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The Daft Punk concert in Berkeley was last Friday. It’s the first real concert I’ve ever been too, so it’s going to be a long post. To summarize: Daft Punk is super-awesome live, and I hate people.

A while ago, Andrew invited Kelvin to go check out Daft Punk at the Greek Theater at Cal, and when I heard they were going, I wanted to go too. I’m not an uber-fan of Daft Punk, but they are one of my favorite musical acts. (I don’t listen to much music.) If you don’t know who Daft Punk is, here’s a couple music videos:

(“Around the World” was directed by Michel Gondry… Wooooo!)

If you still don’t know who they are, well, something is wrong with you.

Kelvin, Andrew, and I all left work early Friday to meet up and head out to Berkeley before 5PM. Even though the other direction was worse, 880 was still a bitch, as expected. What few carpool sections the freeway had were just as congested as the regular lanes. Since Kelvin and I haven’t listened to Daft Punk in a while, Andrew played Daft Punk music through the car radio to make the drive less dull and pump us up for the concert.

When we reached Berkeley, it took us quite some time to get through the local streets. The nav system said we were 3 minutes to our destination for 20 minutes. We passed by a couple frats offering parking in their private lots. The first one was offering spaces for $30, and the second offered it for $15, which we took. In hindsight, since we were pretty early (6ish), we should have tried to see if there was any closer event parking left ($20) or garage parking (free, I believe), but we were lazy.

A large line had formed by the Greek Theater, but it was moving when we got to it, so they must have just let people in. Staffers scanned our tickets and checked our purses and bags. Kelvin smuggled in my camera in his jeans, tho I wonder if they actually would have cared if I had a camera. (It says on the ticket that cameras and drugs are not allowed, but there were plenty of both at the concert.) The booths were by the entrance, selling overpriced alcohol, overpriced food, and overpriced shirts.

The Greek Theater is an open-air, coliseum-like theater on the UC Berkeley campus. It’s surprisingly small, so pretty much anywhere you sit you’ll have a decent view of the stage. The concert was general admission, so it was first-come first-serve, sit where ever. Arriving around 6:45ish, there was a ton of space still available, with the center mosh-pit-like area in front of the stage being the most crowded. We took a small spot towards the middle on the steps behind the center area. Our little claimed spot was pretty roomy, and we were near this large group of very festive gay truckers. (Actually, I’m not sure they were truckers, but I’m just calling them that because a couple of them had trucker caps, several were kinda macho-looking bald men with beards, and their logo was a parody of the women you see on mud-flaps of trucks… except instead it was a chubby bald dude with a beard. While I have no idea if they are truckers, I’m pretty sure they were gay. Guys kissing guys usually means gay, right?) Before the show started, the gay truckers were busy making silver pom poms out of silver streamers, with people around them helping out. The back parts of the stadium barely had any people in them. We knew that wouldn’t be the case; with people willing to pay $100 per ticket on Craigslist at the last second (tickets were around $57 after tax & fees), the show was most definitely sold out.

During the wait for the opening act (which was the Rapture), Andrew went to go buy an overpriced concert shirt ($30), Kelvin took pictures of the venue and got me an overpriced cranberry soju (even tho it was incredibly tasty, it was $9!!), and I went to get two overpriced hot dogs ($4.50 each), since we hadn’t eating dinner and I was getting peckish. Unfortunately, they were out of overpriced hot dogs, so I got an overpriced hamburger ($6) instead. By looking at the burger, it’s nothing like those Carl’s Jr. burgers on TV. Eventually, Andrew got hungry too, and he was able to get in on their restocking of hot dogs. He also got me one, but unfortunately, I never got to eat my hot dog…

The hot dogs were purchased during a food/bathroom run Andrew and I made around 7:45ish. The concert wasn’t supposed to start until 8PM, but by the time I made it back to our spot, the Rapture was already playing. Andrew was still at the restroom (there was probably a line like in the ladies room as people made last minute bathroom runs) when I got back, so he missed even more. What the heck? Why did they start early? Who starts these things early? Andrew eventually got back, and this girl who was repeatedly begging Kelvin for Andrew’s extra earplugs finally got her earplugs. As Andrew had warned, the music was LOUD. I don’t understand how the people next to the speakers don’t go deaf. I had earphones in for most of the Rapture performance.

The Rapture was a decent opening act, but I wasn’t really into it. The only song I know by them is House of Jealous Lovers, and I think not knowing the band and their music made it harder to enjoy them. Especially when you’re impatiently waiting for Daft Punk. You can’t sing along or gush about your favorite band member. They also had pretty limited space to work with, as most of the stage was curtained up to hide Daft Punk’s massive stage equipment. They even tried to have a little light show, but when you see the Daft Punk show, those lights end up looking pretty pitiful. (Nothing against the band here or anything, it’s just an amusing contrast.) Their performance was good, they sounded great… but I was just meh with them.

The Rapture set was about an hour, ending around 8:45PM. Then it was another 45 minute wait for the Daft Punk show to start. They had some DJs in the corner mixing stuff (I’m guessing the other two French dudes that are on the tour, SebastiAn and Kavinsky) while we were waiting. This wait was pretty obnoxious, because the Greek Theater was getting more and more crowded. Apparently people like to skip the opening act and come later (which, while you get less for your money, isn’t that bad of an idea), so all the nice, little spaces between us and our neighbors were getting filled up, and the seats in the back of the theater were getting filled. We had to start getting, as Andrew stated, “territorial” with our small area, so we moved to the front of the step we were on so nobody would stand in front of us. We put our stuff in front of us, including my uneaten overpriced hot dog. This probably would have been a good time to eat it, but I kept thinking the Daft Punk show would start any minute, so I didn’t. Instead, we’d get teased by lights peaking out behind the curtains (I guess they were testing equipment), while the some of the crowd was having their own mini-rave with the DJ’d music. Towards the beginning of the Daft Punk show, the DJ booth was completely surrounded by club kiddies, so you couldn’t even see if anyone was actually doing anything. While Andrew was enjoying the music, I was getting irritable and impatient. I can listen to techno at home without the thousands of other people hanging around, half of them doing some sort of illegal substance. And if I wanted that experience, I could always go to a club or rave. Where’s Daft Punk???

Speaking of illegal substances, as more people filed in and took up more space, it seemed like everybody around us in all directions was doing pot. The group in front of us (a large group of thirty-somethings who’d have more and more friends join them throughout the night) had been lighting up since the beginning of the show, and whiffs of other folks’ joints would wander over to our area also. But the new additions to the crowd were really lighting it up. The person to my left, his friend behind him, some couple in front of him, dude behind Kelvin, and I don’t know if anybody to the right of Andrew… but all these people just started lighting up. Kelvin, who was probably the most irritated about all the pot smoke everywhere, made an effort to take pictures of people smoking joints in a deliberate manner, hoping it would deter them from lighting up next to us. While I think this is a good idea, I’m always paranoid of confrontation. While I don’t really care if Kelvin gets into a fight with a pothead, I’d be insanely pissed if something happened to my camera. He really needs to fix his camera so he can do his photographing hijinks with his own damn camera. Unfortunately, because of poor lighting conditions, we were only able to get a couple different folks smoking joints clearly in photos.

And speaking of my camera, I’m really disappointed with the low-light performance on this thing, even with flash and image stabilization. We took like 160 pictures, but half of them were terribly blurry. I know ultra-compacts take horrible low-light pictures, but is it supposed to be this bad with flash and image stabilization? You can’t recognize anything the pictures! (The worst half aren’t in my gallery. I stuck anything remotely recognizable in my gallery.) I have to figure out the options to see if I can get it to perform better; I read in reviews the auto-setting sucks, and if you tweak the features, you can get pretty good pictures… but that ruins the whole point of a point-and-click, doesn’t it?? Argh. On the upside, the camera takes amazing videos. I can’t get over how great the video feature is, especially since it’s got a nice 3-inch screen. Too bad Sony’s menu interface is totally terrible so switching between camera and movie mode is a complete and total pain in the ass. Every other camera (including the old Sony’s) have that generic switch at the top to switch between modes. In this camera, you have go into the menu, move down from the top of the menu to the bottom of the menu (4 options in this menu), and select it. You can’t even shortcut by pushing up from the first option to go straight to the last option, you have to go down through all the other options. What the hell, Sony!? If they fix these interface and picture quality issues next-gen, I’ll probably be willing to waste another $400 on the camera, because there’s still a lot I like about it. Until then (or until Canon learns to rip-off Sony’s style), I’m going to keep whining and bitching about the flaws of the camera.

At 9:30PM, the curtains are pulled, and finally the weird pyramid stage thingy is shown. The crowd is cheering in anticipation of the show actually starting. There were a few false alarms previously, but flashes from the cameras revealed two silhouettes in the pyramid, so the show was definitely about to start. With a little throwback to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the show got off to a rockin’ start with, well, Robot Rock. I took out my earplugs sometime around then so I could experience Daft Punk in its full, ear-drum-blasting intensity.

I’m not going to go into detail about the show, since it’s hard to be anywhere near accurate in describing the experience in words, but it was pretty freaking awesome. Talking to Chris about it today, he said he was skeptical as how good a Daft Punk concert good be, and I totally understand. I was also skeptical at first. I mean, Daft Punk is just two guys mixing stuff. No vocals, no major instruments, no running around the stage, no large dance numbers… it’s just two guys playing with knobs and buttons and such on a machine. I figured I’d give it a shot since I actually like Daft Punk and Kelvin had to go anyway. Daft Punk makes up their lack of appearance (they wear robot masks, so you don’t even see their faces), performance, and mobility with excellent music paired with a ridiculously extravagant light show. I don’t know how I can describe the awesome-ness of the light show without just saying, “It was a really cool light show.” It starts off simple, progressively getting more and more complicated as the show goes on. More elements will pop in, like the background will light up or the grid will have gradient lighting or the pyramid will start projecting images. Okay, I know that just basically means, “Oooh, more lights.” It was just cool to see such an intense visual interpretation of the songs that was as heart-thumping as the music. I’m really surprised there weren’t any seizure warnings on the ticket or at the concert, though.

The music they chose for their set was a good mix of hits from all three albums. Andrew kept track of the music played, quickly busting out his little notebook at the beginning of each song to write it down, and has the setlist on his blog. Everything was mostly very dance-able, the remixes were very different (and often times better) than the original songs, and bits and pieces of other works were usually interleaved in the mixes. It’s hard to think of my favorite parts with everything so mixed together… pretty much anything I recognized (stuff from Homework and Discovery) I loved, but even tho stuff I didn’t recognize certainly wasn’t bad at all. I think I’m still partial to the crowd pleasers, like Around the World and One More Time. Everyone knows and gets these songs, so it’s great to see the entire crowd bouncing in unison (like in the One More Time video! except with less aliens and more pot). Andrew looked like he was rockin’ out the whole time, I think Kelvin was doing his Asian equivalent to the white-boy-minimal-dance, and I did the same head bobbing and hip shaking movements that was supposed to be some sort of dancing, I guess. You could only do so much in a little space with your feet planted. I think I may have accidentally elbowed the girl behind me a few times while enjoying the music; oh well.

*Warning: Gigantic rant ahead in spoiler.
[spoiler]

So, one of the reasons I’ve never been to a concert is that I don’t really like people. And concerts have a lot of people. Technically, I lied; I have been to a concert before. Jamiroquai played a free concert in SF before, and I went to that. We didn’t stay very long because it was insanely crowded and we could barely see the band. There was even a guy smoking pot as he had his young daughter on his shoulders. Yeah, that was lame. I don’t like having zero personal space, and with this being a general admission concert, I was also hesitant. And to be frank, my expectations of hating people were fully met. I’ve come to the determination that I truly do hate people. People smoking pot… okay whatever, I was expecting that and it was annoying, but not enough to detract from my enjoyment of the concert. But what the fuck is with people moving and shoving around during the actual concert?? Why are you people moving now? Where were you 30 minutes ago when NOTHING was going? And now you’ve decided to shove your way to the front, step on my feet, stand right in front of us, and step on our stuff during ONE MORE TIME??? Are you shitting me? Don’t you have a fucking concert to be listening to? I can’t remember if it was during Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger or Around the World when this group of like 8 teenagers were shoving into us, walking AWAY from the stage! That makes no sense! It’s like one of the best and most popular songs, and they’re relocating themselves, disrupting everybody in their damn way. They go between Kelvin and Andrew, and then they like stop there, because I guess the group behind us is making it difficult for them to pass further. And you know what the dumbass guys next to Andrew and Kelvin do? They dance! They’re on top of our stuff, invading our personal space, facing AWAY from the stage (wtf?), and they’re like “lalala, yay music” and I’m trying to restrain myself from punching them. I think once they pass, the clearing they leave gives an opportunity for these two old ladies and old guy to take over. At least, these people make sense; they’re walking TOWARDS the stage… but they should have figured out where to go before the show freaking started. They also step on our stuff and just stand there, and the old guy is really tall. And based on his indifferent, off-rhythm head bobbing, I don’t think he even likes Daft Punk. He’s probably just there cuz his old woman made him go. Eventually, they move down a step, and we’re back to normal, but they’re majorly crowding the group in front of us. There were at least three groups that took up what little space was on the step in front of us, including a group of college kids who stepped on my feet in the process of getting there (and while they weren’t smoking pot, one bitch proceeded to stink up the spot with her cigarette). I remember seeing the tall skinny guy in front of us (who was there even before we got our spot), his facial expression with each new addition to his area was just pure irritation. I think there was a bit of space between me and the stoner to my left; people seemed to go there a lot. This is fine, as long as they don’t run into me or try to walk in front of me (where our stuff was). Oh my god, during One More Time this one teenage couple walked in front of me and stepped on my foot twice. They came from the left to go towards where Andrew was, but then realized there was no more room (with old people and college monkeys) they went back to where they came, with me shouting “what the hell” at them as they step on my feet AGAIN and knock over the overpriced hot dog I never got to eat. They also tried to take over the spot in between me and stoner dude, but my aggressive elbowing of them and stoner guy’s dancing (mostly likely well disguised elbowing) led them to look elsewhere. I swear, every time someone tried to squeeze their way next to me, I made every effort to knock into them with crazy dancing, elbow them with my flailing arms, and lift my feet straight up when they stepped on them under the hopes they’d fall and break their face on the concrete (never happened unfortunately). It was the only way I could be reasonably violent without straight punching people in the face. My feet were planted, and nobody was going to make me move. The girl behind me (the one who I would accidentally elbow) must have been super-annoyed, since I’m sure she was using the space between me and stoner guy to check out the show (I’m pretty sure she was shorter than me), and people were constantly going through that space and walking into her. I can understand that people need to go to the bathroom or if they want a better spot, but do you have to disrupt everybody on your way during the best songs of the show, you selfish pricks? Why didn’t you get there earlier, you morons? The theater isn’t that big, so it’s obviously maximum disruption for minimal improvement. What dicks. I’m sorry, I can’t get over it. I really hate people. Andrew was really good at blocking out these people, but Kelvin generally hates people too. He somehow managed to tolerate all this crap more than I did, which I don’t understand. I mean, I was on the verge of violence. He did, however, have a hard time tolerating all the pot smoking everywhere. While I enjoyed the crowd energy of the people (stationary) around me (stoner guy lit up like 3-4 times during the Daft Punk show and never missed a beat, a winner at multi-tasking!), all these other people… moving around during the best parts of the show… ugh. I hate people.

And what the fuck is up with the crowd tossing crap onto the stage? The gay truckers were really good with the crowd, having fun LED lights, spreading silver pom-poms, and making giant balloons to crowd surf. For some reason, people were bouncing balloons towards the stage. Eventually, two giant balloons got stuck on the stage. And people were tossing their glow sticks onto the stage. I swear one of them even made it into the pyramid and hit one of the Daft Punk dudes. ??? What is wrong with people??

Yes, I hate people.

Anyways… about the show…
[/spoiler]

So, yeah, the show was awesome. Logically, the show should be lame. There’s two guys wearing masks hanging out in a pyramid with a lot of shiny lights, where you can’t even see what they’re doing. The music could be pre-recorded, and no one would notice. The two guys could just be standing there, bobbing their heads; heck, they could have been two posers, with the real Daft Punk sitting in their studio in France, counting their monies. But, I loved the show. I would definitely pay money to see again. (Well, considering my hatred for people, I’d have to think about it a little bit, but most probably I’d pay to see them again.) I hope they release an album or DVD for the tour because I’d buy that, too. The awesomeness of the show even drove me to deal with the crowd at the overpriced shirt booth. (Ugh, being shoved in between sweaty retarded teenagers made me desperate for a shower. And all for an overpriced shirt that was too small for me! How am I supposed to know there were men’s and women’s sizes? At least it’s not TOO small. I can still wear it, and it’s black so it’s hard to tell that it’s on kind of tight. Besides, I notice a lot of girls wear shirts that are way too small for them anyway.) I’m glad I went, and I’ve learned a lot about concerts at least. My entire lower body got pretty sore from wiggling around and standing for 3+ hours; my calves are still in pain. Despite my wonky camera, we (as in Kelvin) still got some good pictures and great video. The camera ran out of battery (I guess flash photography and videos take a toll in power) towards the end, so we weren’t able to capture the encore. I don’t want to spoil it for you anyway, but if you want, you can check out Andrew’s blog to get a taste of it. I don’t really want to youtube the videos, but if I can’t find a good alternative, I guess I’ll have to. Feel free to check the ridiculous amount of pictures we took in the gallery if you’re insanely bored. I need stop typing because I think this post is about to explode.

New thing I learned today: Daft Punk’s performance at Coachella in 2006 was their first performance in the US since in almost 6 years or over 8 years, depending on the source.

Related posts:

1. Daft Punk – Alive 2007 (Deluxe 2CD Edition) review
2. Large guys scare me, and apparently Eubin has a second job.
3. New favorite music video – The TV Show
4. Conan O’Brien is in San Francisco this week… and guess who got to check out a show?
5. A run-in with a red light runner