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Sam and I attended our first concert at the Woodland Park Zoo last week and saw The Mountain Goats with Blitzen Trapper. The zoo has a large field where they host the ZooTunes concert series every year. I’ve actually been to a concert there before but it was probably twenty years ago. The zoo is a nice setting, hosting ~3,700 on a lawn surrounded by trees.
I have two criticisms of the venue. The first would be that because of the zoo setting and surrounding neighborhood the sound isn’t very loud. This wasn’t a problem for us because we were fairly close to the stage but if you were on the back of the lawn I’m not sure how well you could have heard the bands. That’s probably not a problem for a lot of people. It’s supposed to be a family friendly event and there were quite a few children so having the sound a bit quieter is probably a positive for them.
A bigger issue is that, again because of the setting and surrounding neighborhoods, there is an 8:30pm curfew on the music. With Blitzen Trapper not taking the stage until 6pm that only gave The Mountain Goats less than 1 1/2 hours for their set. They could have easily played another 30 or 45 minutes in another venue. They did the best they could but you could tell they felt rushed. They commented about how “ok, this is where we would normally go off stage and then come back on for an encore. Just imagine we left and came back…”.
The Mountain Goats have been around since the early 90’s and for a good portion of that time it’s just been the work of one man, John Darnielle. He would collaborate with others but much of the music was just him. It wasn’t until the last ten years or so that the band as they are today formed. John has certainly been a prolific artist though, producing 20+ albums with many other singles, three novels and now he has added acting credits to his resume. If you’ve seen the TV show “Poker Face”, John played a member of the one-hit wonder rock band in the episode titled “Rest in Metal”. John wrote all the songs the band plays in the episode. Maybe at least partially due to this notoriety the band has really taken off in the last year. I don’t know what size venues they are used to playing in but both bands seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the size of the audience in attendance at the zoo. They both commented on how gratifying it was to be able to play for so many people. John also remarked a couple of times that “if you’re a new follower of our music…” which I think alludes to the fact that a lot of people are just now discovering them.
I suppose at least partially due to this and the shortened nature of the show they played mostly what might be considered their hits. All in all it was a great show, it just would have been nice if they could have played longer.
Opening for The Mountain Goats was Blitzen Trapper, a band I’ve heard of but never really listened to. They’re one of those bands that is always referenced by “if you like band x, you might like this band too”. Although I’ve never purposely listened to them it turns out I knew a couple of their songs and I was impressed with the rest of their music as well. Maybe this is at least partially because on several songs they clearly extended the songs into a jam-band kind of groove. It was good stuff. I believe that the band is primarily composed of two guys but there were four touring. A fifth player, the bass player, was absent so the keyboardist played the base on the keyboard with his left hand while playing the keyboard parts with his right hand. It was impressive and if you closed your eyes you would have never known the bass wasn’t an actual bass guitar.
Anyway, both Sam and I agreed it was a great show but we would love to see the band again in a venue where they could play a longer set.
