Shut Up and Listen: Encountering The College Student at Music Clubs

Thursday August 11 Gillian Welch, my favorite artists ever, ever, ever will be playing at Tiptina’s. I can’t really get into the ritualistic and profound relationship I have with Gillian and Dave Rawlings but it borders on being spiritual. They their fans wait 8 long years between the release of their last album “Soul Journey” in 2004 and their latest “The Harrow and the Harvest” in July. Now they are tour in just a Cadillac and I’m so excited I’m pulling a micro-tour and seeing them at Tips on Thursday then driving up to Birmingham and seeing them again on Friday.

My only hope is that Romy and I don’t encounter a repeat of our last incident at Tips where I was forced to shoosh a loquacious early 20s Tulane college student during Yo La Tengo’s plaintive, melodic encore. She refused of course and kept going on in a volume that effected the encore for everyone within 15 feet circumference around her. With Yo La Tengo, like Sonic Youth, you really need to listen to some of the songs because the art is in the slight tonal changes within the feedback. In the slower, quieter ones this is more important.

She not only didn’t adhere, she didn’t even understand the request, more, she was flabbergasted by it, asking “Seriously?”
I stated I was indeed serious and she ignored me and kept on about some drama between her and another girl to a third girl.

The rest of our interactions sort of went like this (and I realized our tet a tet probably spoiled the encore for everyone around us)…

Varg: You don’t fucking get it do you?
Her: I don’t fucking get it?
Varg: No. It would be like seeing into a higher dimension for you.
Her: We were here first!
Varg: …
Her: Also, it’s a BAR dude!
Varg: Fat Harrys is a bar. This is a club. A music club.

Not sure how that meant she could talk as loud as she wanted over the band because she spent more time on the balcony but this is early 20s logic here. After the band’s first set, the crowd sort of tapered out a bit and people who really wanted to see them could sort of got closer to the stage. Yo La Tengo was in their Spin the Wheel show and that may have seemed too weird for many of the Uptown college students in attendance so they jammed. Not our privileged little girl though.

So then she called both Romy and me fat (I’ll admit, I had a full bushy beard and some layers on that night, it was January) and asked us what we did for a living as some way of justifying her righteousness to do as she pleased.

By the time it was all over we had missed the encore. Her friend came up to us and apologized but insisted, “We WERE there first.” Like a little kid.

Downstairs, I was paying the tab and apparently her and Romy kinda got into a shoving match and the girl was thrown out by the banana man.

She continued to harass us from outside the club but I had to respond, “Whatever! You lost the high ground when you were thrown out by a BANANA!”

This becoming sort of a serial event at shows. I thought Tip’s may provide some relief and they did certainly react faster than HOB. It happened at a Sia Furler show there a while back too but my tolerence tank had some fuel left in it.

I have to add here that it’s not just young obnoxious girls who do this type of shit at shows. A few months before this incident I had a less caustic encounter with a middle-aged shirt-and-tie fella also at House of Blues Parish during a Jolie Holland show. She’s the quiet type of artist as well. You gotta listen. The tie guy was talking very loud at the end of the show and asserting a lot of wrong things about the artist and talking about how he was just across the street and only came over because he had comp tickets. Thanks for comping this douchebag HOB, he fucked up the show for the paying customers because, you know, he didn’t really care about the artist. Tank got a little more emptied with him.

To his credit though, he got the hint faster than the Uptown girl.

I anticipated the ensuing fight between my wife and this Tip’s girl outside but when we got out there she was gone. I’m pretty sure nothing would have happened. After all, we had Sister Annie Walker to protect us.

So now I am nervous because I know that Gillian Welch is the quiet type of artist that you really have to listen to. And I know that she doesn’t really roll into town that much. And I know that I really do have an attachment to this artist much more than the previous ones. My only saving grace is perhaps the college students are all out of town for Summer.