Axis of Avalon

The Avalon in Boston isn't much of a live music venue. It's on the notoriously frat-daddy hootandholler strip of shit bars called Landsdowne Street (a road which Steven Tyler built with his bare hands on the site of an old Indian burial ground.) The club is Boston chic, aka New York trash. Most of the time they have booty-rockin' oomp-checka-oomp-checka music but every now and again a mid-level headliner will play a show, someone too small for the Fleet Center but too big for the hundreds of smaller venues in town.

I have seen three pretty righteous concerts at this particular spot, the most recent of which went down last night. The first was over ten years ago.

Lou Reed- Lou Reed was one of my biggest teen idols, right up there with Tom Waits, Jello Biafra and Pee-Wee Herman. He was also one of those rare cross-generational musicians that me and my dad could agree on. So when Big Lou decided to play an impromptu concert at the Avalon, just one week from my nineteenth birthday, my pops had a surprise for me.
"Hey good buddy, looks like your dad isn't so 'square' after all- I got us two tickets for Lou Reed at the Avalon!"

That was the best birthday present he could ever have given me. I wanted to go but all my expendable income from working as a toy soldier at FAO Schwarz (a story for another day)
was spent on my pack-a-day Export A habit. The only downside was that I, a selfish bratty drunken teenager, would have to go to a rock concert with my dad. It was difficult to subtly hint that I would've preferred to bring a buddy to the show, which would have enabled me to get hammered on whiskey in the bathroom and thrash all around in the crowd (as was the style at the time.)

Nope, it was me and my pops, both embarassingly dressed in black from head to toe. My dad graciously got me a beer, then watched like a hawk while I drank it, probably trying to determine whether this was my first beer ever or if I was an old pro.

Paternal relations aside, the three-and-a-half hour show was probably the best concert I have seen. Close seconds were Portishead with a live orchestra and Ween on Halloween, but to be brutally honest, I smoked drugs at those shows. The memories cloud.

Not with my pops, though. The only 'high'* I got was from the undeniable synergy of an adoring crowd and a rock legend. It was clear that Lou and his band were feeding off our energy as much as we were off theirs. The music got more and more intense as the night wore on, sweat pouring down the musicians' faces, the audience moving in a fevered frenzy, my stiff old man jerking around like a robot Steve Martin.

Finally, at the very end, the band stood there on the stage with their hands raised in the air like demi-gods, amidst deafening screams and thunderous applause. This literally went on for over five minutes. And all of a sudden, boom, an ice cube came hurtling out of the crowd and hit Lou Reed in the eye, clearly hurting him. Just like that, all that audience-musician goodwill was trash. Holding his eye with one hand, he said, "Thanks for ruining a really good thing," and stalked off the stage.

I can just imagine the whiz kid (it had to be a guy) who earned the right to brag to all his friends that he was the guy who fucked everything up. "It's true- I hurt Lou Reed!" Even now, ten years later, I can't disassociate the awesome concert from the dumb-ass finishing move. That fool actually interferes with my nostalgia. Incredible.

Why I oughta!

*say this with sanctimonious anti-drug commercial voice