Ryan Adams Road Trip Part 2, Night 1

RA in Mobile

so after the drama of Wednesday was dealt with and Chad heroically stepped up to valiantly sit with me in the 5th row, the group going to the Mobile show met up at my house and left about 6:15. the plan initially was to get there in time to hit a sports bar and watch the Clemson game, but plans changed and it was just as well since Clemson wrecked my bracket and broke my heart. i didn’t see any of the game, but got score updates off of Chad’s phone. i was just in a fog between the Wednesday drama, the tension of the day at work, and then the game. i needed something to take my mind off it, and of course seeing RA live would work.

we got there much later than we thought, and ended up just going into the venue. no harrowing adventures of timing like the last time in Mobile or anything. Chad did bring his awesome camera, but foolishly decided to size things up before the show started. i say foolishly because of what happened next. a couple of security guys came over and told him he wouldn’t be able to take pictures during the show with such a great camera, and then tried to say something funny that wasn’t. more on them later. since we were so close i did snap some good pictures (like above), so things worked out on the photography front okay.

the lights go down, the show starts, and already the show is different from the previous two shows i had been to on this tour because the opener was I See Monsters. they did quite a few songs off Cardinology, which was cool, cause i think those songs sound better live than they do on the album. especially Born Into A Light, which was played last Thursday. the setlist was pretty vanilla though, again, which i expected, but i did get to hear a song i had never heard live before for the first time.

the first time i heard the song Evergreen, was from a 15 sec cell phone video my fellow RA super fan friend Marika sent me from a show at the Fillmore in SF (link to whole song from that show). that show saw the live debut of several new songs from Cardinology, which includes Evergreen. hearing it live for the first time made me think of when i got that cell phone video at 1 am, and how excited i was to hear a new song played live, even if it was only 15 seconds. the song sounded great in Mobile.

i thought they had really gotten into a groove by the time they played Evergreen. they had kicked out Mockingbird, Cold Roses (i love that song live), Shakedown, A Kiss Before I Go, and Peaceful Valley right in a row before playing Evergreen. i thought the feel had finally come around and they were locked in. the first part of the show i thought they were just kind of going through the motions, but when i thought they hit the groove, i thought they’d play a while. unfortunately i was wrong, because right after Evergreen they played Magick and the show was over. just like that. the house lights came up about 10:15. they had played straight through, which didn’t make it feel like a short show. and really, 23 songs (20 if you don’t count the Neal Casal songs) was fine. it had the cool moments like Jon Graboff’s pedal steel on Shakedown, so i can’t say i was disappointed. it didn’t feel packaged like Birmingham either, but it did feel like RA was just singing the songs and playing the music, hoping to get done; at least up until that string of songs i mentioned. i texted a couple of friends on the way out and told them i was not going in with many expectations for the ATL ‘final’ show.

a side note about the security guys, while they wanted to hassle Chad at the beginning of the show about his camera, they didn’t seem too interested in a girl throwing stuff on stage at RA. i forget when during the show it was, but this girl walks up the left aisle and threw what i thought were crumpled pieces of paper at RA, and then walked back to wherever she was sitting. the band didn’t stop or anything, but still. a couple of songs later the girl walks up the left aisle again and throws another crumpled piece of paper at RA. she made it behind his on stage monitors this time, which she exuberantly celebrated. she made it back to a seat, and then security said something to her. why didn’t they kick her ass out the first time it happened? i don’t know if she got kicked out, and i read later that she was throwing roses, but it could have been anything, and i thought security totally dropped the ball.