"Heaven"

The consensus is that Heaven, the new album from The Walkmen, is about “grown- up-hood”. In fact they’ve eliminated any ambiguity by using photos of themselves with their wives and children in the album’s artwork and for promotional purposes. I was lucky enough (and simultaneously unlucky – I’ll explain later) to have gotten my copy of the record early by pre-ordering but still, the feeling I believe Heaven was meant to convey didn’t really hit home for me until I saw The Walkmen play their Bowery Ballroom homecoming show the way an “old man” would – at home alone on my 13 inch laptop with the lights out and a Coors tall boy.

Backstory

The day Heaven officially hit stores I found out that Other Music would be giving away tickets for The Walkmen’s Bowery Ballroom show to the first 150 people who bought the record (four days before they go on sale). The first three thoughts I had were:

1     1.  I have to go to Other Music after work and buy another copy.

2     2. That means I have to go to Manhattan to get the ticket and go to the show…

3     3. If I go online the minute the tickets go on sale, I’ll get one. It’s not going to sell out.      

Well, I went to Ticketmaster.com at 11:59 am and kept refreshing the page until the icon went from “not yet available” to “find available tickets” and still, somehow, I was beaten to the punch. Sold out. I’ve been to every show The Walkmen have played in New York City since February 2004¹and only once has any of them sold out by the night of the show. I can’t speak on whether or not they actually ran out of tickets to sell once I was already inside but I do know that I have bought or seen people buy tickets at the door of every one that I’ve been to.

After banging my head on my desk I went straight to StubHub where the price of tickets ranged from $65 - $105, not including Shipping and Handling². Craigslist yielded similar results and even though I’ve been burned there before³, I sent a surly email to a seller requesting $60 for a ticket

“Where are you located? When can I pick it up?”

that went unanswered. And in hindsight, I’m glad it did. It would have been irresponsible of me to spend that money on a ticket when I had an opportunity to get it for even less than what it was actually worth. I spent the next week accepting the fact that I was going to miss a Walkmen show for the first time in 8 years and questioning the practice of ticket giveaways for venues that aren’t arenas⁴.

The silver lining in all of this disappointment was that Spotify, in a move that I’ve never heard of, would be providing a live stream of the concert from Bowery Ballroom to be filmed by La Blogotheque. I wasn’t too comfortable with the idea of watching a concert on a live stream given the inevitable glitches (what if the feed dropped at that crucial point in “All Hands and the Cook”?). But when they posted on their website that they’d be playing two sets, there was no way I could not watch it because of the chance they’d play “Hang on Sioban” (they did!) or “Don’t Get Me Down” (they didn’t).

The Show

It took me a little while to really get into it. Naturally, sitting in a chair at home⁵ when your used to being up against the stage takes some getting used to, but once we got to “Juveniles” I was bouncing in my chair and singing almost louder than Hamilton Leithauser (which I would never do at a concert). The feed however, was even shakier than I anticipated and there were a lot of times where you lost 1 to 3 seconds of a song and a handful of times where the stream blacked out altogether⁶. But when you balance that with the fact that they played 25 songs it’s hard to complain. Compared to the hour of mostly new songs they played at the Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry festival, this felt like they played their entire catalogue. And the best moments for me were indeed the older songs, including those from Lisbon, with the expected live show tweaks and the way Leithauser almost never sings a song the same way he does on record.

Every time they come out with a new album I listen to their whole catalogue backwards and this was even better than that. This was them playing the songs that they wanted to play (for the most part) and that they know their fans wanted to hear in a celebration of their incredibly unlikely 10 year career⁷. Being outside the influence of standing in the same room with Matt Barrick drumming, I was able to reflect on my memories with this band and the realization that I’ve been listening to them for 6 albums. There is no one in my iTunes library (minus The Beatles) that I have been able to stick with for that long. And while all of my best friends who were right there with me on Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone and Bows + Arrows have since jumped ship, I’ve been able to move right along with the progression of the band⁸. As the La Blogotheque cameras did some dissolving pans through the crowd, someone made the decision to key in on a close shot of a woman’s wedding ring as The Walkmen played “We’ve Been Had”. Sappy? Maybe. Sentimental? Certainly. Genius? Definitely. Because that’s when it clicked. That’s when I found my understanding of what Heaven is all about. The tone that the opening song sets for the record, the feeling that the lyrics throughout the album evoke, the promo photos, and the fact that Hamilton introduced one of the horn players at the Bowery show as “My wife, Anna”. This album feels less about progressing and more about arriving at a particular point and “taking some stock” (as Mr. Braddock advised Ben to do in The Graduate). Since I started listening to The Walkmen I’ve:

1.    Gone from having 3 hourly rate jobs at one time to earning a salary.

2.    Given up on Wu-Tang Clan.

3.    Moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn.

4.    Been to Europe.

5.    Quit being a musician.

6.    Realized what I want to do in life.

7.    Lived with a woman.   

8.    Been to the Midwest.  

9.    Lost a significant amount of hair.

10. Gained a significant amount of weight.

That’s some serious stock I just took.

Reservations about the live stream aside, watching the concert sitting in my chair in my home with my Coors Banquet and my external speaker set plugged into my laptop gave me the chance to look at the career arc of my favorite band under an entirely different lens and it really was quite an experience.     

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1. Including the outdoor set they played “for students only” at Columbia University in the spring of ‘04.

2. The original ticket price was $25.

3. In 2008 The Walkmen played back to back nights at the Bowery Ballroom. I bought a ticket to the first night and went with five of my friends (There’s a video produced by Last.fm of The Walkmen playing “In the New Year” that begins with shots of fans outside before the show. There’s one where you can see my friend Marco nervously looking for someone with an extra ticket – the one show I’ve been to where there were no more tickets at the door). The question was posed at the start of the evening and loomed throughout the night, “Are you going tomorrow too?” There were “No’s” all around as we were all broke musicians but as soon as I got home after the show I went straight to Craigslist and bought a ticket to the next night for $30 at a $10 mark up. I couldn’t take the chance that they would top what I had just seen and I would miss it. I showed up at the Bowery and produced my printed out PDF ticket to the bouncer which he promptly rejected, saying it had the previous day’s date on it. And he was right. I never checked. There was nothing left for me to do but spend $25 of my last $40 on yet another ticket and watch them play an even better set (and longer encore) than the night before.

4. Worst decision they’ve made since Pussycats. About 25 of those 150 tickets that were given away at Other Music were shrewdly used for financial gain by people who are probably not fans of The Walkmen.

5. I thought about standing and realized I was being, at best, ridiculous and at worst, a douche.

6. Early in the 2^nd set, at the beginning of “Thinking of a Dream I Had”, it went out for almost 15 minutes that included “The Blue Route” which they never play live.

7. This was effectively the 10^th Anniversary show that New York never got during the 10^th Anniversary tour.

8. Even though I rarely listen to A Hundred Miles Off, a quarter of it is on my Walkmen playlist.