May 4, 2001-They Might Be Giants play at the Odeon in Cleveland, OH. Someone is opening, but it isn't OkGo.
Here I am, in the middle of finals, going to school in Cleveland and TMBG up and schedules a concert right downtown. Awesome. Jen Childs, another CWRU person, was even nice enough to arrange a carpool to the show. Jeff Roberts will also be there, in full effect, I assume.
This show actually depended on us getting tickets at the door, as Tickemaster was just being entirely unreasonable about prices. I figured we were cool. I met up with Jeff Roberts and another Case person, and this mysterious Jen Childs person eventually showed up as our ride to the show. The Odeon ended up being a pretty decent bar/club type of place.
Muckaferguson opened, much to my delight. I've had one of their MP3s for a while now, and liked it quite a bit. There are three guys in the band. For just about every song, they all rotate positions, so they all drum, play guitar, bass, etc and sing the lead part on various songs. During this part of the show there were a bunch of people blowing up balloons and tossing them around. It continued through the break and into TMBG's set, until Flansburgh told us all the balloons made them wonder if they were tripping, and that was really quite the distraction. My 12th show, it's hard to say much new about TMBG's set. The whole band seemed to have a lot of energy and to be having fun, a bit of a departure from some earlier shows where Linnell was supposedly sick and from some shows on the last tour where lots of people said it seemed like the band was tired. Jeff was wearing his Modnar jersey, and we actually ran into a kid we knew from #tmbg, tla. I asked around, but no one was down with giving me a ride to the show at Oberlin the next day, but that all worked out.
