By Autumn Patterson
My girlfriend and I drove down to see the show at Grinnell College the day after the band had played in Minneapolis. We had to drop off a friend in Ames and got stuck in some minor traffic around the Twin Cities, so we didn’t arrive until about 8:45 p.m. When we finally arrived, hoards of young college students were still packed in a “line” several students wide (like a little running brook of Sleater-Kinney fans) inside the Harris Center. We had imagined the Harris Center to be more like an auditorium, but once the few uninterested Grinnell students wearing black and white SECURITY T-shirts finally let us in, we could see that the feel of the room was definitely more high school gym. The pull-down bleachers were pushed up against the wall to create a dance floor and there was a built-in concession area stage left that served free soda and soapy tasting soft water. It reminded me of the episode of Pete & Pete where Luscious Jackson played Little Pete’s middle school dance. The crowd, as far as I could tell, was mostly Grinnell students, quite a few of them drunk and still sipping Boone’s apple wine product out of paper bags in preparation for dancing wild and uninhibited-like.
The Quails opened and when they started to play it became painfully obvious how incredibly short the stage was. There weren’t that many people in front of us, but all I could really see was the top of Mr. Bass Quail’s bald head peeking up over the crowd. They played pretty much the same set as in Minneapolis and warmed up the crowd as far as dancing goes, although I chose to save my own energy for the main event. Instead of shaking my booty, I spent the Quails set trying to spot the biggest Grinnell-grown ‘fro, getting some “punch” for my sweetheart and perusing the merch table. At the end of the Quails set, 6 or 7 students got up on stage and danced like crazy.
Sleater-Kinney started playing around 10:30 and just a few short seconds into the first song, the crowd established a pocket near the front of the crowd center stage for crazy dance moves. To steal Carrie’s phrase from the previous night, the wildest dancers were of the “pogo” variety, with Corin’s favored hip motion dancers gravitating more toward the edges and Janet’s friend-embarrassing dance mongrels dispersed evenly throughout the crowd. The entire set was very charged and powerful – a lot more like a non-stop dance CD, whereas the last tour (All Hands on the Bad One) tended to be sets that were more stop and go, slow and fast.
They played all of One Beat except for Funeral Song plus Little Babies, Joey Ramone, Burn, Don’t Freeze, Turn it On, One More Hour, Youth Decay, YNRRF, #1 Must Have and Start Together. (Note: I didn’t write the setlist down so we recreated it mostly from memory. It may not be entirely accurate.) During #1 Must Have, Corin sang the wrong line–both her and the crowd winced but
she kept on singing and by the time she got around to screaming the chorus again, everyone had forgotten anyway.
I was really pleased to hear so much material from The Hot Rock and Dig Me Out on this tour. Burn, Don’t Freeze was so incredible to hear live–I had heard it once before, but had determined that, with the competing vocals, it just couldn’t work in a live setting. But Carrie’s voice is a lot stronger on this tour, I think, and she helped pull the song together much better than before. As far as songs from One Beat go, Sympathy is probably my favorite live song from the new album. It is to One Beat what Milkshake ‘N Honey was to All Hands and it translates really well to the stage, giving both Carrie and Corin a chance to show off how incredibly powerful and emotional their voices can be on their own and ending with all three singing together and complimenting each other beautifully.
In between two songs, Carrie stopped to encourage the Grinnell campus to exercise their voting rights. No one there was even old enough to remember MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign and everyone just stared blankly at the stage. “Do you guys have a senator you’re backing or something?” Carrie asked, referring to the concert the previous night during which the crowd started shouting about voting for Senator Paul Wellstone of the Green Party. At the Minneapolis show, Carrie responded with “Paul Wellstone is here tonight to see Sleater-Kinney?! Awesome!” But no one at Grinnell College was probably even from Iowa, let alone registered to vote there, so Carrie’s call to arms for voting fell flat.
Before Light Rail Coyote, Carrie proclaimed that it would be a sing-along. Corin and Carrie thanked “John” for putting on the show and mentioned that John could help out on the sing-along since he was a music major. (They must have mentioned the boy 5 or 6 times after that in the set as well. I’m sure they made his day). At the end of the song, the crowd sang “Oh dirty river, come let me in,” until it was obvious that no one could sing and that there weren’t even enough people for us to just be loud. I felt like we all fell short in helping the band to feel like rock stars, but we made up for it when that one random guy started crowd surfing, for sure.
For the encore, they came out and Carrie said they would play three more songs, although they only ended up playing two. The first song Corin introduced as being “the party song for my generation, but you guys look like you’ll dance to anything right now.” They then broke into a cover of the B-52s “Private Idaho” which, while a good song in its own right, did not seem appropriate being covered by Sleater-Kinney. I think that the band lacks the requisite beehives and Casio keyboards for a decent B-52s cover band. Corin was right, though, about the audience being able to dance to anything, especially given that people were even moshing earlier in the set to Prisstina while I just stood there with my mouth agape wondering how that song even made it into the setlist.
The second song of the encore was Words & Guitar. Corin started to lose her voice near the end of the song and during one of the quiet parts of the song she made mention about how John was supposed to be backing her up on this one. That turned out to be the last joke about John of the evening, and the band left the stage around midnight. I had been worried that seeing two shows in a row would be too much but after the Grinnell show, I found myself entertaining the idea of ditching work to drive to Chicago the next day for more of the same.
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