NOTES FROM VIVACE:

NO DOUBT

No Doubt. Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. August 2nd.

Distant memory.  A friend suggested that we all take a road trip to see his friends play a gig. He tells us that they’re called No Doubt and that they’re really cool. He adds that we’d get to hang out with them. I decided not to take him up on the offer. A few months later; however, I decided to listen to their album. They’re quirky, I thought. Then they became famous. So I tell another friend, “Can you believe how this band became so big.” He responded, “They’ll go back to being nobodies soon enough.”

  Fast forward to the present and No Doubt’s reunion tour. It is early March. “Are we going to see No Doubt?” “Yes.” “Let’s go get some tickets.” “Oh no, they’re all sold out, and I was on the phone for like 30 minutes . . . wait, they’ve added a date . . . I’ve got tickets.”

The pre-planning for August 2nd and the result. Our one pre-planning move was to determine when we should leave Los Angeles. Now, of course, this is all pre-determined by when the bands start playing. I personally wanted to see the opening acts. This is how it worked out. I sent an e-mail to my friend, who still had the tickets, never having given me my ticket, “When should we head down to Irvine.” She replied back, “When do you want to leave?” I asked back, “When does it start?” I wasn’t getting a response so I started to search the Internet and saw a 6:15 p.m. time. I figured that was when the gates opened so I sent an e-mail saying, “You’re not even giving me any details so I had to do some look up on my own. It looks like gates open at 6:15 p.m. So first band up at 7 p.m.? Maybe we should leave at 5:15 p.m.?”

We met up at 5:15 p.m. and arrived in our seats at 8:15 p.m., missing the first band and about 15 minutes of Paramore. How does it take 3 hours to get from Los Angeles to Irvine when Yahoo! maps states that it is a 55 minute drive? Traffic doesn’t even begin to explain the situation. Enough said on that topic. Sorry, I told my friend I was going to gripe for a couple paragraphs.

Camera. I brought a camera to share some photos with the TRAffIK readership. Now my camera is no SLR, but it is far better than a basic point and shoot. I was a bit worried about getting turned away at the gate. I expressed this thought when I saw a couple of women walking back to the parking lot with a camera in hand. They over-heard me and said, “They aren’t allowing in any big cameras.” Their camera was not an SLR either, but by taking a look at their camera I could tell that my camera was superior to their camera. Luck was with me. Looks can be deceiving, which results in you getting some sub-par No Doubt photos along with this column.

Paramore. They were great. We missed the first 15 minutes, but their set was about 45 minutes. I couldn’t help noticing that the lead singer loved to talk. For their last song, a bunch of costumed characters came out on stage and danced around with them.

Honest mistake or attempted manipulation? There was a 30 minute intermission after Paramore and so I headed to the washroom. As I was coming back, there were two teenage girls trying to get back to their seats. (Now security guards had warned everyone as they were walking out of the seated area that they needed their tickets to re-enter. If not, you were stuck in the grass area.) One girl yelled out. “This is F**ked up. We left our tickets at our seats. We didn’t bring our cell phones. We’re just going to be stuck out here with no one knowing we’re here. This is so F**cked.” Okay, so were these girls playing the security guards or honestly distressed? Part of me believed them, but the other part of me argues that they were just trying to get a better view.

The anticipation. Back at my seat, I saw a black curtain draped around the stage area. At one point, the curtain started to move, perhaps caused by the wind or maybe No Doubt’s stage crew. The crowd roared and then died down.

The concert notes.It became evident when No Doubt was taking the stage. A white curtain came down from the ceiling and four figures started walking forward, their shadows growing to giant sized proportions. All the fans stood up and started screaming. No one sat down for the next 1.5 hours. Gwen noted that this was their third concert in a row. She also noted that they hadn’t done a sound check, because they’d arrived too late, but who cared because they were f*cking great and didn’t need one. (My friend said that at a previous concert, Gwen used the F-word with abandon. The above was the only time she used it on this particular night. My friend speculated that it was because her kids were in the audience.) For “Running,” they had some old homemade videos playing in the background. For “Don’t Speak,” an acoustic guitar was brought onto the stage, which Tom Dumont played while it lay on a rack – I mention this because the crowd went crazy. Back on the lawn area, it seemed that along the fence, 10 to 13 year old kids were jumping throughout the whole set. (For a band that has been around for 20-ish years, I just found it amazing how all these tweens were going crazy for the band.) For “Just a Girl,” Gwen got down and did 10 push-ups. She tried getting the guys in the audience to sing “I’m just a girl.” She was semi successful . . . or maybe not. Apparently, at the front of the stage there were a number of die hard fans who are following No Doubt around on their current tour. (I always wonder who has the time or money to do something like that.) When demanding an encore, we fans started clapping, then screaming and ended by pounding on the chairs in order to get our three song encore. For the “Stand and Deliver” encore, the same characters that came out for Paramore also came out for No Doubt. The two lead singers from the opening bands also joined in on the fun. Guys from the various bands were dressed in tutus. After the concert ended and the crowd was heading for the gates, I noticed a guy peddling $10 No Doubt t-shirts – this compared to the $40 price point of the official t-shirts. I couldn’t help but wonder how he was able to smuggle the t-shirts into the venue.

Counting. It was noted by us that we saw three separate vomit scenes. We also noted a fire truck, and firemen hanging around a car. It didn’t look like anyone was actually in the car. Someone had over-dosed, I argued, and was dead dead dead – and that’s my exaggerated story I plan to tell twenty years from now.

Okay, so I was WRONG!!! There was an argument about how to exit the parking lot. I admit I was at fault for a 20-30 minute delay in exiting the parking lot. If our experience is normal, make sure you exit up the middle of the Verizon parking lot versus along the sides. But you know what; I’m not the one who caused us to miss part of Paramore!!! (Yes, dear readers, I’m still having a difficult time getting over that one. I hold grudges.)

Fun driving back. So it took 3+ hours to get to Irvine while it took 2.5 hours to get back to Los Angeles. Though not all of the following impacted us, we did learn that at 1 a.m. there are a lot of freeway closures. The one closure that impacted us was the 5N freeway. At the 5 and 91 interchange, all lanes of the 5 were closed. Also, after diverting to the 91, we saw that the 710S was closed. And when we eventually got back onto the 5 freeway, we saw that the 10E exit was closed.

Comment of the night. “I am in need of a shower.”

Set List. If you like seeing set-lists, the Dog House Gallery has the following August 2nd set list:

Irvine, CA (8/2/2009)
“Spiderwebs”
“Hella Good”
“Underneath It All”
“Excuse Me Mr.”
“Ex-Girlfriend”
“DJs”
“Simple Kind of Life”
“Bathwater”
“Guns of Navarone”
“New”
“Hey Baby”
“Running”
“Different People”
“Don’t Speak”
“It’s My Life”
“Just A Girl”

Encore

“Rock Steady”
“Stand and Deliver”
(featuring The Sounds and Paramore)
“Sunday Morning”

And if you’d like a more professional review of a No Doubt concert, check out this review by the LA Times for their Gibson Amphitheatre show.