The Beer Retard - July 29th, 2002

last week was pretty eventful. where to start? reddawn graced us with her presence early on in the week. we welcomed her to town with a night of serious drinking that finally ended at 5am in dolores park. our sick asses even outlasted the drug dealers. i spent most of the next day hanging out with our distinguished visitor (who was very cool and a most impressive drinker), but i was too out of it to be much company. yet again i was reminded that while i can still put away the hops and barley, my ability to recover the next day is not what it used to be. yes, i'm getting too old for this shit.

we also had our first softball game last week. we managed to eke out a 9-9 tie after falling behind 9-0 in the first two innings. everyone on the team contributed something to the comeback and i was pretty happy with my day, going 2-3 at the plate and miraculously committing no errors in the field. it was a lot of fun, even though i screwed my hand up pretty bad shagging flies for some kid taking batting practice on the next field. note to self: don't run around like an idiot trying to make spectacular catches on baseballs that are so old and beaten up they're not white so much as a dark gray. you see...it's kinda hard to see the balls when there's no white left on them.

while houseguests and softball made it a memorable week, nothing can touch friday night's mission of burma show. i was looking forward to this for the past few months and it lived up to my expectations. from the minute they hit the stage and the opening chords of "red" rang out, you knew you were seeing something pretty remarkable. even though these guys are in their mid-forties and hadn't played any shows together in 19 years, they played with such fire and intensity...it was amazing. they played two sets separated by a ten minute break and then two encores after the second set. highlights of the first set (and there were a lot of them) were "red," "peking spring," "max ernst" and "academy fight song." they closed the first set with the latter two songs and the entire place was singing along with "academy fight song."

as hard as it was to imagine, the second set was even better. they played so many good songs it was sick: "this is not a photograph," "forget," "einstein's day," "that's how i escaped my certain fate," "fame and fortune" and the one everyone knew would be the closer --"that's when i reach for my revolver." like with "academy," everyone went crazy during "revolver." the intensity seemed to build during every chorus leading up to the last one during which it seemed like every person in the fillmore was jumping up and down, fist in the air, screaming out the words. fucking incredible...

the first encore was great too. a couple more old tunes, one of which was "dead pool" and then a blistering cover of the dils' "class war." they should've quit then, but the crowd was going so crazy that they were forced to come back up for one more song. it was unnecessary and a little anticlimactic, but they were so good it didn't really matter. we got to see one of the greatest bands from back in the day. a band that i've listened to for the last 10-12 years and never thought i'd be able to see (except maybe on video). a little piece of history and we were there. i know i won't forget it anytime soon. now i have to head over to lost weekend and get the video of them playing back in '82 and see the difference. i have a feeling that they haven't lost much intensity over the years.