A couple of weeks ago, my brother mentioned that Imagine Dragons were playing in Worcester and seemed interested in going, so I offered to buy him a ticket for his birthday.
On the day of the concert, I picked up a couple of pizzas from Pizza Roma on the way to get Mike in Watertown. We chowed in his sparsely decorated living room with the cats and then hit the road.
Nico Vega was playing when we got to our seats. Nobody was all that into them. The Naked and Famous played next. I really like and enjoyed these New Zealanders. They were awesome. Here's a playlist of my favorites.
When Imagine Dragons came out the crowd was amped and people on the floor were going bananas, but the people in the seats were still sitting. I stood up and nobody else in our section joined me. A few years back I saw Green Day at the Garden with Johnny G and the words Billy Joe Armstrong opened the set with pretty much sum up my concert philosophy "get the fuck up! This ain't your living room." Eventually, people got up.
After the Dragons first song Mike says "so far this is unbelievable!" He was drinking Bud heavies at a solid pace and he had had more to drink than everyone surrounding us, combined, so I enjoyed his enthusiasm.
The lead singer of Imagine Dragons was a total cheeseball. I did a lot of eye-rolling at his cliched antics. Despite this, I was still anticipating the Radioactive performance.
Radioactive stood out to me during summer '013, and the more I heard it the more I liked it. I listened to it quite often on my road trip out West and it made my Gems from Road Trip playlist. Radioactive is an epic hard pop song with primal drums beats and chanting. It was my favorite performance at the Grammys this year with Kendrick Lamar.
Radioactive seems to be about facing your personal struggle. It's an empowering song about breaking free of something that controls you and the lyrics seem to support that idea "checking out of the prison bus". The lines "this is it, the apocalypse" and "it's a revolution" symbolize the transformation of perspective and awareness needed to change the direction of one's life - a creative destruction to break the chains of the past that brings the dawning of a new age of freedom and opportunity. Radioactive is their best song because it celebrates the only true freedom we can hope for in life - to escape the prison's of one's own mind.
It was amazing performed live. So good that I left immediately after it to get the car and let Mike stay for the encore.
I had somewhat of a moral dilemma in the parking garage. The garage was so busy that I sat in the same place on a down ramp for a half hour and during that time everyone from the concert filled up the parked cars on the ramp. I'm usually very patient and I like to be a team player when it comes to parking and traffic, but I had just skipped the encore to establish positioning in the garage, it was getting late, and I didn't expect it to be this slow, so I didn't let any of these people out of their spots. Not to mention Mike was lost and his phone was dead and he was freezing his ass off somewhere because it was bone-chillingly cold. A man's game charges a man's price.
Mike loved the concert and I enjoyed it, so it was a good night. I dropped him off in Watertown and then stopped at McDonald's for an extra medium orange Hi-C. The sweetness nourished me as I drifted north. I turned up Bedtime Magic and let Jewel folk me gently.
