RHCP Concert!!

Absolutely amazing in every way possible...
would be the best way to describe my weekend.

Starting off my blog, like the concert setlist

I've only been to a few major rock concerts, like concerts that you pay more than $50 for a ticket and is held in a stadium. The few that I have been to was...umm memorable I suppose you could say.
I've been to a Three Days Grace concert waaay back when I was in like grade 7 or 8 and I went deaf for a couple weeks.
I've been to a Roger Waters concert which was definitely memorable in that there were giant video wall blocks and elaborate stage set ups and well Roger Waters...



But I've gotta say, Red Hot blew everything out of the water, it went beyond all my expectations.


The night before was a good one, hanging out with Trevor, Brad, Konrad and Tina.
Konrad being the super swell guy he is, took us out for pizza at 1AM
I clocked about 3 hours of sleep friday night....or I guess saturday morning

So to kick off the monumental day, I sat in a Unicolour jam session and twas awesome. Apparently they're rusty, so if what I heard was an eargasm served on a drum stick then I wonder why not rusty sounds like.
After the Unicolour jam and a lovely breakfast made by the lovely TS, we broke the sound barrier to get to the ferry terminal to catch the 11AM ferry.

At least half the boat was decked out in Red Hot gear and the other half were Red Hot fans in disguise obviously, I mean there's no other reason to explain why you would ever want to go to Vancouver.
There were so many foot passengers on the boat that we missed all 3 buses that would take us to the skytrain station.
So Graeme did the natural thing while waiting in line for the next bus, he started a wave.

So after transiting around, we ended up at our hotel but we couldn't check in so we hung around McDs and ate dinner there.
Graeme's cousin came along and got our hotel room and lemme say this...
Our hotel room was SWANKY to put it in Fresh terms.
The room was like an apartment. We had 2 separate bedrooms, a "living room" and a bathroom, it was pretty friggin sweet, we was living in the lap of luxury.

We decked our selves out in our RHCP gear, facepaint and shirts, and headed off to Rogers Arena.
Unfortunately we took the long way around and we missed seeing Josh and Anthony coming out of their tour bus by literally 30 seconds.
We then spent the next few hours wandering around the arena looking for the right gate to get into. Eventually we settled in and started blasting out songs...while we were standing in line...for the show tonight...there was a light on...heavy glow...
The tour photographer came along while we were waiting and we got our photos taken and they might be used which is AWESOME

This is what I'm getting at

So for the promotion of the concert, they were advertising a new paperless ticket system to save money on tickets which is why the tickets were relatively inexpensive.
Welp when you swipe your credit card, guess what happens?
You get a paper ticket.
So we got paperless paper ticket or papered paper tickets or ticketless papers

We got in and booked it to our seats. Brad and I got decent seats that looked at the side of the stage and Graeme and Trevor got floor seats.

The opening band was Rebirth Brass Band, a brass jazz band from New Orleans and they were pretty tight. I mean all their songs sounded pretty much the same but they were grooving.

Then the lights dimmed, suddenly the somewhat full stadium filled up in the blink of an eye...

They were just there, jamming out

and the entire arena went nuts

There was a pretty damn awesome and elaborate stage set up. There was a giant asterisk on the stage that lit up with the giant screen behind it.
And hanging above the stage were these screen panels and halfway through the concert (around Raindance Maggie), the screens split into bars and hung low to the stage and it was so smooth that I didn't even notice until Brad pointed them out to me when they were almost half split.
There was also the 2nd coolest guys in the arena, working the spotlights.
They took a sketchy rope ladder to the platform where all the lights were and stayed up there for the entire concert...they are probably all badasses when not crewing for the band.

One of the night's favourites

ITs awesome how much energy their show has and how much energy the entire band just exudes.

I'm pretty sure Anthony had only 1 foot on the ground for half the concert because he was jumping and spinning all over the place.

Josh was swinging all over the place and rocking out

Flea was just crazy, he made the entire stadium looked like they were asleep (btw, there was no-one sitting down in the stadium)

Chad was pounding his drums so hard, it looked like he could pound out a tunnel to China

The setlist for the night was:

Monarchy of Roses

Around the World

Snow

Scar Tissue

Can't Stop

Hey

Throw Away Your Television

She's Only 18

The Adventures of Raindance Maggie

Charlie

Did I Let You Know

Under the Bridge

Look Around

Californication

By the Way

Encore

Suck My Kiss

Soul to Squeeze

Give It Away

You could tell who brought weed because they all took out their lighters to wave when this song came on

And they didn't just play those songs, they pretty much jammed between every song

And if you were a real fan (like Graeme and Trevor), you could pretty much predict most of the songs (that means I couldn't predict the songs)

I feel like I got second-hand high again but it wasn't as bad as Roger Waters (maybe because I was on the floor for Roger Waters and there was a haze of smoke (not from the smoke machines if you get what I'm saying) over the floor).

I did get super hungry halfway through the concert though.

Lot of parents brought their kids and either smoked in front of their kids or their kids smoked in front of them...great parenting eh? But then again they did bring their kids to the concert...

After the wild concert, we waited at the backdoor to see the band. It started off as 7 or 8 of us and it grew to a small crowd. After an hour we got to see all 4 band members.

None of them signed autographs but it was still awesome to see them.

I don't really blame them either because they were probably tired and they had a show the next day.

Flea gave a heartbreaking apology for not signing stuff and he was genuinely sad.

But still, we got to see them in person, less than 2 meters from us.

After that, we went to 7-11 and McDon's again and after filling up on food, we crashed for 3 hours

So I got about 6 hours of sleep the entire weekend and all of them were at like 3 in the morning.
Pretty hardcore

It has been the MOST AMAZING weekend of my life so far.