tortoise / beans / fourtet
16-04-2004
capital city music hall, ottawa
(when i get back to the alter-reality, something else will appear in this space.)
i was not at this show, but i was at the ottawa show on the 16th of april, a week prior.
the biggest thing i remember about this show is that the crowd was absurdly flaky. it wasn't billed as a tortoise concert, so much as it was billed as an "exclaim party", so it was fully of preppy hipster bourgeois poseur losers that were there to "network" and cared more about fitting in and being seen than about the band that was playing. you could actually barely hear the band playing over the buzz of useless socializing. and, i lost my no-good girlfriend to the crowd, once again - which i found particularly annoying, because i fucking hate that type of person. it took a few more months to literally happen, but i finally mentally dumped her when i saw how positively she interacted with a type of person i have nothing but contempt for, and realized i was literally sleeping with the enemy and rationalizing my way through it. a mirror was held up, and i saw her for what she really was: painfully normal. i left her there, both figuratively and literally; i walked home by myself, in disgust.
the set was shorter than the louisville show, but longer than the werchter show that follows in the setlist. it's not that they were having sound issues, it's that the "audience" wasn't interested in the band. they clearly cut the set off due to crowd noise, and then blamed it on technical difficulties.
it was a bad concert, all around - and the reason everybody always skipped ottawa, for years.
that said, you can only blame the crowd to a certain point - it was what it was. i suppose you could make the argument that tortoise probably wouldn't have placed ottawa as a high priority stop, and only made the trip to ottawa in the first place because they were brought in by exclaim. but, the band clearly would have been better off playing a slightly smaller venue as a billed act as they would have avoided the fucking hipsters that way.