Jesus, would you look at that anorexic motherfucker on the left!?
I feel like I just discovered a candy shop in my own home. This thing, Archive.org, and specifically their “Live Music Archive” has been blowing my mind for the past twenty-four hours. I’m clicking through all the different artist pages and finding recordings of dozens of concerts I attended in the ’90s and ’00s. There’s even concerts that I personally recorded on that site! Crazy…
This revelation has lead me to dub the next seven days a celebration of my history as a concert-goer. The first installment in this “Seven Days In Evan…’s Live Music Archive” is a Tenacious D show I attended as a freshman at the University of Vermont in Burlington. I remember very vividly walking down Colchester Ave. from my dorm to Higher Ground. It was freezing outside. I stopped at Domino’s just to warm up for a few minutes and grab a soda. When I got to the venue, there were maybe four or five kids mulling around. The Tenacious D tour bus was parked behind the venue, and I saw Jack Black walking around outside on his cell phone. I could hear him struggling to book a flight somewhere (this was barely two weeks after 9-11), and when he hung up I slowly approached him and started chatting with him about his band and some of his acting credits. At one point a plane passed overhead and we both lost our train of thought and stared at the sky in silence. When we realized what had happened we chuckled. A few more stragglers stopped by to chat and maybe five or ten minutes later everyone took some photos with Jack before heading back to the entrance. As we arrived, Kyle Gass was walking out the front of Higher Ground so we took more photos and joked around until he left to join Jack on the bus.
No idea who the third guy is, but he makes this photo perfect.
The show opened with a set by The Moldly Peaches, who I thought were hilarious (especially their costumes) but musically uninteresting. “Who’s Got The Crack” was the definite high-point of their performance. I actually shot a roll of film from my spot at the front of the stage, but I didn’t want to hassle my sister to go through and scan every picture I took. I just had her find the ones of me (because I’m selfish like that) and scan those. Believe me when I say The Moldy Peaches looked awesome.
Tenacious D put on a good show. By far the highlight was the trio of Karate, Kyle Quit The Band and Kyle Took A Bullet. At the time I’d been watching the old HBO shorts Ad nauseum and listening to bootlegs of their live performances in and around Los Angeles, so I kind of knew what to expect. Still, it’s always much funnier in person. I don’t remember if this show came before or after their first album was released, but being that the show was acoustic I think it had to be before. I know later they toured with Grohl and put on proper rock shows, but that was when I lost interest in the D. There was so much humor in the stripped-down duo shows. Oh, and Page McConnell of Phish sat in on keyboards during the band’s encore. I guess that was pretty cool. You know, Phish…Vermont…they’re pretty much synonymous with each other.
I started at UVM in August of ’01, so I think this might actually have been the first show I saw as a college student. I saw plenty more that year, and maybe Archive.org has those as well…you’ll have to wait until tomorrow or later this week to find out!
Tenacious D
September 28th, 2001
Higher Ground; Winooski, VT
MegaUpload DL Link
01. Land Of The Lost
02. Fat Albert
03. Warning
04. Jesus Ranch
05. Kielbasa
06. History Of Tenacious D
07. Dio
08. The Road
09. Lee
10. Cosmic Shame
11. Saxaboom
12. G&R
13. Karate
14. Kyle Quit The Band
15. Kyle Took A Bullet
16. Rocket Sauce
17. Fuck Her Gently
18. Sasquatch
19. Tribute
20. Rock Your Socks
21. Double Team
22. Flash (w/ Page McConnell)
23. Wonderboy (w/ Page McConnell)
24. Beatles Medley (w/ Page McConnell)
