Friday, November 16th 2001
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I've seen Sloan several times, and this was the most awesome Sloan show I've ever seen. The venue was small...ok tiny. It made for a very upclose and personal show. The crowd was very much into the participation as well.
Drove up from Pittsburgh (and blew off school and my own mother's birthday!) to see Sloan for the first time and was not disappointed! The crowd was energetic, the band was loose and having a blast. The set list was fantastic, hitting the best songs from each album...I have it written down somewhere...I think they did a Sabbath cover (???). There was a large Detroit contingent there, I remember. Great venue, too...smallish bar with good beer! Stood on a bench with a German teacher from Cleveland (wie geht's?) and had a perfect view. Andrew was under the weather but soldiered on for the good of the show. Noted Patrick's Lemmy microphone setup. Chris was sweatin' his glasses off. Jay seemed reserved. I yelled so much I ended up getting laryngitis, which pleased my students to no end. It was worth skippin' school for! Thanks, guys!
very very good! what made this show was the full audience participatioN! the black sabbath cover was good, but i love it when you guys do ac/dc's jailbreak.... just a blast!
At the time of this show, I was living in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, my friend Will (who had introduced me to Sloan sometime around 1996 when he was living in New York City) had relocated to Columbus. Since we had nothing better to do, I flew to Columbus, and we drove up to Detroit and Cleveland for these two shows. It was awesome.
(Most of the rest of this was written in November 2001, originally on OSMB.)
The Sloan lads were really impressed, I think, with the Cleveland audience, even though they had complimented the Detroit crowd more frequently on the previous night. At the time, to me, Chris seemed impressed that the crowd was audibly singing along to everything including the songs from the brand new album. The band was definitely in a great mood and played excellently.
Sloan came out planning to play the same setlist as the night before (a slight disappointment to those of us who went to both) but changed a couple things after polling the crowd (”who’s here from the Detroit show last night?” got a roar from at least half the crowd, conservatively).
The best thing about the club (Peabody’s Downunder) was the superior sound quality. The mix was perfect, I thought. (For example, "It’s In Your Eyes" sounded really good as a loud rocker there, and it just sounded messed up in Detroit.)
The first band, Sad Davie, was decent. Earlier, several of us waiting (interminably!) in line bugged several members of that band through the window by holding up notes asking what was on one of their shirts that was partially obscured by a jacket (disappointingly, “Life is too short to drink cheap wine”) and offering the lead guitarist (we didn’t know) a piece of gum to let us in. He then pantomimed some other things he’d rather have (I swear that one of them was shampoo).
Ultimate Fakebook played the exact same stuff as the night before the exact same way, with plenty of flashing of monotonous devil signs.
Chris and Patrick attempted to make a joke (that fell flat) about the guy who was wearing the shirt that said “at least I’m still cool to one girl.” Luckily, the details are now lost to time. To get them back on track, I pleaded out loud, “just play the song!” Chris saw me and echoed my gesture, saying “for the love of god, just play!” It was funny at the time.
I'm sorry I didn't write more about the actual music at the time! I think I have the setlist... somewhere... on a tiny notepad in a box in a closet. Maybe I'll get around to posting it here in 2017.
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