Loud love

Oh no, it’s the ‘Light Grenades’ tour! We’re gonna have to sit through at least five songs we never liked!” was something I heard a lot in the weeks before last Sunday’s Incubus concert at the Araneta Coliseum. “We’re going to have to pretend to like it! Brandon’s gonna see us!” said some friends who were sitting really close to the front.

To the surprise of Incubus fans who have been around since “S.C.I.E.N.C.E.,” they only played a few tracks off “Light Grenades” — the most popular ones like Anna Molly and Oil and Water — and played old favorites that everyone (at least everyone who knew anything) sang along to. When they started playing Vitamin, my younger brother (who was too young to go to their previous concert) started going crazy, and so were the rest of us.

The kids in front were shoulder to shoulder, packed like sardines and having a great time together. It didn’t matter that we were all strangers; we jumped up and down like friends and sang along to every song they played. It’s what I wish all concerts would be like. It was just like the first Incubus concert.

Incubus last visited Manila at the height of my high school fan-dom, when my silly little high school band used to play acoustic versions of Pardon Me and A Certain Shade Of Green in the hallways of Goldilockslandia. It was the night before prom and I couldn’t have cared less — Incubus was the highlight of 2004. It was the first time that I got to see a band I loved, and the experience was amazing.

For a lot of us, the Incubus love subsided somewhat, and there wasn’t as much excitement this time around. (Maybe it was because of the “Light Grenades” thing.) But when the band stepped onstage, when they played favorites off “Make Yourself,” “Morning View” and “A Crow Left of the Murder,” it was like it all came rushing back to everybody. They were living the Incubus love all over again. It was beautiful.

The band wasn’t into spiels between songs; the guys just went from song to song to song to song to song, and it all went by so fast that after they played Aqueous Transmission and left the stage for the last time, we couldn’t believe that it was actually over so soon. It was one of the best concerts of 2008 so far.

The only damper on the whole experience was the bouncers behind the barricade. The lucky kids on the right of the stage were spoiled with attention by guitarist Mike Einziger: after every song, he would throw the pick he had used to certain people in the audience. I was one of them, my 12-year-old cousin was another. Of course, there was a good 10 feet between the fans behind the barricade and Mike on the stage, so more often than not, these guitar picks fell to the floor where we couldn’t reach them.

The bouncers who were right in front of us actually picked up every single pick that fell and pocketed all of them. One of them even jostled a girl’s hand so that she dropped the pick she was already holding. It got to the point that Mike took to standing on nearby speakers so he could be close enough to hand them to his fans. When Incubus left the stage, the bouncers had the gall to ask me and my little kids to buy a guitar pick for P1,000. I cussed them out — it was most likely the only language they would be able to understand since reason wasn’t going to work. The nerve of those extortionist jerks! Trying to make money off teenage kids who love the music and kids who mostly paid really good money to be that close to a band they loved.

Two of the girls were crying because they had been given backstage passes (for having really funny fan signs I think), and the bouncers were telling them that they couldn’t go in, that they were just souvenirs, when it clearly said on a diagram behind them that the passes were valid. They were letting artistas through who had exactly the same passes. I bet the only song those artistas knew was Drive. I bet they were dead lost when the band played Favorite Things.

Whoever that event’s security company is, please, screen the morons you hire. I have a name and a photograph of two of the idiots who were trying to sell me and the other kids near me something that was already ours and I am more than willing to forward them to you so you can fire them because they deserve it.

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You can e-mail me at bewaretheashtraygirl@yahoo.com with your bouncer horror stories — I want to hear them.