After Paul and I left San Francisco, we headed back to Sacramento for our second free concert of the day, Tori Amos. Paul’s boss, Dave, had won the tickets from a radio station in Reno, I believe it was the X, and he couldn’t swing the Thursday trip up to see the show.
We were very nonchalant about Tori Amos and in no hurry really to get there. In our minds, she was another slightly whiney female singer akin to those who were all the rage at the time, and the fact that the X was giving away the tickets didn’t make it any more credible in our eyes. Paul described the X as all Rickie Lee Jones all the time. Today, when I look at their playlist, I chuckle when I realize that I like most of the bands they play.
We wound our way back from San Francisco and into Sacramento, stopped at the Beat and Tower Records to shop, went to dinner before the show at Eppie’s (yummy toll house cookie bars!) and basically took our sweet time finding and getting to the Crest Theatre. Once we got there, we (well at least I) felt kind of silly because the show was sold out and there were people milling about outside trying to scalp tickets. Those folks really wanted to see the show, and here we were, ready to just blow the whole thing off. Dave’s name was on a list of folks that were supposed to be let in for free, and for a few minutes we were sweating it because they didn’t want to let us in at all. I don’t really remember how Paul convinced them, but I suspect it might have had something to do with his press pass, and we were in.
We missed all but the last 3 minutes or so of the opening act, A Man Called E. The few minutes I heard sounded pretty good, but who knows. The place was silent and dark and completely jam packed. We had to go all the way to the top of the theatre and sit on a carpeted bench of sorts at the top – not really seats. We had a few minutes to look around during intermission, to notice that the place was probably 80% or so women, most of them together, which is fine, of course, just kind of a shocking ratio for two dorks from Carson City. The lights went down finally and Tori came out and sat at her piano and sang for a good couple of hours.
The concert was the most serious of any I’ve ever seen. Everyone was so silent, so reverent, that it was like sitting in Mass. All of this seriousness made the two of us giggle like little schoolkids for the better first half of the show. The fact it was so quiet made it really difficult for us to keep from cracking up. I’m not sure what we were saying to each other, but it was damn funny at the time.
At some point though, I really started to get into it, and so did Paul I think. She really is a beautiful songwriter, and the power of her with just her piano was unmistakable. By the time she sang, “Me and a Gun,” I felt like a turd for laughing so much. And by the end of the concert, I was hooked and bought her disc pretty quickly after I got home. This is one of the first shows I can remember that changed me from an almost non-fan to an almost rabid one, in a couple of hours. Pretty remarkable, I’d say.
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