Live Concert Series, Pt. 12

We Were All Yellow

Seeing Coldplay with former friends

I don’t know if you’ve ever agreed to accompany a couple on its first, and very blind, date, but as Jerry Seinfeld once opined,

“It’s a scene, man.”

Of course, he was chastising George for an aborted menage-a-trois, while I’m merely talking about taking a 200-mile road trip with semi-friends to see Coldplay at an outdoor arena in Charlotte on a semi-hot August night.

The friend was our old buddy Owen who, somehow, had met a new woman through another friend. The new woman was Karen and she became our semi-friend, in the sense that we didn’t know her for very long, because Owen couldn’t decide if he was in love with her or not.

This is hard to say because if you’ve read my stories over the years, you’ll know that Owen passed back in the fall of 2017. I’m still asking my therapist “Why?” but that’s another story. This story, this hard-to-say part, is that if a woman ever asks whether you’re in love with her, you have some choices.

The best choice, however, is surely not:

“Well……… I love you, but…”

Best choice, that is, if you think the relationship has a chance of lasting, and I suppose that Owen knew that this one had reached its ignoble end. He told me that he would have been happy letting their relationship ride on out the way it was — separate places, no major commitment — but, surprisingly to him at least, Karen wasn’t so committed to that non-commitment.

This story has something to do with the sudden death of Elizabeth Taylor, too, because when she first heard that news, Karen felt an unexpected shock, as if yet another institution had passed before her eyes. So, after a bottle of wine or two, or so Owen related to me after, she issued her question/ultimatum.

If none of this makes any sense to you, join the club. Actually, I do get the sense of time passing, of trying to figure out a braver path to healthy relationships.

Still, whatever those two had, it ended when Owen, not a sentimentalist, couldn’t muster up the whatever to console Karen on Liz or on their own particular junction.

So that’s how it ended, and here’s how it began.

It wasn’t as if we were Coldplay fans. In fact, pretty much what I knew about the band was that first hit of theirs, “Yellow,” which I first heard in 2001, while flying home from England with my family. It was just one of those songs on the in-flight system, along with certain other songs by David Gray. I thought the song was pretty fine, actually, especially those thrumming guitar chords that open and repeat throughout the tune.

I thought I’d get a copy of their record when I got home, but whatever time elapsed between unpacking and finally going to my local record store again, caused me to find other enthusiasms to buy, though I’m hard-pressed now to say what these were. So I never bought a Coldplay record of any sort until a decade later when I started downloading on iTunes.

In the meantime, my older daughter became a big Coldplay fan, like many other college kids did in the years between 2006–10. So when she heard that the band was playing Charlotte in 2009, and given that the venue was only sixty miles from her college, she suggested very strongly that we join her and a couple of her girlfriends, which sounded fun in that way that the idea of sitting on a blanket on the hard ground for three hours doesn’t seem that bad to older bones until maybe twenty minutes go by and you realize that your core won’t be supporting your lower back for much longer, so go ahead and have another beer because something in you at least should be happy.

When we agreed to go, we invited Owen, who then told us that he’d like to bring Karen, the woman he had only recently met via one phone call.

“Sure,” we said, because we knew how long Owen had been searching for love — love, that is, but not “in love.”

We know how to make small talk; but my wife and I are basically introverts, and so after a half-hour, we’re ready for some quiet, for some rejuvenating within our own silent heads.

This, absolutely none of this was true of Owen and Karen, who didn’t really need us as they rode in the backseat of my old Honda Element. They began talking the moment we took off, and after a perfunctory nod in our direction, proceeded to discourse for the entire hour-and-a-half trip.

And let me add: both knew how to project.

We ate an early dinner in Gastonia, and they continued their chatter, every now and then nodding at us.

And when we got to the show, though there were 15,000 people with us, and though when Coldplay came on, the speakers flooded us — not to mention the screens projecting chosen images to complement the songs — what I heard foremost was the uninterrupted conversation of two people who seemed to have much in common.

Every now and then, they’d pause to exclaim how much they liked the song that was on, especially “Paradise,” but the stage up front, maybe sixty rows from us, couldn’t match the one they’d erected next to us.

My daughter kept rolling her eyes at them. I suppose to a twenty-year-old young woman, two fifty-somethings feeling each other out and acting as if no one else is playing doesn’t sit well.

My back started screaming after two hours of sitting semi-upright, but I did sit up straighter as the band played “Yellow.” However, the song I really noticed that night was “Clocks,” a song from their 2002 album, A Rush of Blood to the Head:

“Confusion never stops Closing walls and ticking clocks Gonna come back and take you home I could not stop that you now know…”

The projected screens showed a rush of time, clocks spinning, the world passing even faster. I kept thinking that this meant something beyond the obvious way that we understand time elapses while we’re so busy surviving. While we try to withstand the constant patter of two people who are only trying their best to impress, to not leave themselves out or behind.

I remember that night hearing my daughter singing to many of Coldplay’s songs, as I would have had I been her age, as I do now when I’m in my car alone and no one else can hear me — a lone tree, falling. My daughter has a melodious voice and I’m not sure she realizes it. So let me say here, that for me, the Coldplay show was worth it just to hear, above everything else, her love of music.

That translates, right? Live Music. Love.

Going to a show with friends.

As we walked away from the venue — and we had to cross strange barriers in the parking lot — I saw a woman heading our way. She was tall, brown-haired, wearing white jeans, and was as striking a person as I’d seen in a very long time. Why she was walking counter to the crowd exiting, I’ll never know. I turned back to look after she passed. I wondered if Owen noticed her. He didn’t, he told me later, but my wife did:

“I’ve never seen you check out another woman before…but I don’t blame you. She was gorgeous.”

And she was, surely. I still wonder where she was going, passing us in that opposite way.

My wife drove us home, and her ears, and my ears, were still ringing, because whatever else you might think of Coldplay, their sound system was top-notch. I knew that my wife wanted no more music, so I decided to tune our old AM to WCBS to see if the Yankees had beaten the dreaded Red Sox (I know, but…). It was midnight, and the game was tied 0–0 in the twelfth inning. I wanted to keep listening, but I didn’t want to turn the volume up, and really couldn’t have turned it up loud enough because, you know:

In the back seat, the conversation was still going strong. I have no idea how they managed it, Owen and Karen, but they never ran out of things to say.

Until a couple of years later when Liz Taylor died, and Owen called me to tell me the news.

I suppose they liked the show that night, but seriously, John Denver could have been playing, or the reunited Beatles (two from the grave even), and it wouldn’t have mattered. Until it did.

I ran into Karen one more time before Owen passed. It turned out that we saw the same massage therapist, and so we spoke in the moments passing, her coming out and down the stairs, my entering and heading up. She asked about Owen, and I sadly informed her about the death of Owen’s beloved dog, Walker, whom Karen adored. Whom we adored. Whom Owen worshipped.

In fact, after Owen passed, our younger daughter said,

“Now he’ll be able to see Walker again.”

Gonna come back and take you home.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how clocks gauge our lives; how time keeps coming and going; how a concert that isn’t even in my top thirty all-time shows, still sticks so clearly.

How the sound never dies.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being a part of The Riff. Thanks especially to the body of writers here led by Noah Levy, and these are only some of the rest: Frank Mastropolo, Steven Hale, If Ever You’re Listening, Harry Male, Jessica Lee McMillan, Kathryn Dillon, Sarah Paris, TheWellSeasonedLibrarian, S.W. Lauden, Gary Chapin, Keith R. Higgons, MDSHall, Alexander Briseño, Mike Marolla, Kevin Alexander, Rob Janicke, Magda Szymanska, Cherie Jamison.

If you enjoyed this story, here’s another in the series: