I have always loved music.
I can remember when I was a wee little lad (I’ve spent way too much time in the UK… j/k there’s no such thing) having a revelation that if I were in a bad mood, music always changed it.
But it wasn’t until sometime in the late winter or early spring, I believe, of 2004 that I began to like good music thanks to the influence of a good friend of mine. His favorite band is The Black Crowes, so that’s where we started. They were on a hiatus at the time, and lead singer Chris Robinson had a solo project going on at the time which released an album that summer.
The song was 40 Days.
I remember exactly where I was, in my bedroom on Columbia Avenue where a little side table served as the place for the keyboard for my computer after something had destroyed the slide-out tray that had previously been attached to the desk. It was a Friday, and I quite specifically remember that it was a late afternoon because I remember shortly afterwards being outside in the driveway talking with my mom and my grandfather after he had finished work for the week. Not that the conversation was about 40 Days, it’s just that it’s a very vivid detail I remember about what ended up being a pretty monumental day in my life.
There was other music before that and I’m fairly positive I had picked up TBC’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and fallen hard for a couple songs from that record, but it was 40 Days that sealed my fate.
It’s upbeat — of course it is — starts with a rollicking bit and then Chris sings…
Lost in the equinox / Lightning flash in a blood-red sky…
Absolutely. Positively. Hooked.
This began countless late nights (read: more like early mornings) where our AIM conversations would go something like this: what’s up? nothing much, you? nothing much…wanna listen to some music?
My answer was never no.
Not all of the details are as clear as that day when he first shared 40 Days with me so I don’t have all of the timeline right, but because my friend was there, I paid a lot of attention to Bonnaroo that year. Like I say, the details are hazy, but I feel like there was a video stream available? That feels a little early for that, but I also feel like I watched some of the sets from that weekend. But it might have just been the digital audio recordings they had available pretty quickly.
Regardless, I know that it wasn’t just Chris Robinson and the New Earth Mud or the North Mississippi Allstars — a band that held the title as my favorite for a long time — that had my attention that weekend.
What I don’t remember is if my friend had introduced me to My Morning Jacket before Bonnaroo, if I watched their set, or if we listened to it afterwards. I wish I knew, but I’d just be making it up if I said I did. What I do know is that I remember hearing their song Dancefloors from their set one way or the other, and when the album that 40 Days is on came out later that month, I also left Best Buy with MMJ’s It Still Moves.
I’ve used several Jacket songs for titles of entries — Circuital on the last one, for example, or also Mahgeetah for the entry when I got out of my French funk and started to enjoy myself again.
Mahgeetah is the opener of It Still Moves, and it’s as the kids say nowadays an absolute banger. It’s followed by the aforementioned Dancefloors which makes you want to, well, dance, and Golden calms it down a little bit next with the album’s first acoustic guitar introduced along with a sumptuous — I said it — pedal steel.
It’s three amazing songs that set the tone for what is an amazing album.
But It Still Moves and 2005’s Z didn’t immediately make My Morning Jacket my favorite band. No, that was the Allstars and the Crowes. From 2004 to 2009, I saw those two bands more than 20 times, catching nearly every show for both that they played in Florida.
Jacket was most always third, sometimes with Wilco slipping ahead, but they a) didn’t play Florida too often — only two headlining shows — during that period where I was going to so many shows and b) released a DVD that convinced me that I would not want my typical position of being as close to the stage as possible because the crowd seemed to be quite rambunctious. “Don’t go down front then,” my wise friend said in his typical short but practical and unable to be argued against way.
Oh how I wouldn’t take that advice.
Still with me? If so, congratulations. You deserve a medal.
Don’t worry, we’re going to skip a lot of time now. Fast forward to 2021. The Covid shutdowns have ended, concerts are happening again, and Jacket’s put out yet another new album. I say yet another because they made for one of the best stay-at-home days when they surprisingly released a follow-up to The Waterfall with a Thursday night listening party on YouTube.
“Wanna listen to some music?” Yep, we both listened and texted throughout. It really was one of the coolest things MMJ could have done in that crazy time, and I think that’s what rekindled my love for them. Not that it had gone away or anything, but I had moved on from the Allstars and the Crowes to Robinson’s latest solo project and obsessed over them for a few years.
That’s what I do. I obsess. I get into one or two bands, and that’s to what I devote 94.7 percent of my music time.
So when Jacket announced a smattering of tour dates, I was bound to make it to a show finally. I debated between an outdoor amphitheater show in Atlanta or an indoor show at a cool-looking theatre in St. Louis, and I settled on the November 6, 2021, gig in the Sh0w Me State.
I summed it up to my friend in one word: transcendental.
It was a life-changing moment. It really was. The feelings that I had from seeing Jacket live… there’s no way I have words to adequately express it.
On a whim, I caught them again last spring in Memphis, and then after making my decision to sell everything and go on this journey, I followed them around for a week across the South. I had a ticket to the show in Huntsville already, so why not add Wilmington, Asheville, and Nashville to the list?
I said in an Instagram post it was on the best weeks of my life, and that’s no hyperbole.
I also began to joke with my friend that it would be awfully convenient if they’d tour in Europe while I’m over here, and then after they all but confirmed they sure enough would be, they finally announced a run of festival shows in addition to two headlining nights in the UK along with another pair in Belgium and The Netherlands.
I bought the tickets as soon as the pre-sale started, buying the two EU shows on a train in Italy and the two UK dates while standing in line at Five Guys in the Rome train station.
So that brings us to last week.
After my incredible time in the Orkneys and a brief stop in Edinburgh which included catching up with UAH soccer alum Jordan Wright and hugging strangers in a pub while watching Everton escape the drop yet again, I headed back to London. This was my third time there this year, and I have to admit that there’s something cool about not having to look for directions to my usual hotel… or my usual Mexican restaurant (that’s right, I’ve gone back to Wahaca… multiple times).
Not having anything better to do, I went ahead and took the Northern Line up a few stops having decided to just go ahead and get to the venue. It wasn’t a conscious decision to get there and be in line early, but rather I was just bored at the hotel after eating a late lunch and not wanting to eat again before the show.
“Don’t go down front then,” I heard in my head, smiling as I posted up at a spot on the rail just a few paces to the left of where Carl Broemel’s place on stage is. That was always a dumb comment that I made that led to my friend saying that, and I realized that during the four shows in the summer when I was in the GA pit for each of them. So I’d been close before, but not that close.
I pretty much was alway on the rail for the Allstars, and there was one TBC show that I managed to be up there. It’s just a totally different experience. From an atmospherics perspective, there’s nothing to serve as a distraction in front of you — other than perhaps an overzealous security officer who blocked my view for several moments later that night standing on top of the barrier as if he was going to stop whatever probably harmless nefarious thing he saw going on (but they also handed out water to everyone so it evened out) — and from a musical perspective it’s really quite a treat to watch artists perform from that close range. You notice things they do to make certain sounds that you just wouldn’t see from other places in the venue, and it really is quite a treat.
The show was fantastic, and I saw my 53rd different song — yes, I keep track of such things … record keeping used to be part of my career, if you’ll recall — when Jim James and Carl played a beautiful I Will Be There When You Die from the band’s first album. It’s a softer song, and I must say it was quite refreshing to have a change of pace from American audiences because the Brits didn’t make a peep that I could hear whereas folks back in the States absolutely would have been annoyingly yapping through it.
Needless to say, my rail addiction was back in full force, and I was determined to be back up there the next night in Manchester. Or at least I would be if I was able to get there in time for the show…
Rail strikes. I swear. Again, I won’t opine on whether they’re a good thing or not because it’s not my place I don’t feel like, but it sure did make for a stressful Wednesday. I left the hotel with just under an hour until the scheduled departure of my coach. That should have been plenty of time to get to the Victoria Coach Station, but the Victoria Line (I love the names of the Underground lines more than I should) ended up having delays, forcing me to have to rush to the station and try to make sense of this mode of transportation I hadn’t yet used.
I found the gate my coach was at, hurried through a mass of humanity to get there with just minutes to spare, only to realize in a moment of horror that I apparently in my haste had read the departures board wrong, something that was especially troublesome considering the gate I had speed walked to was at the far end of the station. When I say that I was relieved when I saw “delayed” on the board when I found the actual gate I was to use…
Eventually a coach showed up, they let some folks on, and then it left.
No announcement. No explanation. Nothing.
Did I do something wrong, I wondered to myself. Was there some last call I didn’t hear and these other folks around me are waiting for the next coach from this gate? I hadn’t stopped sweating from all the hurrying with the however many pounds bag on my back (I was really regretting the full bottle of Highland Park 12 Year Old Viking Honour I purchased in Kirkwall that was adding to the weight), but somehow I broke out into even more of a nervous waterfall of perspiration.
I wasn’t worried about the hotel I might never get to. I wasn’t worried about trying to figure out where to stay in London if I never made it.
I was only worried about Jacket.
Thankfully other folks quickly confirmed they too were still supposed to be headed to Manchester, and finally a worker at the gate told us that they were sending another coach because they had overbooked it due to the train strikes.
It was an uncomfortably long journey on the M40 but eventually we made it, with just enough time to drop my things off in the hotel, grab a quick shower, scarf down a bite, and head to the venue.
The venue where I would be the first person in line. Even I laugh at myself a bit for that. (Though to be fair, I don’t think about 45 minutes before doors is that early.)
While in line I met the famous Erica who just a couple shows prior back in the States had been to her 100th MMJ show, and she was still riding the high of being celebrated by the band at the end of the show that night. I met several more folks over the course of the three remaining shows, and while I’m perfectly content seeing a show solo, there’s also something really cool about feeling part of a communal experience with people you know. It also doesn’t hurt having some folks to talk to pass the time before the show starts.
The Manchester venue was nice and intimate, and the show was — this will start to get redundant — fantastic. I was especially delighted to get Mahgeetah as a closer, sending me back to the hotel floating on air as a terrific closer to not only the show but also the day that started off kind of hairy and finished so spectacularly.
The next show wasn’t until the next Monday (that’s 5 June if you’re trying to keep up with what day of the calendar we’re on here for some reason), so I went back to London for a couple nights and then took the Eurostar to Belgium on Saturday to head to Antwerp where I mainly just hung out at the Airbnb, cooked my meals to save some money, and walked around in a couple of nearby squares for some good people watching.
This is where I’ll note the difference between being here in the winter and being here now: so many more people. And that’s a double-edged sword. It’s definitely much livelier which makes everything seem more vibrant, but it sure was nice (and cheaper) to kind of feel like in some of the places that I was one of the only visitors around.
I knew from some interviews with the band I had read that Jacket really credits Belgium and The Netherlands for getting them going, having curiously taken off here before back in the US, so I was excited for these two shows since it had been a while since they’ve played over here.
We were not to be disappointed.
In Antwerp, Jim mentioned at one point in the middle of the show after paying homage to the locals for that aforementioned early support that the band — and specifically Jim and bassist Tom Blankenship who have been together since the start — was playing their 1,000th show either that night or the next night in Utrecht. What an absolute treat to be there to experience that!
Speaking of Tom, this is probably when I’ll start to sound a bit stalkerish or a little woo woo or what have you, but there was a moment that happened when they played Mahgeetah again in Antwerp. If you put me in a situation where I absolutely had to choose my favorite song of all-time, it’s Mahgeetah. If you then asked me what my favorite part of the song is, I would tell you it’s right at the end of the second verse when it quiets down and Tom’s bass line becomes the focal point for a brief moment. There’s just something about it that is so cool to me.
I also happened to have the awareness to have my phone out and try yet again to get a decent video of Mahgeetah to be able to look back at and enjoy again — the other three times they played it I either was so excited that the video sucked or I just didn’t even try at all — and I started filming just in time for that awesome part where Tom shines. And as he bounced around in such a way that matches the feel-good nature of the song, he happened to grin while looking right into the lens.
The next night in Utrecht, this happened multiple times where I’d make eye contact with Tom and we’d both just grin, and it reminded me of the similar performer-fan eye relationship I had when following the Allstars around with their bassist at the time Chris Chew. And while I may or may not have a little bit of a crush on Tom (I do), let’s be clear that has nothing to do with why I think those moments are so special. I just think it’s really cool to know that they are able to be in tune with their crowd, to know and feel the appreciation for their craft.
The music is spectacular, and if they stood behind a completely opaque curtain and performed, I’d still go. But the experience is heightened so much more by feeling like in some small way you’re… I don’t know how to say it other than… part of the performance?
While on the train the day after the Utrecht show, I listened to a podcast Tom had been on, and he even stated as much, that if you see him looking out and smiling during a show, it’s because he’s just so stoked that someone is there enjoying their music. So I thought that was really cool, and you can think I’m weird and I don’t care.
My shared grins with Tom notwithstanding, the Utrecht show was… well, and I don’t say this lightly… the absolute best concert experience of my life.
If it’s not that, then it’s tied for that with my first time seeing The Black Crowes or seeing them at the Ryman.
It was that good.
I walked out of there on cloud 99 (that’s right, not just cloud nine, but cloud 99), and as I strolled back to my hotel in the amazing city of Utrecht that I wish had more time to visit, I couldn’t help but think of my friend messaging me at 2 in the morning in our college days, asking me if I wanted to listen to some music.
And so my usage of Thank You Too! as the title isn’t just to My Morning Jacket for four incredible evenings of interstellar-level good music, but it’s to him also for his influence.
It’s funny because music is a perfect little microcosm of our friendship. We are alike in so many ways, and yet we are also so very different in so many ways. Obviously on a broader scale, we both like the music. Alike: checkmark. He enjoys it much more for the technical ability of the artists, for the things they’re able to do with their instruments or with their voices, while I on the other hand absolutely appreciate that, but really I’m just a big ole hippy at heart who gets lost in the cosmic universe of the journey that the music sends me on. Different: checkmark.
And so I can’t wait for my next scheduled Jacket shows — their tour schedule is permanently open in my browser and I have nothing planned for much of the summer currently… — which will come at the magical Red Rocks in Colorado at the end of August.
But before that happens and before I get back stateside, I have to go find out a little bit more about my apparent Viking heritage, so if you’ll excuse me as I’m still trying to catch up on sleep from not getting a great night of rest after the show in Utrecht and then having to wake up at 5:30 for a 15-hour day on the rails heading up to Scandinavia.
Skål.
Rails to Ride 