What follows will be be a series of posts about my experience at the AC/DC concert. One of these posts will include photos, just not this one because I forgot my flash drive at home this morning.


The Concert

I don't have a lot of experience with attending rock concerts. I've been to dozens, to hundreds, but I've always been in the back. I've always been an employee at these shows, and not a patron. Its not even the same experience. Yes, you still hear the music. Sure you still see the lights. But there's some intangible quality to being /in/ the crowd that changes it for you.

AC/DC is one of those bands that just transcends time. What are these guys, like 50 now? Yet they came on stage and in minutes they had the crowd. Just had us. I was into the show before the first song was done. I've been to a few shows as a patron and you had to warm into it a couple of songs. Not with this one. Bang! The show starts and you're connected with the music.

I wish I could rattle off from you the set list. I wish I could but frankly I don't have the memory for that. Its all just one melodic blur. I remember some of my favorites were played. The did 'Dirty Deeds' and 'Hells Bells'. They played 'Rock'n'Roll Train' early. Now that I think about it, I think it was first. Actually, a lot of the songs they did were from the new album. It was as if they mixed a new one with an old favorite, so you couldn't mark the difference from one's you knew by heard, from one's that weren't familiar yet.

I've never been to an open air concert. It was a little different. The sound was perfect. There wasn't a scratch to it at all. Sometimes a rock show is loud, and seems loud, and you know it. But this was loud but you didn't notice it. I wasn't even aware of how loud it was until they finally quit, and there was no more music, and I realized I was partially deaf!

It just flowed, and flowed and flowed. The whole show was seemless. Effortless. And you could tell that it was ending. All good things eventually do. But it kinda felt like the band was almost more reluctant to quit than the audience was to let them go. Before the actual encore, Angus did this guitar solo that had to have went on for 20 minutes at least. He played to the wings. He played down the center. He played onto a rising platform with strobe lights going off. It was crazy epic. Then he played to the centre of the stage, over the drums and you thought it might be over. You feared it might be over. Then a boom went off and they played more. I cheered and screamed and I had no conscious thought about doing it.

When it ended, and it had to end I guess, they let us go with a bang. We had fireworks and explosions and a fantastic send off to captivate the end of a phenomenal rock show. They'll talk about this one for awhile and I am one of the people that can say, I was there.