There had to be a catch, right? I mean, all you had to do was go to the website, fill out your personal information and you got a free GA ticket to The Reverend Horton Heat at Grinders. My first plan for this weekend was to do a second Bike MS (I did the Ozarks one two weeks ago, there was one in Nebraska September 26 & 27, and I was tempted. I didn't figure I could fundraise much so close to hitting family and friends up for the Ozarks one, so I'd have to dig into my tithe fund for the minimum $250, but that wasn't impossible.
But I'd never seen the Reverend before. I've got six or seven albums, I'm a fan, but I don't go to a lot of concerts, mainly because it's insanely expensive to do so. I just don't have the budget to buy a $50 or $100 ticket, then be a sport about the overpriced concessions. Same reason I rarely set foot in the ball park.
And he puts on a hell of a show. A group of my friends was there, and we eventually got a mosh pit going, though that was a bad idea. Almost a week later, my tailbone is still sore as hell and my back is still needing iced when I go to bed. Moshing is fun, but it's rough play and I think I'm officially retiring from the pit. Officially too old for that nonsense.
The opening band, Loaded Goat, was really good too, a bluegrass band. The blood moon was a bit of a disappointment. The moon was huge on the horizon when I got to Grinders, but by the time the eclipse started it was high and small. I guess it couldn't live up to the hype, at least not here. And of course, I had thought I wanted to try and shoot it with my Nikon but realistically I don't have the glass to do it. I think I'd want at minimum a 400mm prime lens to do the job, possibly with a teleconverter, though being my D7000 is a DX sensor, a 400mm is effectively a 600mm, and that should fill the frame with the moon pretty nicely I would think. But even if I had such glass, I knew the venue wouldn't let my Nikon in, let alone a big honking lens and tripod.
Of course I had my iPhone, and of course I took a few shots with it. I probably shouldn't have bothered, from 100 feet away in the dark with harsh stage lights, there isn't a camera that's going to do a great job with that and no matter how much they tout the improved camera in the iPhone 6s Plus, it's still just a phone. I wasn't alone poaching shots with my phone of course, and I saw a few people taking extended video (which I imagine sounds about as good as it looks, which is awful). I guess this is the new equivalent of holding up your cigarette lighter, but yeah.
So on the one hand, I can see the argument for stick your phone in your pocket and just live in the now. And then Jimbo lays his bass down (while still playing it), and Jim Heath jumps up on the top of the instrument in the middle of a blistering solo and damn, that phone just came out and took another shitty photo.
As far as that catch I wondered about with the free ticket, apparently Grinders does one free show a year as a promotion. And they got me for a few overpriced beers while I was in there, so I'm sure they come out okay on the deal.
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