So by pure dumb luck, I got a hold of two tickets to Wilco and Okkervil River at Red Rocks last night, for a very reasonable price that I could actually afford (somewhere around $1500 for both of them, I think). Anyway, here is the full story.

We arrived late because of dinner plans I had made before I knew I was going to the show, and the parking situation was ridiculous. We ended up taking the easy route and parking about a mile away and hiking up to the show. We arrived to see the last two songs by Okkervil River (pictured) who are amazing and I was pretty bummed we missed their whole show, but hey at least we made it Red Rocks. They also played three of my favorite songs (we heard the first one on the walk up there), John Allyn Smith Sails, Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe, and Unless It’s Kicks. During the last song, lead singer Will Sheff even did a little spiel about getting everybody pumped for Wilco and even had some (ad-libbed?) lyrics for it about being at Red Rocks and such. Pretty cool.

Then after everybody was pumped for Wilco, there was about an hour break.

Courtesy of the on-screen trivia thing, we learned that the two rocks surrounding the ampitheater are called Ship Rock and Creation Rock, apparently the first one pictured is Ship and the second one is Creation. We found this odd because we thought that Creation Rock looked more like a ship and Ship Rock looked more like God.

Anyway, on to Wilco. Let me start off by saying that Wilco has never been one of my top 5 favorite bands, I would even go so far as to rank Okkervil River above Wilco (but not by much). This is not to say I don’t enjoy Wilco, I love their music and I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Jeff Tweedy, especially after reading a pretty cool interview in Chuck Klosterman’s IV, in which he comes off as an all-around awesome person. It’s just that I didn’t know the names of a lot of the songs they played (something I have trouble with at almost every concert) so don’t ask me about that.

They had probably the most bizzare intro I’ve ever seen. After the sun went down and all but the stage lights went off, The Price Is Right theme song started playing and two guys dressed in a camel suit sauntered onto the stage and they broke into the title track from their new album, “Wilco (the song)” on “Wilco (the album)” by Wilco (the band). Something I find hilarious for some reason. “There’s a camel on the cover of their newest album” I explained to my companion who wasn’t familiar with Wilco at all. She remained confused.

Anyway they went on to play a lot more awesome songs. The songs I know the names of were “I’m Trying To Break Your Heart”, “Impossible Germany”, “Hate It Here”, and a few others that I knew the names of but can’t remember today. They also played a lot of songs I didn’t know the names of, but sounded familiar. One highlight of these songs were one where the guitarist (Nels Cline, I believe) switched between a tiny steel guitar he had on his lap and another guitar, then switched positions and played the little guitar upright for a little riff, then switched back. It was all very impressive and Tweedy remarked after the song “A beautiful Friday night for some baroque pop” which left most of the audience confused as to what “baroque” meant.

Another highlight of these songs was one sort-of harder song with a really cool guitar riff that went “bah BAH BUH bah BUH bah buh” or something like that, I just remember that it made me dance a little bit, which is impressive.

Here are the non-musical highlights:

• It was an insanely beautiful night. Perfect weather, and after the sun went down and Wilco went on you could see multiple fireworks displays throughout the Denver area as well as two storm cells in the great distance that were producing some amazing lightning.
• The crowd was pretty good, the only time I heard people singing along was when they were obviously prompted to by the band. The only bad part was there was a really drunk guy next to me who felt the need to hug me multiple times and make nonsensical comments to me.
• While promoting some $5 tour programs, Tweedy decided to throw three of them into the audience. Unfortunately paper booklets don’t fly very well and none of them made it to the actual audience. When the audience asked for one more, he said he didn’t have any and asked if they wanted a Glenn Kotche wristband. The wristband also failed to make it to the actual audience.
• Later Tweedy asked the audience why there were so many people at the concert “Did somebody post something on Twitter about it?” and later remarked that “Tweedy doesn’t Twitter”. I was going to remark that it would be funnier and more accurate if it was “Tweedy doesn’t tweet”, but I decided I didn’t want to look like that big of a nerd

This was the closest picture of Wilco I could get with my crappy camera phone (sorry, Lee)