Summer is still a month away, but we’re already getting an early start on concerts for this year!

Weezer! From very far away on an awesome cell phone camera...

Back at the tail end of April, we headed down to College Park for Art Attack XXVII.  Art Attack is an annual event/concert at the University of Maryland, though I only went once or twice.  Hmm.  Either way, I was able to get a student ticket this year since I’m in grad school, which was far cheaper than a general public ticket.  But on to the show!  This year’s artists were Weezer and Ben Folds, which is pretty awesome and why we wanted to go!  Ben Folds was on first.  He was performing solo on piano, which was really great, but unfortunately the students didn’t seem to be that into it.  They were itching to see Weezer.  But who cares what they think, Ben if you ever read this, you were really awesome and I loved hearing you!  You are just incredible on piano and your lyrics are so unbelievably clever.  I’d love to hear him perform some day in a smaller venue, like some sort of piano lounge, that would be fun.  So then Weezer was up next.  It was pretty cool to see them live, especially after seeing Green Day last summer, since the Blue Album and Dookie were two of my favorite albums back in middle school when they came out.  Weezer played most of the songs off of the Blue Album, but did a lot of newer stuff too, much of which I had heard but some I hadn’t.  I, of course, sang along at the top of my lungs for all the old songs I knew!  It was an awesome show, so I think I’ll need to go back and get caught up on their albums that I’ve missed.

And then this past weekend, we went into DC for another annual concert event, the DC101 Chili Cook-Off.  We had never gone to Chili Cook-Off before, but they had a pretty good lineup of bands this year (Tears of Mars, Anberlin, Switchfoot, Cage the Elephant, Alice In Chains and Stone Temple Pilots),  so we decided to check it out.  The festival is held in the parking lot of RFK stadium, so when we arrived, we had to wander around a bit to figure out where everything was, all you could see was a mass of people.  First, we checked out the chili competition area.  There were at least a few dozen tents set up for people making chili and putting out samples for the crowd to taste.  Some of them were pretty amazing, and you could put money in a jar at each stand (donations to the National Kidney Foundation) to vote for your favorites.  Once we were chili-ed out, we headed for the stage for the rest of the evening.  We missed Tears of Mars and Anberlin (well, we heard them from a distance), but were by the stage for everyone else.  I’ll admit, given my love for classic rock, these aren’t bands I’m very familiar with (except for STP, who were popular when I was in high school), but the concert was great.  I particularly liked Switchfoot and Alice In Chains, I might need to check out more of their stuff.  STP was good, but the lead singer was incredibly drunk and/or high, so anything he was saying in between songs was pretty unintelligible and I was just waiting for them to get on to the next song.  It started raining during Alice In Chains, but the crowd didn’t care at all, and it may have made the crowd surfers even more amusing.  Overall, it was a really great show and well worth the hours of standing out in a sun-baked parking lot!

So between those two shows, it was a pretty good kickoff to the summer concert season!  I’m not sure who we’re seeing next, but I know Barenaked Ladies, Keane, and OAR are all coming to Merriweather within a week of each other in August, so we’ll have to decide which of those to go see…