls and walls of books on religion, cosmology, existentialism, Greek textbooks and lexicons, American cultural values, language theory, and 20th century politics. I have spent a lifetime reading Russian, English, Irish, American, and French literature. I have researched and written and published on how we reason together about conflicting values. I have run college freshman writing programs and Sunday School programs. I have contributed articles to academic encyclopedias. I have traveled the world. I have actually trained my dogs to sit, stay, come, leave it, wait, fetch, and not jump at the door. I have adopted two grade-school age children from Russia and raised them to young adulthood. I make plans and lists and checkmarks. I have battled the State Board of Education and high school athletic association when I saw injustice. I don’t give in just because my daughter says “Everyone is doing it” or “Nobody’s parents does it.”
And I chase country-rocker Keith Urban across the country and across the globe. Between November 2004 and the end of 2007 I will have seen him in concert at least 30 times (there’s always the potential of more shows being added to my list, compared to a friend with over 100 under her belt), including shows all over the U.S., in England, and in Germany. I’ve driven a thousand miles in one day to get to a concert. I no longer tally the amount of money I’ve spent on hotels, food, transportation, and tickets – always more tickets as I head to a performance sometimes with three in hand because I don’t know which will be the best seat for making more photographs to add to the thousands and thousands already stored in my iPhoto file. And I am not alone.
“Groupie.” Yes, you can say it. Believe me, I’ve heard it spoken with disdain by my sisters and with bemusement by neighbors and others. However, they are wrong. This is no “Almost Famous” tale of debauchery and playing the country concert ‘ho’ role in an attempt to get on the bus. It’s no second childhood or escape from a dying marriage or a hormonally induced obsession that will send my family into financial ruin. It’s a tale of passion and friendship and adventure and a tribe of women discovering who they are at their second stage of adulthood. But when I mention to someone outside of all of this that I am flying to England to sit on a sidewalk in a queue for 8 hours and stand inside the unairconditioned basement club – sardined with a couple of thousand newfound friends – for another four to see a stripped-down concert that costs £20 when the same artist will be in my hometown a few months later at the airconditioned arena with video screens, laser lights, and assigned seating for 15,000, well, they don’t have time to listen to the expla-nation so I just stop telling anyone what I’m doing. I pack my bags and disappear for a few days and then slip back into town and continue with my life.
The guitar line starts to build as he steps into a “cage” of blue spotlights. He plants his feet wide and begins slowly to arch his back, the muscles in his quadriceps straining through the Levi’s after a thousand concerts striking this exact same pose. His amber and black [TELE BRAND?] display glints of hundreds of fingerprints from two hours of manhandling the instrument. Don’t ya’ know, nobody drinks alone. Every demon, every ghost from your past, every memory you’ve held back follows you home. After speaking the truth with his words he is poised to pour out his soul with his music. A few simple sustained notes cry in a quiet anguish as he closes his eyes and his shoulders sway with the music. The notes come a little more quickly with a “wah wah” as the anguish turns into a torrent of emotion. His fingers crawl up the fingerboard, then back, then up a little farther, continuing until they are over the body of the instrument, slamming down with a precise anger. He leans forward into his guitar, which by now is an extension of his body rather than something separate. All I can think at this moment is one woman’s apt description, “Y’all better close your eyes ‘cause Keith’s gonna make love to me right now!” And he begins. He works the neck of his guitar like he would work a woman, the fingers covering every inch, speeding up, slowing down, then moving so quickly they become a blur. He leans into his musical partner, pulls it up higher on his torso, then starts pounding the floor with his left foot. So skillfully and almost indecently, he is playing this solo for each individual woman in the arena. At some point the pounding leg lifts so high that it throws him back. With his head whipping from side to side and his hair flipping in a fury, he starts his backbend. Eyes closed, oblivious to the presence of the thousands of other people in the room, he slowly arches back farther . . . farther . . . until almost parallel to the floor. The momentary view for those in the front row is the stuff of dreams. Wailin’ on the Tele, he starts shredding the strings like a man possessed and trying to escape his demons. Throwing his head back, he displays an ecstasy usually reserved for more private moments. But it is a private moment because for every woman in that room they are alone. They are riding this wave of energy together. His right hand nothing more than a blur, his face completely obscured by a curtain of hair and the cage of lights now flashing in a blue lightning storm, he jackhammers his leg until he is in an upright position again and digs into the guitar, striking and pulling the strings with a vengence as he jerks the guitar up high with each chord. His shoulders lunge forward, coiling for a final burst. With an unexpected rush he runs the pick to the end of the fingerboard and back. Excised of all his ghosts and demons (at least for one night), he assumes his stance for one last backbend, then throws himself forward again, hanging over the guitar for two deliberate final chords. And he stays there momentarily . . . spent. And the feeling is mutual for the audience.
Most of us never have moments of transcendence. Our lives are not about passion but about routine or daily crisis management. We don’t seek passion as much as to check things off on our “to do” list. When people hear I travel to all of the Keith shows, their first question is always “But aren’t they all the same? Why do you need to do so many?” That’s like asking “Why go hear that Beethoven symphony again? Didn’t you already hear it once this year?” or “Why go to the museum again? They haven’t really changed the paintings, have they?” A Keith concert brings us to that same point. It lifts its audience out of the world and takes us on a ride to someplace better.
“There was a shot of adrenaline, an excitement, all too often absent [from concerts]. And all there was was this one guy, smiling, playing his axe, sans dance steps, sans backing tracks. . . . There was no attitude. The music spoke for itself. We were all enthralled by, in service to, the music.” Bob Lefsetz, Southern California music industry insider, had barely heard of Keith Urban, never attended a show before, and was definitely not a country music fan. And he had an immediate “Urban conversion” from the first note of the show he attended in Phoenix. He understood. Too often people want to focus on the fact that Keith concerts are heavy on the female demographic because he is the most gorgeous human being on the planet – so says country legend Dolly Parton, People magazine’s sexiest men issue, and Playgirl magazine, which found his layout its most popular in the first five years of the 21st century (. . . and on the eighth day God created Keith Urban). However, his music has the beauty of a Renoir and the passion of a Van Gogh.
A master musical artist, he can change his performance on a dime. One night you hear “But For the Grace of God” played on his golden electric Les Paul, and a month later he’s slowed the tempo to do it without the band and on his Maton acoustic. “You’ll Think of Me” was lauded when first released as the sweetest, most loving kiss-off song ever recorded. By the time he got through with it, however, he had infused it instead with anger. Concert by concert he changed a word here, a phrase there, until “some day I’m gonna run across your mind/but don’t worry I’ll be fine/I’m gonna be alright” morphed into “I bet you’ll think about me . . ./in fact, I’ll feel a hell of a lot better/Some day when you’re lyin’ alone in the middle of the night/wishin’ I was there to hold you tight/Well I ain’t never comin’ home/You shouldn’t have treated me this way” – as he spits out each syllable with the bitterness that comes from deep in the gut, foot pounding the stage, hair flying around his head, neck muscles straining, anger spewing from the guitar, and then utter exhaustion as he sits there dazed before coming back to us and back to himself when it’s over. Then a minute after finishing that invective, he turns the concert arena into a tent revival show with “You Won,” a song of redemption and release that could be about love or something higher: “I thought I knew what I was doing, I thought I was in control/I thought nobody’s gonna tie me down” with his bandmates repeating the chorus mantra “ready to fall” in the background. He speaks for all of us as he continues, “I was just a kid, a motherless child; no one to watch over me, I was running wild.” At that point he has thousands of people, hands overhead clapping and singing “Ready to fall” with equal conviction as he sings “Are you with me tonight? Are you with me St. Louis?” Preach it to me, Keith, you want to call out! And with one last “I’m ready to fall” he raises his arms in surrender to that unnamed something that is always more powerful than our pitiful little selves. And at that instant the stage goes dark and immediate silence. Nothing left to say.
You go to the show hoping this is one of those nights that he will bring us another pure and unique moment. The night in Rockford, IL when he brought out friend and songwriter/singer Richard Marx and the two of them sat with their acoustics and filled almost a third of the concert with Richard Marx tunes. Or the night in Connecticut when he was in a good mood and abandoned the set list for the show to instead serenade a couple who had just gotten engaged that night and to sing songs he had started writing that afternoon. Or the parking lot concert on a blustery March night in Little Rock where he came strolling out with his ganjo to the crowd of fans waiting by the buses and gave an impromptu concert. Or hearing the driving Celtic drum beat for “I Told You So” for the first time in the special album release concert in Chicago. Or the hope that you will be in the vicinity when he leaps off the stage to sing with the crowd. Or listening night after night to the raw emotion of “I Got It Right” as he sings it just with a piano and one floor lamp – the same way he wrote it for his wife. Or to be in a German music club when you first start hearing that crowd singing the chorus of “Raining on Sunday” back to him in English in their own expression of love.
But what is best is to find out that you are not alone. I chase Keith Urban not only to hear him and watch him, but also to join women of kindred spirit. We all have asked ourselves why we do this. Those outside, those who don’t understand, speak on internet message boards of the hoards of hormonal middle-aged women abandoning husband and kids and spending all the retirement fund in hope that Keith will whisk them off for twenty minutes in the back of the tour bus. But these women do not abandon anything. They get the kids to martial arts and dance class. They supervise the office’s year-end reports, they tend to children who’ve had brain surgery and parents who have Alzheimer. They navigate the uncertainties of a child who is bi-polar and have dinner on the table when the family comes home. They go back to school so they can improve their career prospects and raise kids on their own while working swing shift at a factory. They tend to the day-to-day business of getting life done while at the same time they know there is something else out there. And most of them are just like me.
They speak of watching a music video of this man. Or catching a snippet of him singing on a television show. Or being struck dumb by his performance when he was the 20-minute opening act for another country star. It’s an Urban Conversion and goes from 0 to 90 mph in a matter of seconds. A friend who is willing to listen to me talk about this experience has said that I had a “Keith-shaped hole in my life.” That hole was deep. I had been sitting at a stoplight one morning not really listening to the Keith Urban CD that was playing. I had bought it for one song, which hadn’t come up yet. Having given up my career as a university professor to address the needs of the children my husband and I had adopted from Russia, my life had become an endless round of driving from teacher conference to psychologist appointment to language therapist, to soccer practice, and more. Through the fog of another hour in the car with the purpose of managing someone else’s life, I heard the lines sung, “There’s a woman with a kid in the car next to me, and she’s singin’, ‘Sometimes I can’t help thinkin’ “What about me?”’” Tears started down my cheek to know that someone saw right through my soul to my despair and loneliness. Pulled by the same inexplicable force that pulled Richard Dreyfuss toward the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind I went home and bought tickets for his show.
And the adventure began.
Not “one of the girls” kind of gal, I had never had a large contingent of female friends. I had a few with whom I had suffered through graduate school and one I had known since I was four. However, I couldn’t tolerate females in bunches. I didn’t do drama, I didn’t gossip, shop, trade outfits, get my nails done, have any desire to go to a spa in Las Vegas, or an outlet mall at the lake. Lying on the beach was a boring vacation and I hated bridal shower games and didn’t care to host Longenberger basket parties. I loved books, I loved music, and I loved words. Somehow amid the thousands of fans populating the fan message boards I could pick out those like me. It was a word here, a turn of phrase there, a particularly clever comeback or innuendo that told me this was someone I wanted to know better. They, too, had that “Keith-shaped hole” in their lives. Intelligent and clever women, I found that the passion we shared for Keith Urban, the man and his music, was really a passion for something else that had been locked inside for so long. We had listened to Raffi records for too long and had lost our inner rocker chick.
Some of us had never been on a plane when we decided that we just had to leave our home in Wisconsin to travel to Florida for the next possible concert. We made arrangements to share hotels with women we had never laid eyes on. We taught each other about computers, and memory, and pixels, and zoom lenses, and external disk drives, and f-stops, and photo-sharing sites, and youtube searches as we bought expensive cameras to record every concert and laptop computers to store the audio and video we obtained legally and otherwise. I learned how to run message boards and set up mySpace pages. We searched for, took ourselves, and traded photographs from every concert like my children had collected Pokemon cards, until I had to buy a 320 GB external memory to store close to 10,000 shots of Keith Urban and the bootleg videos of entire concerts. While to some this may seem obsessive, but the obsession was not a passive one. Until his concerts, I had specialized in nature photography because flowers and trees don’t move. Suddenly, I’m faced with the challenge of photographing a target moving at lightning speed across a stage with flashing spotlights. Joining the sorority of “5th row whores” (as we nicknamed ourselves), we scrambled for seats as close as possible for the clear shots. I loved being forced to learn something new, adjusting the camera to each new venue, each new angle because every night I was in a different seat, catching the unexpected and very human moment when he was lost in the music or lost in the adoration of the crowd, and waiting for the iconic moments that would occur concert after concert to freeze it forever.
And in between sharing the technical know-how we shared our lives. I’ve attended concerts with travel partners from Wisconsin, California, Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Vermont, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennesse, Nova Scotia, France, Scotland, and Germany, to name a few. I’ve been introduced to new music and new artists. I’ve traveled to hear artists who have not yet got a record deal, and others who are just about to break into the big time. I’ve learned what they listen to on other continents and seen parts of this country I’ve never visited before. I had Keith’s bass player buy me lunch, ate breakfast sitting five feet away from my guitar god, finally won my chance to meet Keith backstage, and snuck in to watch a soundcheck. I’ve encountered some truly wild women who put in the car two drunk Irish rugby players they met in the hotel lobby and then managed to extricate ourselves from the situation in one piece. And I’ve had hours in the car on road trips for these other women to assure me that I’m not insane, that we are just as normal as the women who spend their free time and money on outlet mall vacations, that we probably have a hell of a lot more fun, and that we deserve this.
Once in an interview Keith was asked how he selected the people who helped him record his Be Here album. He said he didn’t just look for the people who were good; he looked for the people who were “born to be” a studio engineer, or producer, or session musician. When you’re “born to be” you have a different commitment and drive to your craft. This was spoken by a man who definitely was born to be a guitar player and performer. Chasing Keith Urban is part of our own search for who we are born to be. It takes us out of who we have been for so long and pushes us to explore the world inside and the world outside and find what arouses our own passion.
All I can say is WOW!!!
You can spend all your time making money
You can spend all your love making time
If it all fell to pieces tomorrow
Could you still be mine
WOW is right.
That is one incredible piece of writing. Never have I seen the experience of hardcore fandom described so perfectly, and so sanely. Yes, we are sane--we just also happen to be fans--very devoted fans.
I saw so many glimpses of my own life in her essay. It is wonderful when you find a kindred spirit, someone like you who really "gets it." And she quoted Lefsetz, a man whose column I read regularly because he writes passionately about the music industry (and also happens to love Don and The Eagles as well as Keith Urban).
And...the description of Keith's guitar playing......
Makes me wish Don played, really played, the guitar.
That is truly beautiful! I hope all of our dedicated regulars here read it.
"They will never forget you 'till somebody new comes along"
1948-2016 Gone but not forgotten
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