12/20/1999 Splender, 5head (Rochester, NY @ Milestones)
By Eric | December 20, 1999 11:59 pm
Much like with the Watchmen, after seeing Splender at Edgefest and buying the CD, we got to see them in a tiny club in Rochester. This was a charity show as well; we brought a couple cans of soup for the food bank. Local ska-ish band 5head was on first, and they put on an energetic set. A good primer for the night.
Splender came out and played a great show, played just about everything off of Halfway Down The Sky, and presumably sounded good doing it. I say presumably, because this was the wrong show to forget wearing earplugs to. They were way, way, way too loud. We could barely hear Waymon Boone’s vocals over the guitars. Otherwise it was great time, and we even got to meet the band after the show. They came out, I got the CD signed, and one of the guys in the band remarked “I saw you singing everything, even ‘Cigarette’!! No one knows that song!”. So that was a nice little ego trip to cap off the night haha.
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Tags: 1999, 5head, Milestones, rochester, Splender
12/07/1999 Oleander, Staind, Shelia Divine (Buffalo, NY @ Sideshow Music Hall)
By Eric | December 7, 1999 11:59 pm
Two Edge charity shows in a row! This show was roughly a month after the infamous OLP “turkey show”, and while there was a donation involved with getting these tickets as well, the story wasn’t nearly as involved… Mary and I simply donated to Toys for Tots and got our tickets that way. This show was also the first time we’d seen Staind since meeting them outside of Showplace that prior May. As if that “meeting the band” experience wasn’t cool enough, this time we got there pretty early, and along with maybe one or two other people chatted with Aaron Lewis for a good 20 minutes or so, even walking to the convenience store across the street from the venue with him! Staind still wasn’t huge yet (they’d played Family Values 1999, but Outside hadn’t been released yet), so that sort of thing could still happen!
Once inside, we got through the Shelia Devine (I was never really a fan of them), and then it was time for Staind. I recall them playing everything off of Dysfunction, and just generally sounding great. We were right at the barrier so we got some great pictures as well as generally going nuts. There were plenty more people there to see Staind this time around than at Showplace, so that made for a better atmosphere as well.
The night’s headliner was Oleander, and we were pretty excited to see them for a full set, up close and personal, versus the huge stage playing 5 songs to people that couldn’t care less as the first opener on the Creed/OLP tour that we saw in Syracuse. I have no idea on the setlist, but I’m guessing it was probably all of February Son. Guitarist/lead singer Tom Flowers played the intro to I Walk Alone while he was literally inches from our faces, as we’d been singing along all night. That helped out later, after the set, as we got recognized, chatted with and got autographs from Doug (the bass player) and Rick (the guitarist). Another super fun show in an era full of them!
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Oleander, Shelia Divine, Sideshow Music Hall, Staind
11/17/1999 Our Lady Peace, Velour (Buffalo, NY @ Showplace Theater)
By Eric | November 17, 1999 11:59 pm
This show is one of my all-time favorite concert stories, and it has much more to do with obtaining the tickets, rather than the show itself. And the show was nothing to sneeze at!
So in order to get tickets to this one, the Edge was asking people donate turkeys to the food pantry by taking them to a “secret” location, which was announced right when the ticket giveaway started. Mary and I bought two frozen turkeys the night before, and so I had two turkeys (two tickets) in the trunk, and drove into Buffalo at like 8 in morning from Rochester… only have the DJ’s be bastards and tell us they’d announce the location at 1pm! AARGH! (Thank God it was a day with no classes!) I milled around town for a couple hours, and then went to my strategic starting point, the Wegmans parking lot on Amherst St. in Buffalo. Close to the 198, so I could hit either the 90 or the 190 in a quick hurry. So they announce that the turkeys would be collected at… Delaware Park, on the corner of Parkside and the 198! SCORE! I seriously couldn’t have been any closer. I rushed over and got my tickets, I think I was the 6th or 7th person there.
Fast forward three days. The show rolls around, we get there super early and got to talk to Jamie Edwards (the touring guitar/keyboard player) for a good long time, and then Raine parks his BMW right behind my car (adorned with 2 or 3 OLP stickers at the time, mind you)!! I was getting something out of the car, and he walks by, and I’m like “Hey Raine, what’s up?”. So that was something new, and I can’t say that anything like that has happened to me since! So we finally get inside, get a barrier spot, and watch a great show… We got to hear a couple more of the tunes off of Happiness live (we’d seen OLP open for Creed about a month before in Syracuse) Raine was a little sick, so the set was a touch short, but the band sounded great, and to see OLP at a place that small at that point in time (little did we know about the Tralf two years later) was like a jackpot for us. Our favorite concert nemesis Velour actually went on *after* OLP, so we heard half of one song and split.
Setlist:
Happiness & the Fish
Naveed
Superman’s Dead
Automatic Flowers
Potato Girl
Is Anybody Home?
The Birdman
Blister
Consequence of Laughing
Lying Awake
Starseed
One Man Army
Clumsy
4am
Stealing Babies
Encore:
Waited
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Our Lady Peace, Showplace Theater, Velour
10/08/1999 Creed, Our Lady Peace, Oleander (Syracuse, NY @ The OnCenter)
By Eric | October 8, 1999 11:59 pm
This show was a huge triple threat for us at the time. Mary and I were nuts for OLP, we really liked the Oleander album a lot, and Creed had just put out Human Clay and were one of the biggest bands in the country (and Scott Stapp hadn’t alienated everyone yet!). As college students with favorable class schedules, we got to the arena around 3:30 in the afternoon to try and meet the bands. And meet the bands we did! Tom Flowers, the lead singer of Oleander walked past us a couple of times, and we didn’t realize it was him because he looked nothing like the picture in the February Son liner notes! We met Rick and Doug from Oleander a bit later and when we asked them to apologize for us, they chuckled, saying the record company actually made them re-shoot some promo photos because of it! They also hooked us up with a couple of stickers, so that was pretty cool. We met everyone from OLP, spending the most time with Mike Turner, especially talking about the Clumsy Congress, but all of the guys were fantastically nice to us. We even met the Creed guys for half a second, Mark Tremonti was probably the nicest of the bunch. I also remember them all wearing these really nifty Maple Leafs varsity jackets.
So the show! We finally got inside, and I don’t think we ever went to our real seats (probably 15-20 rows back I think). I’ve never been fond of seats on the floor at an arena, but Syracuse has a law regarding it. We were pretty far back for Oleander’s set, which was about half of the album. Enjoyed it, but not as much as we would have up front. Given other setlists from this tour we most likely saw Where Were You Then?, Shrinking the Blob, Stupid, I Walk Alone, Why I’m Here, Down When I’m Loaded.
For OLP, we’d be a little more determined, and somehow, some way, we managed to get to the front barrier as OLP started (I still don’t know how we did it) for our first live glimpse of some of the Happiness songs. We had our usual raucous time up front, and got some good pictures.
OLP Setlist:
Automatic Flowers
Is Anybody Home?
Superman’s Dead
Waited
Lying Awake
Naveed
Clumsy
Stealing Babies
One Man Army
Starseed
We ended up milling around the arena, bouncing from row to row for Creed (there was no way we’d get barrier again, they started cracking down for the headliner!). They sounded really, really good, and we had a great time during their set. They played a lot of the “rock” songs still, without getting too bogged down in the sappy ballads until the end. It was a pretty decent mix of old and new songs as well.
Are You Ready?
Ode
Torn
Beautiful
Illusion
Say I
Wrong Way
My Own Prison
Wash Away Those Years
Unforgiven
What If
With Arms Wide Open
Faceless Man
What’s This Life For?
Encore:
One
Higher
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Tags: 1999, Creed, Oleander, Our Lady Peace, Syracuse, The OnCenter
10/01/1999 The Watchmen, Caroline’s Spine (Rochester, NY @ Milestones)
By Eric | October 1, 1999 11:59 pm
After seeing them at Edgefest, and subsequently obtaining Silent Radar, Mary and I figured we should probably go see The Watchmen since they were playing a tiny place in Rochester. Starting things off, Caroline’s Spine impressed the hell out out of us! We had never even heard of them, and we were captivated for their whole set. “Attention Please” had only been released for about two months, so I’d imagine the set was heavy on those tunes. Then The Watchmen played an amazing show, and despite only knowing the Silent Radar songs, we had a great time. Brighter Hell was definitely a highlight, and they closed with Stereo.
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Tags: 1999, Caroline's Spine, Milestones, rochester, The Watchmen
08/29/1999 103.3 WEDG Edgefest: Econoline Crush, Splender, The Watchmen, Showoff, Shades Apart (Buffalo, NY @ LaSalle Park)
By Eric | August 29, 1999 11:59 pm
Ahh, the illustrious Buffalo Edgefest. For a couple years, LaSalle Park was the place to be every summer, as the Edge would usually get at least a couple bands I’d want to see. This year Econoline Crush was the big draw for us. Upon our arrival, Splender was first up, and we were fairly impressed by them. For only knowing “Yeah, Whatever”, we liked what we heard of the rest of the set. The girls thought the bass player was hot, and also thought their guitar player looked like Trevor Hurst from EC. Showoff was okay, a typical punk-pop band from that era. We saw Shades Apart on the other stage while waiting for EC, they were okay too, even though most people (like me) only knew Stranger By The Day at that point. Then, Econoline Crush came up, and it was “the return of Trevor”, who was supposedly in his finest “liquid sex” form that day, according to the ladies. EC played an awesome set (couldn’t tell you what they played, unfortunately). We had met Ziggy before the show, and then met the whole band at the autograph tent; Mary got a picture with Trevor. We caught most of the Watchmen’s set while in line for autographs, and we were impressed by them as well.
Apparently Kottonmouth Kings, The Verve Pipe and Moby were on this bill also. Totally forgot about that, totally didn’t see them.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Econoline Crush, Edgefest, LaSalle Park, Shades Apart, Showoff, Splender, The Watchmen
08/13/1999 Eve6, Velour (Buffalo, NY @ Sideshow Music Hall)
By Eric | August 13, 1999 11:59 pm
While I was never the biggest Eve6 fan in the world, a free show is a free show. Coke was running a promotion called IYDKYDG (If You Don’t Know, You Don’t Go), and I forgot what hoops we had to jump through to get the tickets, but it wasn’t much. I do remember the sideshow being a sauna, and our first grade trio of myself, Sara and Joe G. being the ones that went. This was our second run-in with Velour, and again we thought they were terrible.
We thought the crowd was terrible too. Not sure if it was the Eve6 fan base, or just in general, but there were many failed attempts at crowdsurfing, the mosh pits were fairly lame as well. As for the show, Eve6 seemed to be having a great time playing up the “rock star” persona, and they sounded decent too. According to an old MTV article I found, Max Collins, the singer, had recently had surgery to remove nodes on his vocal cords, so this was only the 4th show back on the road for them. I have no idea what they played, but considering they only had the one album out at the time, I’ve got to assume they played close to the whole thing.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Eve6, Sideshow Music Hall, Velour
07/02/1999 Friendship Festival: The Tea Party, Esthero, BTK (Fort Erie, ONT @ Mather Arch Park)
By Eric | July 2, 1999 11:59 pm
The Friendship Festival was always one of those shows that we anticipated going to, and then wondered why we anticipated it so much. We’d always love one or two of the bands that would play, but the venue was never the greatest. For a couple years it was held at the Mather Arch in Fort Erie, and it was a cluster every time. Hard to get to, everyone packed in like sardines, and since it was free, EVERYONE showed up. Usually just to get drunk and party (it’s a holiday weekend after all), but it made life a little difficult for those of us who were “all about the music” back then and wanted to be up front.
I don’t recall who the first band on was, but we were pretty much crushed all through the first three sets. Literally and figuratively couldn’t move. I’d seen BTK and Esthero both at Summersault the summer before, so they were good enough as openers. Don’t recall a whole lot about their sets, however.
Unfortunately, when The Tea Party came out, so did the idiots. The aforementioned drunks slobbering, spilling and creating the usual festival beer garden-type mayhem. At one point, Mary got a whole beer spilled on her, so that about sums up how our night went, crowd-wise. The band’s set was excellent; Triptych wasn’t even a month old, so this was our first time hearing Heaven Coming Down and Great Big Lie in the live settings, and according to Jeff Martin it was the first time ever for The Halcyon Days. Listening back to the bootleg, that song was a bit different from how they’d end up playing it in the future, as there was no Zahira intro, and he actually hit the high notes in the chorus. Beyond those three, it was a typical set, but with some cool inserts as they threw some Jeff Buckley, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie covers in. So the show itself was fantastic, but the crowd was a bit of a bummer.
Hooray for the internet! Someone posted a bootleg of the show on Guitars101.com along with the setlist:
01 Drums [Intro]
02 Temptation
03 Army Ants
04 Fire In The Head
05 Psychopomp
06 Great Big Lie
07 The Bazaar
08 Halcyon Days
09 Release
10 Save Me > Last Goodbye (Jeff Buckley) > Save Me
11 Voodoo Child (Jimi Hendrix) > The River > Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin) > The River
12 Heaven Coming Down
13 Winter Solstice
14 Sister Awake > Temptation (New Order) > Heroes (David Bowie) > Sister Awake
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Tags: 1999, BTK, Esthero, Fort Erie, Friendship Festival, Mather Arch Park, The Tea Party
05/07/1999 Staind (Buffalo, NY @ Showplace Theater)
By Eric | May 7, 1999 11:59 pm
This was the first time seeing Staind while actually knowing all the songs, and hands down it’s still my favorite Staind show.
I was on the Staind bandwagon fairly early. Between seeing them open for Limp Bizkit (which I didn’t really remember), seeing them open for Kid Rock a month before this, and then buying Dysfunction the day it was released (about three weeks before this show), I was pretty excited to see them and actually know the material. We got there fairly early, and once inside, Mary and I were two of like maybe five, ten people tops there who even knew who Staind was. Not that there were many people there yet, period. I guess Monster Magnet fans were latecomers, not that it mattered to us. Once Staind started I think we made it pretty obvious that we were there to see them, rocking out to each song. I don’t have the exact setlist, but for a lot of the Dysfunction tour they didn’t switch it up much, so I’m assuming we saw:
A Flat
Mudshovel
Spleen
Suffocate
Crawl
Just Go
Raw
They sounded great, and we had a blast. Aaron Lewis was still finding his on-stage persona, I recall a lot of wandering back and forth across the stage, and standing sideways kinda facing the wall. The rest of the guys were very energetic though, and made for a great show.
If the show was good, the aftermath was even better. During set-change, and after buying our inaugural Staind shirts (I think I topped out at 8 or 9 at one point!) we saw Mike come out to the bar, told him we loved the show and asked for an autograph. He did us one better, invited us to come talk outside, and we ended up chatting with the entire band out by the bus for probably a half hour, just the two of us! All four guys, Mike, Jon, Old-School and Aaron, were awesome, very personable, as interested in what we had to say as we were in them. I think the fact that we were college engineering students may have had something to do with that, as we found out that Mike had been working towards an electrical engineering degree! Since this was right around Mother’s Day, as we talked to the other three band members, Aaron was on the phone with his mom, but when he was done, he was amazingly nice to us as well. Being that this was very early on in their major label career, they seemed happy that anyone recognized the songs, or them for that matter. As for me, this just solidified my love of the band and they were easily my favorite band all through college.
Needless to say, we didn’t end up going back in to see Monster Magnet, and we really didn’t care. This show is still one of my more treasured concert memories!
I found a YouTube video of a show from a week later, so this is pretty much exactly what we saw! (I don’t think we got Home or Me, but regardless…)
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Showplace Theater, Staind
05/01/1999 Sugar Ray, Orgy, Run-DMC (Buffalo, NY @ SUNY Buffalo)
By Eric | May 1, 1999 11:59 pm
This was a free show put on by UB, and was actually part of the MTV campus invasion tour. Needless to say, there were TONS of people packed into Baird Point. Sara, Danielle, Mary and I waited in what seemed like the longest line ever to get through metal detectors, but then A) I found an RIT buddy that let us jump in and cut half the line, and B) Run-DMC started playing while we were in line and a bunch of people skipped out of line to go sit on the big hill and watch. We finally got in and caught the remainder of Run-DMC’s set. I remember everyone was ripping on Run-DMC for some reason, I thought they were cool as hell! These are rap legends we’re talking about! Not that I knew the entire catalog or anything, but certainly the hits. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently Run-DMC played early so they could get to a second gig later that day, and Orgy wasn’t quite ready. More than an hour later (or so it felt like), they finally got out there.
Orgy came out, and the place got nuts, Sara got kicked in the head by a crowd surfer, and we moved off to the back and the side for the rest of the day. Orgy played a good set, I still didn’t recognize too much besides Blue Monday and Stitches, Judging from other sets from this era, I’d say we probably saw Dissention, Gender, Fetisha, Stitches, Pantomime, and Blue Monday.
Sugar Ray came out, and it wasn’t the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen. They were decent, but 19-year old me wasn’t really into it. Of course, they played Fly and Every Morning, I think they opened with RPM, and maybe they played Mean Machine, couldn’t tell you much more than that. They brought up two kids to freestyle rap, and both kids sucked. Badly. Mark McGrath kept saying how he was so sexy and whatnot. In other words, its a good thing this one was free.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Orgy, Run-DMC, Sugar Ray, SUNY Buffalo