After our overnight flight on Open Skies to Orly (the “other” airport in Paris) we needed to cross the city to CDG.
We slipped the driver a 50 and stopped off at the Eiffel tower for a few minutes…
And then went on to drive around the Arch d’Triunph
Definitely a weird way to kick off a whirlwind trip to Italy!
The rest of the day 0 pictures can be found HERE.
Tickets said 7PM.
We arrived at 7:45 expecting to miss the opener and be just on time.
Turns out, 7PM is doors, show starts at 9. Well at least we are front row!
The venue is tiny, but that’s good when you’re front row. The bleacher seating in back is nice had we chosen that route.
8:45 “The Dirty Pearls” go on. They’re fine musically, but the variety in clothing style among the band is hilarious. Vocalist = Emo. Lead guitar = Lenny Kravitz clone. Bassist = Metalhead. Drummer = S+M. 2nd lead guitar = Tee + Jeans. Rhythm guitar = Hipster.
They play their 30 minutes and I expect a long delay, because the stage is quite cramped, they’ll need a lot of setup for Weiland. 9:30 comes and goes. Stage is setup. Some “Scott-y” chants. Nothing.
Around 10PM some VIPs show up. One guy named Mark and I chat quite a bit, he owns a few bars and is here with the travel coordinator for Weiland. He tells me, in a whisper, Weiland is not in the building, he’s across the street in his hotel having an episode.
10:45PM and lots of disgruntled fans. A half dozen or so beers get tossed on stage. Me and Mark talk concerts and he gets me free VIP beer, so at least the time goes by a little more quickly.
11:15 Doug Green comes out and announces it will be another 15 minutes. Turns out it was more like another 45 minutes.
5 minutes to midnight Weiland finally goes on stage. He makes some excuses about taking a redeye that morning and then various press/book signing commitments. Plenty of booing, but nothing thrown at him or his band.
They open up with 3 or 4 “new songs” on a yet to even be announced album. It was super jam bandy.
From there he goes into a series of covers – his version of Fame, “Let Down” by Radiohead (this sounded great, but being so tired, it made us sleepy) and “Francis Farmer” by Nirvana (also sounded very good).
Before the Stone Roses song he told a story about the first time he did LSD and heard that song. Someone in the crowd yelled a perfectly timed “COOL STORY BRO” which was hilarious to me.
They did an encore of Unglued, the only STP song of the night. All told they only played a dozen songs, and while they sounded good… the night as a whole was just frustrating.
He was literally within arms reach of us though, which was somewhat redeeming.
All pictures here.
Saturday night we went out to Equus for dinner.
The grounds were beautiful. We were on time for our reservation, but had to close to 40 minutes for a table. The service was pretty bad. Too many wait staff and no one dedicated to a table. Very strange/unacceptable for a place like this. Very extensive wine list, small menu. Food was good, but not great.
At least we tried somewhere new!
Sunday we took Ada and her 2 boys to their first Mets’ game. Shake Shack. Yum.
Our $18 seats were actually pretty awesome.
Victor had just learned “Up” and “Down”… I helped teach him “upside down” and Alex couldn’t be left out of the fun…
It was a wonderful time, the only shortcoming that the Mets lost!
As the day wore on, pictures got more blurry… sticky little fingers constantly playing with the camera! All pictures here.
