Mmm, concerty goodness

I'm starting to wonder if what we do as we get older is just specialize more and more when it comes to our taste in things (and like, in how we think as well). I'm only going to toss the nostalgia back a few years, but I remember my first concert was the Barenaked Ladies, at Blossom (which is a hugegiant amphitheatre outside of Pittsburgh). This was just after One Week, so the concerts were often packed. I went with my family. It was fun, I bounced a bit, and sung along. Fast forward now through most of high school--by and large all big concerts (Weezer, BNL several more times), with a few They Might Be Giants concerts thrown in, which were novel because you could usually catch the band members on the way out and get an autograph (there was no time for talking). Then college, which was sparse but exclusively in small venues (I think the largest place I've been to here is the Congress Theatre, which is only slightly larger than where I used to see TMBG... and infinitely cooler. Holy crap the interior of that place is cool.) Honestly, if I'd had my way I would've seen Guster and I would've seen The Arcade Fire, and both of those would have been in larger places, but money stopped me. And since college... (with the exception of the frakawesome Millennium Park concerts of awesometacularness), I've pretty much done things at places like the Logan Square Auditorium (smallish), the Empty Bottle (small), the Beat Kitchen (smaller)... anyway, what I'm building up to here is that last night I saw Akron/Family at AV-aerie, which is basically a large loft (and I mean large in loft terms. I think it was smaller than the Beat Kitchen, if you're going for floor space and not volume) in the middle of the near-westside industrial nowhere. They played under a huge white parachute, everyone sat on the floor for the opening act and there were only about 30 people there when Angela Desveaux & the Mighty Ship took the stage. 30 people! And that's counting band members (who, by the way, mingled the entire time). The opening act was like story time... with hipsters in tight jeans and no carpet squares, but story time nonetheless. Needless to say, though this made me a bit awkward in a "Holy crap there are so few people that I could basically sit on the stage here, what do I do?" way, it was pretty fantastic. And Akron/Family was amazing. I really don't have another concert experience to compare it to because, um... I can't quite describe their music, and since the whole thing was basically one giant song that went from soft noddling and bird whistles to folky noiserock and finally culminating with crazed screaming, jumping about, and generally displaying the sort of energy that made me wonder how they hadn't destroyed anything yet, it's... well, really hard to describe. But A++++ Would See Live Again. I also made friends with a very drunk girl from Columbia and her friend who (sadly) was too drunk to stick around, and after we held him up for about one song, he ducked off and disappeared. At the end of the show I also lost my friend after I grabbed my coat, so now I've got this nagging guilt that she thinks I abandoned her. (Go go gadget guilt complex!)

Um... the point that I was working towards earlier, though, was that this concert was pretty much the culmination (of the moment) of all the work I've done towards more and more obscure music. I think the show probably topped out at about 120-some people. Is this a product of my taste in music becoming more specialized? I mean, it's finally gotten to the point that I talk to people at shows now. And no one cares if you don't know all the words. This is weird to me. But I like it.