After a 5 and a something something hour drive from Atlanta, we made it to Nashville, TN. by way of Lynchburg, TN. and the Jack Daniels Distillery.
And let it be said that Lynchburg reeks of the hooch, seriously, every corner of that tiny town smells like Jack on the rocks… That aside, we had a fun time poking round the distillery for a short while, we didn’t have time for the tour unfortunately but oh well, we had to be in Nashville for about 5pm as the Weezer/Ben Folds concert opened at 6:30. Cue some moonshine bootlegger getaway driving (complete with soundtrack provided by station 14 on XM Radio) by Robyn and we made it to the hotel by about 5:30, one valet parking later and we were ready to head on over to the Municipal Auditorium to see the show…
We got there looking like hobo’s as we had driven for 5 odd hours and we were greeted by a long ass line that wrapped around the building and security people screaming that no cameras would be allowed into the arena and if you had one, take it back to your car, well, we had two and no car, so we were shit outta luck in that department, so I took Robyn’s slim one and she somehow jammed my bulky one into her purse and we hoped for the best… We get in to the security area and I got in no problem. Seriously, it was a half hearted pat down and a silly question, “do you got any knives?” Hell no… But Robyn got busted with mine, and I was already inside so I couldn’t do much about it… After some pleading they agreed to take the battery and let her in, a $60 battery it must be noted as it’s a Sony camera, but we still had her camera, so all was cool… Or was it?
Ben Folds started after the support band at about 8pm, I took a few shots covertly with Robyn’s camera and I should have really stopped at that, but I got greedy and got busted about 2/3 into the show… The security wanted to take her memory stick, a $100 memory stick it must be noted, and there was no way on Earth I was parting with that (but more of that later on) so I agreed to give up 2 duracell AA’s after deleting all the images I took…
Anyways, Ben and his band rocked, but we were pretty tired, and I was pissed off with security, and we left before Weezer came on which now leads to me my rant about security and their approach to cameras. Sure, they werent allowed, but as I said, we had no car to take them to and screw going back to the hotel and all the hassle around that, but I personally find it to be completely unreasonable to even expect people to part with any of their equipment… Especially now in the digital age. I mean, my camera might be 5 years old, but I’m not going to let anyone take it off me, it was too expensive to simply allow some jobsworth security guard take it and do whatever with it… And to surrender memory sticks is equally unreasonable, if it was a disposable camera then sure, but again, digital equipment cost a fair amount, even for cheap, lesser quality stuff.
It just pisses me off, one saving grace that prevented the arena going into my blackbook of places to avoid was that we found the guard who took my battery as we were leaving and he gave us it back… Saved me $60 (even though I have a spare) so the night wasn’t completely ruined…