I’m no longer tired and my feet feel fine, so here’s some more on the Stripes show: It’s been a while since I’ve been to anything like a large concert (not that Roseland can really be called a large concert venue), and I’d forgotten what it’s like to mingle with Serious Fans. Because Roseland is entirely general admission, I figured I would try to show up early enough to get more or less to the front - I’m just under 5′6″, so if I get stuck in the middle of the floor there’s no way I’m seeing more than the backs of other people’s heads. However, having taken the time printed on the tickets for the actual show time (which it was not) rather than the door time (which it was), I turned out to be dramatically early, early enough that I was perhaps only ten people back from the front of the line outside Roseland, and smack in the middle of some very serious fans indeed. One pair, a mother and daughter, had come from California to NYC for the week because there were three Stripes shows here on consecutive nights - they bought tickets for all three on eBay and made a vacation of it. The mother was very Jack-focused, and gave me (whether I wanted it or not) an update on the past six months of his love life and haircut. The daughter, a sophomore in high school, was more of a Meg fan, but still had several anecdotes that involved waiting around outside venues until one in the morning and getting to actually touch one or both of them.

As this was only my second show, the first one being that free performance they did in Union Square last October, I was distinctly in the front-of-the-line minority, but everyone else assured me that I was still nonetheless a Serious Fan for having shown up four hours early, and allowed me to share umbrella space when it started to rain about forty five minutes before door. (I didn’t tell them that I’d only meant to show up an hour and a half early.) Once actually inside, of course, we had two opening bands to sit through. I don’t even know who the first was, but after them we had Whirlwind Heat. I’m not a fan, exactly, but they were certainly entertaining, and better than I expected.

The White Stripes show itself was fantastic, although the atmosphere was distinctly different from that of the outdoor show last year - there was less between-song conversation, for one thing, and I think the crowd’s energy was beginning to wane by the time they went on - but they’re still better live than (almost) any other band I’ve seen in recent history. I haven’t been able to dig up a complete set list yet, but they did most of Elephant and a healthy portion of the earlier stuff - Death Letter was great, of course, and Hello Operator might be the best song in the world. I ended up being able to see perfectly, being front and center behind nobody except a girl who couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall. And at least this time I didn’t get a horrible sunburn.