Second Summer of Seether, May 29, 2022 It's the Day! part 2 The Hu, Bush, Seether, Papa Roach (almost)

 

5:40-6:20 The Hu

My husband has been listening to The Hu on You Tube.  They had a few out and we watched Wolf Totem both the original and the one with Jacoby Shaddix and Song of Women with Lzzy Hale.  As of this date, there are many more and concert recordings as well.  Being old school, or just old, my husband and I spent some time playing  "Who's on First" with the band names: The Hu vs. The Who.  Stupid jokes never get old.  We wondered if Jacoby Shaddix would join The Hu for the song he did with them, but it wasn't to be.

Background:  A folk and mental music band from Mongolia, The Hu use both standard rock instruments and traditional instruments from their home country to create an outstanding blend of both.  Vocals also incorporate Mongolian throat singing, a powerful sound.  This band is composed of classically trained musicians who play many different instruments.  Some have taught music, made or restored instruments, won national awards for music and wrote music for other musicians as well as The Hu.  They have a few series on You Tube: Tour Diary of The Hun Tour, Hu's in the Kitchen and Hu We Are, which is in it's 2nd season.  If you start with the first season of Hu We Are, you can learn about the members of The Hu.  Each man has an episode sharing his life, instruments, interests and country.  They are all interesting people with lives worth learning about.  As with other musicians and bands, the lives of each member and the history of the band is much more complex and full than we see from the surface of watching their concerts.  Certainly anyone from a different country and culture than what we know from our own lives intensifies this.

The Hu's setlist for Dallas does not represent everything they played by any means.  Wolf Totem and a cover of Sad But True (Metallica) are the only ones listed, but I bet the setlist from the previous night at The Woodlands may fill in the gaps:  Sugaan Essena, Shihi Hutu, Honchu Zairian, Yuve Yuve Yu, Wolf Totem, This is Mongol.  There are 6 additional songs listed for May 27th in Oklahoma City that may also have been played in Dallas.  They did have a 40 minute set.  As I wrote in Part 1, the stage setup is very different than the previous bands.  The amps and guitar rack seemed to stay the same.  I may have missed some of the setup since, once again, I had to go to the ladies room.  One problem is that every time I did that, I had to show my ticket to get back to my seat and the ticket is on my phone which, as the afternoon moved into evening, lost more and more of it's charge.  What happens if I have to go again and my phone powers off for the night?  I was at 12% by the time I made another run before Seether came on.  That is why we have fewer photos from the end of the evening.  The heat is a killer on phone batteries.  

Back to The Hu.  They have a wonderment of instruments from their home country that are beautiful and inexplicable to me.  They've been touring the U.S. since earlier this year, I think it's the first time they've been here, but I may be wrong.  I am wrong about The Hu's tour schedule.  The band did a European Tour June and July of 2019 and was back in the fall of 2019 to tour the United States, which included the 2019 Aftershock Festival in Sacramento. 2020 was sort of a wash, but they've been touring steadily the last two years.  Don't take my word for information--actually do some research! The Hu are awesome live.  Can't understand what the words are (not that I could with the previous bands singing in English over the sound system) but I can feel the music right through to my bones.  The crowd was just as enthusiastic.  The inability to sing the lyrics didn't dim our enthusiasm and there was an abundance of fans for The Hu in the audience.  In the previous bands, and those after, the "frontman" is often synonymous with "lead singer".  With this band, the "lead singer" position seems shared by two of the musicians and the backing vocals are everyone else.  This means a chorus of voices from eight band members.  

6:50-7:30 Bush

I was interested to hear Bush, because I only know them from the song Glycerine.  The audience sang most of their songs with them and I certainly enjoyed their performance. I somehow didn't realize they were British, despite the pronunciation of "Glycerine".  American English sounds like "gliss-r-in" and Bush's British sounds like "gliss-er-een".   

Background:  A long standing band, Bush was active from 1992 to 2002 with Gavin Rossdale, Nigel Pulsford (with Chris Traynor filling in his lead guitar spot at the end of that period), Dave Parsons on bass and Robin Goodridge on drums.  They disbanded in 2002, working with other bands, solo and even acting in the case of Gavin Rossdale.  After eight years, Bush began playing shows with Rossdale, Chris Traynor and Robin Goodridge from the earlier band and Corey Britz taking Dave Parsons bass position.  By 2019, Robin, the drummer had left and Nik Hughes took his spot, leaving Gavin the last original member of Bush playing in the band by the time they played in Dallas.

Both my husband and I had limited phone power by the time Bush came on.  We have but three pictures and didn't get a picture of Chris Traynor at all.  Sorry, Chris!  Who did have a lot more energy in the heat than us and our phones was Gavin who made a surprise "tour" of the audience jogging up the stairs and around to the fans sitting in the sun on the grass and back on stage.  No one was more surprised than two security (crew?) members who took off after him like a shot, after looking a little horrified.  Those gentleman had some hustle. The other Bush musicians didn't seem particularly surprised.

8:00 Seether

We were on the "Shaun" side of the stage and only a few rows back.  It was as close as I have been to the band at show of theirs and I felt like I was singing with Shaun.  Yes, I was "fan-girl-ing" the whole time, but it was magic for me.  I don't know if it's because I've been immersed in their music for a year and a half (because, why not obsess), but between concerts, listening to interviews and watching videos, they have become very familiar, like I really know them.  No, I do not, and if I have a chance to meet them in person, it's likely my anxiety would overcome me into silence. "Her mouth is moving, but nothing is coming out.  I don't think it just my rock musician hearing." If not just an artificial paradigm, this is at least an extremely one-sided relationship.  Really, I'm not creepy, their music just makes me happy. 

Seether ended their set early, although the setlist shows 10 songs.  Shaun apologized for not giving the performance he wanted to provide.  I understand he said allergies were to blame.  I was so entranced I didn't notice this, but listening to recordings of some of the songs they performed later, Shaun's voice was strong and in tune, but scratchy, as if he had a sore throat.  When I have allergy problems and still have to go to work, I a least can avoid talking much with a sore throat.  And I'm not working outside, either.  Certainly, no one expects me to sing, although we do sometimes break into a tune a random.  One of my supervisors is a fan of musicals.  Maybe the day I retire, I can do the chorus of Fake It.  Yeah, that should go over well.  Hope you all are better.  Seether didn't have anything scheduled right after Dallas, so perhaps they could go home for a bit.  Their website doesn't show they have a lot scheduled in the future.  July 16 and 17, in Iowa and the Inkcarceration Festival in Ohio, respectively, July 22 and 23 in Wisconsin and the 19th of August in South Dakota.  There are two more festivals in September, Rocklahoma on the 3rd and Blue Ridge Rock Festival on the 11th.  I saw the poster of Rocklahoma on Facebook on my phone and thought it said it was going to be in OH, as in Ohio.  What the hell? Why would a festival called Rocklahoma be in Ohio?  Oh, that's a "K" not an "H".  

Background:  I could background for pages.  If you are reading a website called SeetherGeezer, you probably don't need background.

Papa Roach (almost)

I have a tendency to become saturated after seeing Seether and not wanting to see anyone else.  I skipped out on Three Doors Down last September and almost missed seeing Metallica in October because of this.  "Are you crazy?"  I think we have already established this.  By the time Seether finished, we were finished, too and ready to go.  The icing on the cake was I went to gather my belongings and checked my front pocket for my wallet.  Uh, oh. I looked around the seats and when I mentioned this to another fan, since I was looking around her row, she enlisted the people sitting near us to help look, too.  Despite their kind sympathy and help, I'm pretty sure it fell out on my last bathroom run before Seether started.  I wasn't going to spend their set having to pee, like I did at USANA last September.  We heard Papa Roach from afar, sitting at a picnic bench near the merch stands cancelling the credit cards I had in my wallet.  We were down to my husband's debit card from his account for the rest of the trip.  Then he thought about going home at the end of the week,  "How are you going to get on the airplane without an i.d.?"  Good question.  We'd gotten passports last year thinking we might want to go over the border to see Canada at some point so my daughter UPS-d my passport overnight so my husband didn't have to stick me on a bus for the return trip.  They probably wouldn't let me on a bus without i.d. either.

We did check lost and found with little hope.  The staff were very welcoming but we all understood the best we could hope for was someone taking out the money and tossing the rest.  I sure would like to have my Covid vaccine paper back though.   

EM

PS: We made it home safely after driving around East Texas on what turned out to be a impromptu food tour of Barbeque, Tex-Mex and several gallons of sweet tea.  I loved fried okra.  Okra, which I call (fondly) "the vegetable that makes it's own snot".  I didn't get to see a Texas Longhorn, though my husband spotted one in a field that I didn't turn my head fast enough to see. He said, "We can see Longhorns at home."  "But they won't be Texas Longhorns in Texas."  He seemed to think this was splitting hairs, but I stood my ground.  Speaking of hair, and a very frivolous comment on my part, The Hu did have the best hair of any of the bands there.  

PSs:  I found my grandpa's headstone in the family section of the small New Boston cemetery and got to brush the dirt from his name and dates.  He is with his sisters and their husbands and a brother.  They all died early in the previous century.  There are older stones, but are so weathered that they can't be read.  There is one path into the cemetery that curves around and goes back out the entrance.  We didn't want to block anyone else who was driving through by parking on the path and certainly didn't want to accidently park on anyone buried there, so we went back outside the fence to leave the car there.  We met a lady with a small dog sitting in the passenger seat of her car who was just leaving.  She rolled down her window to see who we were looking for.  She was visiting her parents and her twin sister, who had recently died.  I thought of my own sister and thought that would be a hard thing to visit your sister by visiting her grave.  I could be her.  She could be me.  Her dog was a chihuahua and growled at me when I said hello.  I could be her with a larger dog.