Xpression.v2

Joe and I decided to go to the Seether/Breaking Benjamin/Three Days Grace show at Asbury Park yesterday. I met him in the city and we got in the car for the hour and fifteen minute drive. Well, that drive took three hours. It took an eternity just to get out of the city. The traffic was horrendous. When we finally got to Asbury Park, we discovered they don’t have a damn parking lot. As we were driving around, I saw a motel with a lot and just told Joe to park there. Of course, it just had to be raining, so as we walked to the “convention center” (It’s not a convention center. It’s more like a bootleg high school auditorium) we got drenched.

The show itself was ok. I’ll quote myself from Neowin:

Show was alright. Between horrible weather and a 2 hour traffic jam, I got their late and missed most of Seether’s performance. However, what I did catch, was awesome. Breaking Benjamin was next, which was kind of weird considering they’re billed at the headliners. Their performance was going well until they decided to have a 10 minute drum solo. After the first 4 minutes, you could feel the energy being sucked out of the crowd. They came back though with a few more songs and did OK. At one point they had Shaun from Seether and the guitarist from Three Days Grace come out and they performed “Change” by the Deftones while Ben walked through the crowd handing out water bottles. Three Days Grace was last. Decent performance, though they made a questionable set selection (”I Hate Everything About You” was about 3rd song in). Oddly enough, the crowd thinned quite a bit once Breaking Benjamin performed.

The venue itself sucked, though. It looked like a high school gymnasium. There’s no parking lot either. We wound up parking in a motels lot. The weather was miserable and made getting their horrid. The crowd sucked, too. I’m not a mosh pit guy, but I like my fair share of jumping and head banging (got a stiff neck again), but this crowd just stood there. The people in the seats sat for the entire thing. The venue is what really did them in, I think.

Even with the crummy show, one chick managed to hit her head on something and had to be carried out half unconscious.

The drive home was just the icing on the cake. It took forever to get out of Asbury Park because the lights on the main street changed way too quickly, thus only allowing traffic to trickle through. On top of that, once we hit the highway, the rain came down hard and it was nearly impossible to see the dividing lines on the road. It made for my some interesting moments.

Sadly, besides seeing some of Seether, the highlight of the night came as we refueled at a “LukeOil” gas station. First off, let me say that they have the worst service ever. The fat bastard working the pumps must have been slightly retarded because half the time, people were sitting there just waiting for him. Of course, Jersey being Jersey, it’s illegal to pump your own gas, so we had no choice but to wait for him. Anyway, while at the pump and waiting for him to start filling up the tank, there’s an SUV and red sedan in line on the other side. For whatever reason, the driver of the SUV decided he just had to reverse. Crazy bastard must have just put it in reverse and hit the gas because he wailed the red sedan. The driver of the sedan gets out and, well, it’s a “pretty” girl (and by “pretty” I mean “hot”, but I don’t want to be demeaning) in a harem costume. She was coming home from an early Halloween party. There’s really not much else to say about that story, but the driver of the SUV was a dunce and the girl was “pretty”. No real damage to her car.

All that said, I’m never going back to Asbury Park. It’s on the Jersey shore and, as I told Joe, it’s the part of Jersey that floods every year and no one cares.

Filed under: Journal