Back in May bunny_hugger noticed that Walk The Moon was going to return to Detroit in their current tour. This would bring them to our area in mid-September so now you know how far behind I'm still writing. They were playing on a class day, of course, so
bunny_hugger cancelled her evening classes in order to attend a concert and she kind of hoped that some of her students would ask so she could tell them. Better, she kind of hoped that we'd run into some of her students at the concert. We weren't that lucky.
We also had some trouble finding the venue, one which had years ago been a punk music place where one of bunny_hugger's friends went when she was a teen. The main point was as we finally approached the satellite navigator was telling us to look for Chrysler Road (or something like that), which I noticed was of course tucked between Ford Field and what I called the GM building. It wasn't really near either of them, and someone who actually thought about it might have called ``the GM building'' the Renaissance Plaza like it's actually named. (Well, it's a skyscraper with a huge GM on it.) Since the highway signs didn't say anything about Chrysler, either, the result was our getting lost and needing a couple go-rounds to get where we meant to go. (That there were a couple of downpours as we drove out didn't help matters, and did help clot traffic up.)
The hall had, decades ago, been a ballroom and still had the basic layout for that. We went up the stairs to see what the balcony was like and ended up staying there for the whole show. This was a great spot to look from since the band and for that matter the whole floor was unobstructed viewing, and we could get great views of everyone performing and various special effects like the cloud of soap bubbles dispersed mid-show. In trade, the people gathered on the balcony weren't into dancing or making nearly as much noise as the main floor, so we looked out of place with bunny_hugger dancing and me lurching about in something putatively inspired by the beat. Also people with very serious cameras kept lining up beside me to rest against the railing and take photographs.
The show was great, as we'd anticipated, with Walk The Moon trying out two songs that haven't been released yet. One of them had a pleasant British New Wave-y sound that bunny_hugger couldn't help noticing, particularly since her Trevor Horn glasses have been taken up by the band's lead singer and, in consequence, an increasing number of concertgoers. She was wearing her hipster glasses well before the hipsters were, though.
bunny_hugger said she couldn't think of which song they might have left for the encore, which I had assumed was her being sly even though I gave the answer (``Jenny''). She hadn't been joking, though; she'd just missed that was the canonical Walk The Moon song they hadn't got to yet.
A couple days later bunny_hugger noticed the band apparently tweeting from Jackson, Michigan; they almost certainly typoed the postal abbreviation for Mississippi, based on their itinerary. They don't seem to be scheduled to get back to reasonable visiting range of Lansing soon; Walk The Moon might just be too big to play in places like the Loft anymore.
Trivia: Around 1892 the Pinkerton Agency could assemble a force of 30,000 armed men, a force larger than the standing army of the United States. Source: The World That Never Was: A True Story Of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents, Alex Butterworth.
Currently Reading: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding.
PS: The Big Zero, following up on the main point proved in ``Split Lines'' last week.