KORN Greatest Hits Tour

99.9 KISW The Rock of Seattle had teamed up with KORN and Northwest Harvest and were giving away KORN tickets to their show at the Tacoma Dome.

KISW had set up camp in a parking lot and were accepting donations of canned and dry goods for the Northwest Harvest. For every bag of food you brought in, the station gave you a ticket to go see KORN.

Of course, I brought food!

The show itself was nothing special, I enjoyed KORN as I always do, but I don't know if the acoustics in the Tacoma Dome suck or if the Sound Engineers should seriously think about a career change because the sound was horrible! KORN made up for it with their enthusiasm, but the supporting bands, Chevelle, Breaking Benjamin and two others who I don't remember, didn't make their performances good enough to be memorable!

I have to say I'm glad I didn't pay for the tickets!

Club Endfest

I won tickets to 107.7 The End's Club Endfest. They decided to take the concept of Endfest, their end of summer open air concert for the low low ticket price of $10.77 and extend it to 9 Club shows over a 3 day weekend. I won a couple of "Ultimate" passes, which gave me and a guest access to all 9 shows. The were as follows:

Thursday 11/4
Jimmy Eat World/Recover/Smoosh
at the Premier
Instant Winner/Twink: The Wonder Kid/The Femurs
at Graceland

Friday 11/5

Pennywise/3 Inch Max/The Accused

at the Premier

Super Deluxe/The Divorce/Mon Frere

at the Crocodile Cafe

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead/Dance Disaster Movement/The Casettes

at Neumos

Saturday 11/6

Mudhoney/Thermals/Kinski

at Neumos

The Faint/Tv On the Radio/Beep Beep

at the Showbox

Camper van Beethoven/Radio Nationals

at the Crocodile Cafe

Tim & Lars of Rancid/MXPX/Eddie Spaghetti of Supersuckers

acoustic

at the Fenix

Since it is physically impossible to see all these shows because they're all kinda at the same time, the station provided the winners of "Ultimate" passes with transportation from show to show.

Our Plan was to go see the show at the Premier on Thursday, the show at the Premier on Friday and the show at the Fenix on Saturday followed by the show at Neumos.

Thursday's show was great, Smoosh are two girls, 11 and 13 years old. They play the Keyboard and Drums. A very interesting young band who have, nationally and internationally(Canada) opened for local Seattle big timers Pearl Jam and The Presidents of the United States of America. They had an interesting sound, and if the mixer had done his job right and the sound design hadn't been so god-awful, I would've enjoyed it a lot more. You've got to realize, these girls are young and their voices are not as strong as older bands'. I could barely understand what they were saying between songs, let alone the lyrics during.

All in all, they're supposed to be really good though, the DJs talk about them quite a lot, I just haven't heard any studio recordings of them yet.

Jimmy Eat World was great. They played all the crowd favorites, and even though the singer had a sore throat, he belted out every song with heart. "Sweetness" sounded kinda off, but then again, his voice was going and they played it during their encore.

Jimmy Eat World

Friday started out good, with the first two bands being ones I had never heard of but still enjoyed. About 15 minutes before Pennywise was supposed to go on though, we left and I took my wife to the hospital because she was doubled over in abdominal pain (her being 4 months pregnant, there was no question about it, we left) No biggie for me, I have seen Pennywise 3 times before.

Unfortunately, we did spend the whole weekend in the hospital though, so we missed the acoustic punk show on Saturday. Personally, my wife's well-being is more important to me than any concert, no matter how unique and rare it may be!