Persistent Distraction: The Black Keys And The Pink Moon

Late one Saturday afternoon, I'm listening to blues-rock duo The Black Keys, and remembering that a few years ago, they'd played in Amsterdam and I'd missed the show. I wondered if they were planning a European tour soon.

Sometimes things just line up. Jungian synchronicity, heavenly bodies in a row, whatever it is, it's pure chance but when you're in the middle of it, you just sort of know, and it feels like a streak. And when a streak's going your way, you go with it.

There was one event listed on my favorite music-related timesink website. For that same evening. In Utrecht. The last show in Europe, the only one in the Netherlands. At a 40-minute train journey from me.

I checked the clock: six p.m; the support act went on at seven-thirty. No mention of whether there were tickets available, and the venue's voicemail was four days old... I scrawled the address and directions from Utrecht Centraal, grabbed my jacket and keys and headed for the station.

Now, I'm not a leap-and-a-net-will-appear sort of person. That is not to say that I don't do impulsive things; I just don't usually expect them to work out in my favor. I'm more leap-and-visualize-hitting-the-ground-like-a-watermelon.

But I decided that even if I couldn't get a ticket, it would be fine. I decided not to indulge in anxiety. Even when, in the train, I realized I'd left the directions to the venue at home, I didn't bother panicking: you gotta respect the streak.

Leaving the station, I asked a local whether he knew the Tivoli. "I'm going there," he replied. Of course he was. I tagged along, we chatted music (he'd never heard my boys Dan and Patrick, was more of a drum n bass kinda dude), and at the door, he bade me good luck getting a ticket.

Which... I did. In plenty of time. And found a pretty good vantage point, on the second level, nobody in front of me.

The thing about the sound is...well, it's rock and effing roll, totally basic and absolutely genuine, and without a bit of indie pretense. I'm fond of quoting Nick Hornby, and I'm not above doing so here:

"I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs, that bring me up short, make me do a double-take. When things add up to more than the sum of their parts, when the effects achieved are inexplicable, then atheists like me start to get into difficult territory."

The sound was more than should come from two white guys from Akron. How they can take a drum kit, one electric guitar, and one voice and channel Hendrix and Howlin' Wolf, and sound bluesy and joyful in the same crunchy riff...it's just loaves-and-fishes miraculous.

And I was "that guy." The idiot dancing like there's nobody else there. I don't care that they didn't invent the wheel. I just love cruising down the road with them.

On the midnight walk home from the station in Rotterdam, I happened to look up and see, framed above the lights of the crane ships and skyscrapers, a sight I hadn't been expecting, because I'd forgotten that this was the day everything was to line up in the sky.