Massive Attack Writeup September 18
Alicia and I had a pretty busy weekend. On Friday, we went had contemporary Indian cuisine at this place in Addison called Clay Pit. The food is good, but somewhat americanized. I assume this is the contemporary part of it. After that we went home got to bed fairly early since our week had been quite long and hectic.
On Saturday afternoon we went to The Oktober Fest beer tasting at the Gingerman. We had planned to go to a meditation meetup event, but that had been canceled. It worked for the better since Alicia had not slept well the night before so she was able to get some nap time. I have really enjoyed the other beer tastings there. This tasting was a little different, basically instead of an organized tasting as the other one are, this one was a festival style where you got tasting tickets. Some of the beers were really good. The Lowenbrau clearly was not up to stuff. I am not sure why this guy was one the tasting. I prefer the organized tasting they usually do, but the Oktober Festival was fun, but very very muggy. After the tasting Alicia and I went home and cleaned up. My Dad had made an unplanned trip to Dallas. They were at my step-sister’s house in McKinney. We went out there late and had dinner.
On Sunday we went to Ikea and I got a new entertainment center to replace the modular one that I got a few years ago. With the modular one you could not move without it falling apart. My plan is replace the carpet in the back bedrooms upstairs in the next few weeks and then put together the entertainment center when the carpet is laid. I found a couple of desk ideas at Ikea too. I want to replace the existing once it takes up a lot of room and does not offer much in the way of storage. I am going to hold off getting one till I we get the office switched to the other room.
After Ikea we drove down to 121 to go to Fry’s in Irving or Coppell. I have no idea which city it is in. We stopped at Home Depot and ended up getting a Weber Silver Genesis grill for a really good price. The only catch is it is a natural gas model so I called Weber and ordered a conversion kit. It added another 70 dollars to the price, but it was still cheaper than the regularly priced version. Alicia loves to grill so she was very excited about our purchase. Getting the assembled grill into the car proved to be a challenge, but we were finally able to get it in with the entertainment center that I got at Ikea. At Fry’s I got some batteries that I needed so it was nothing exciting there.
Later that night we went to Nextstage to go to the Massive Attack show. It is funny since Muse is playing there tomorrow night. The show was good. The music was very mellow which was to be expected from them. The crowd size was fairly small. This illustrates a big gap in the Dallas area concert venues. Nextstage holds 6,350. The next size down from that I know of is Gypsy Tea Room which I believe holds around 1100. That’s a big gap. There used to be The Bronco Bowl which I think held around 5,000, but that was torn down about three years ago. There has been an alarming downward trend on the number of concert venues the past few years in Dallas. Deep Ellum Live, Trees, and Bronco Bowl have all closed. Club Da-da fortunately reopened after being closed for a year. I hope we see a reversal of the closing trend.
Anyway back to the concert. There was no surprisingly no pit for this show. We had fourth row seats, but those soon turned into tenthish row as the crowed move up against the barricade. I had never seen Massive Attack before. They announced this was their first trip Texas. We can thank Austin City Limits for getting them here so hopefully they will come back. They used a total for four different vocalists which is an interesting concept. The vocalist I enjoyed the most was done by Elizabeth Fraser who used to be in Cocteau Twins. She has a phenomenal voice that vaguely reminds me of Sinead O’Connor. You can hear her here. It was a very good show that unfortunately only lasted 90 minutes which is disappointing since there was not an opening act. They did have an opening DJ that was playing some very good music, but I go a concert to see live music and a 90 minute set with no opening act is not quite enough.