The Eagles

We spotted this cartoonishly perfect mushroom on the little path near the post office in Kirkland. Having a new sort of biome full of life to discover has been a lot of fun.

Today's event at my night job at Climate Pledge Arena was the Eagles! It was pretty exciting.

Hockey games became pretty routine at some point but these shows always threw curve balls. The stage would be different sizes and shapes, different placements, and they seemed to love to rename and rearrange the seats every time which made helping guests difficult. Usually our ground floor was fairly quiet and controlled and populated by rich people. Concerts though had humans packed in where the ice would be during a hockey game, so all sorts of lost yahoos would be wandering all over my zone. Another amusing little wrinkle was the plethora of backstage passes that people could have and we were expected to remember in case someone wanted access to someplace exotic. People would occasionally say they knew the band or they wanted to go to the green room, and I never did learn where the heck that was because it came up so seldom in my daily work. 

I wanted to make sure I was watching when the band played my favorite songs, and one of my coworkers was kind enough to show me this website that tells you the setlist of a band's previous shows so you can anticipate the order of their songs. 

A rich lady in one of the tunnel clubs wanted me to go buy her a few merch shirts. Fine. It turned into a whole goose chase due to sizes being out of stock and so forth, but it was a welcome respite from the boredom of the usual work. She tipped me $20 for the effort too which was fun.

There was an orchestra and a choir, and I got the impression that maybe the band members got their own dressing rooms or something as well because they had signs pointing them around backstage. I only barely knew who frontman Don Henley was, so I did see some of the band members backstage but it didn't do anything for me really. It was fun anyway. I wasn't allowed to look at my phone during work, though clearly I did numerous times to take these pictures, but one way I passed the time was by chatting with security guards and other staff people. They were also a good source of intel on who was going to be where if I had wanted to high five someone or something. Covid made though sorts of interactions potentially unwanted by the band so I didn't try anything.

This was the Hotel California 2020 Tour but it was postponed due to covid a couple of times. Anyway it was novel to me because they played their Hotel California album from beginning to end. There was an old timey record player doing nothing on stage except for one time when a beautiful woman slowly walked across the stage, picked up the record and flipped it to the B side at the appropriate point in the show. I thought that was a very classy touch.

This show was fun because I realized just how many great songs these guys had. Then different members had solo careers, joined other bands, had more hits, then met up again for more hits. Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good" is one such classic. Joe: "I had a lot better time being 20 in the 70s than 70 in the 20s".

 

This was the type of show that made the hours of standing staring at the wall during hockey games worth the pain.