1 for Sorrow, 2 for Joy...

"Today...I consider myself...the luckiest man...on the face of the Earth..."

So said Lou Gehrig once, but I'm feeling that way right now, after having just returned from seeing my favorite band, The Counting Crows, play here in Salt Lake at the Delta Center. It was part of BrainShare, a yearly Novell conference, and they were ever-so-kind enough to open the concert up to the public, although it wasn't really announced and even when I heard about it, it wasn't for sure that we could get in without a ticket of some kind. So I didn't invite a lot of people to go down with me in case we couldn't get in in the end, just one friend who is also a big fan (although not as big a fan as I am). We got there about 7:30 or so and it sounded like at 8:00 they were going to open it up to the public. When we got there, there was a small line forming, but by 8:00 there was a line stretching from the doors back to the intersection (quite a ways if you aren't familiar with the DC setup).

We got in, found decent seats, across the floor from the band, right about center stage. We heard some comedian who was somewhat funny, mixed in with some Novell parodies of TV shows like 24, Lost, and CSI, and then about 8:40 the band took the stage and went to town. They played for about an hour before leaving the stage, and then after the crowd refused to be denied more CC goodness, came back and gave us 3 more songs. Here's the setlist:

Recovering the Satellites
Mr. Jones
St. Robinson and his Cadillac Dream
Mrs. Potter's Lullaby
Rain King (Acoustic)
Miami
Friend of the Devil
Long December
Hanginaround

and for the encore we got:

Black and Blue
Hard Candy
Holiday in Spain

So not too shabby if you ask me. The only one I don't especially like is Recovering the Satellites, but even that was fine to open with. I wish they could play here more often.

A couple fun items from Adam's monologue included his thumbs-up to the Red Iguana and this little narrative (which I'm obviously not quoting verbatim):

"I made friends with a woman here in Salt Lake a long time ago, a devout Mormon. She's recently divorced, and I know the rule is no sex before marriage, but I thought I was pretty smart and thought maybe there was a loophole for sex after marriage. Nope. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you're not getting anything from a woman that she doesn't want to give you. But we did have a good conversation on religion and a lot of stuff. But no sex. Which was fine, because I've had sex before, but I've never had that conversation before."

All in all, a great night. Lots of fun, great music, and all for $3 worth of parking, and Kelsey chipped in $2 on that since I drove. I'm so lucky. Thank you Novell. Oh, and did I mention that Yellowcard is playing a free (for students) show at the U next month? Good times.