Travels with FatCatAir

Wednesday October 26, 2005

Cream - better late than never

I just got back from an extravagence, a day trip to NYC in order to see a reunion concert of Cream. They had played four concerts back in May at the Albert Hall and the DVD of those shows came out recently. I got a copy of the DVD in early October and found that they were now going to do three shows at Madison Square Garden on October 24-26. I've seen Clapton quite a few times (including the infamous West Palm Beach rainout) but I never expected I'd get a chance to see a Cream reunion.

Naturally the shows were all sold out. So I was forced to go to a "ticket broker".  I have often bought tickets the day of the show from people stuck with extra tickets or amateur scalpers but this didn't seem like a good show to expect this to work out. ( A friend of mine and I usually rate shows as 5 dollar shows or 10 dollar shows, etc. based on what we hope we can get in for. When the Stones played in Raleigh in around '95 we rated it as a $5 show. I was happy to get in for that until I found that Mark managed to get someone to give him a ticket).

So I investigated the online brokers and the tickets and prices they had available. For only $4000 I could have a second row seat! I think not. After much debating and looking at seating charts ( the Garden has a great chart that lets you see the view from the section you are in based on how the event is set up) my wife and I decided on section 310. Now the only worry was if the tickets showed up and if they were legitimate. I was talking with my younger brother Dave about how much we had to pay for these seat and he reminded me of when he went to the Masters and bought a scalped practice round ticket for $175 and then the day was cancelled because of rain and he had a useless ticket. Even though the tickets we were getting were more expensive I was feeling better about it.

We flew into NYC around noon and expected to spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When we got there we found that it was closed on Mondays! So much for that plan. So we mostly just wandered around. We stopped by the Garden to see where exactly we had to go in and found that they were already selling programs and other paraphrenalia. So we got our stuff then instead of having to carry it around later. If the tickets turned out to be fake we could at least pretend we got in.

Show  time was 8pm. In order to make it seem like the old days it didn't start on time. However it wasn't as bad as it used to be, where you might have the concert start an hour or more late and have interminable stage changes, they only kept us waiting for half an hour.  They started out with "I'm so Glad". As soon as the lights went out the smells of the '60s filled the place. Unlike the 60's it only lasted a couple of songs. Apparently the potency is strong enough now that you don't need to keep them burning all concert long. Either that or it's too expensive. One thing that was funny was the guy sitting just in front of me lit up and the guy two seats over leaned over and told him to stop or he'd call security. The 60's are surely dead. :-)

I had been saying to my wife before the concert that I hoped that they added "Tales of Brave Ulysses" to the set list. Sure enough they played it! After it was over Clapton noted that it was the first time it have ever been played live. I'm (so) glad they picked up on my mental vibrations.

The show was just great.  Except for the addition of "Tales ..." the set list was identical to that on the DVD, down to Ginger Baker's joke about Pressed Rat and Warthog re-opening their shop, so you can get a good idea of what it was like by checking it out.

Oct 26 2005, 04:30:31 PM EDT Permalink