The other night Richard and I went out with our friends Christian and Melissa who always seem to have the best tickets for everything. Lucky for us they call us every now and then to join them. Especially last Thursday night for this!
We met them at their incredibly cool apartment in the incredibly cool Eastern building downtown. This is taken from the roof, suckahs! I’ve always wanted to be inside this building and it didn’t disappoint. We also learned that Johnny Depp lives in the penthouse. But we didn’t spot him in the lobby….
After an awesome dinner at The Parish (sorry opening band!) we headed to the Orpheum, which is literally across the street from the Eastern building, and found our seats just in time for the first song. It turns out that seventh row center at the Orpheum is really fucking awesome. Hello, Alice!
What a fitting location for the master of horror-show rock – an old vaudeville theater with tons of character and great acoustics. And our seats were so great! Not that we were sitting…
I could have thrown something at him, literally. But I’ve learned my lesson on concert projectiles – we’ll save that for another post. Besides Alice and his crew were much too busy throwing things at us. Aside from the Dickies, I have never seen this many props at a rock show. I mean, I knew it would be like that, but still – he threw dollar bills for Billion Dollar Babies, draped a snake around his neck for Devil’s Food, morphed into a guy in a big monster suit for Feed My Frankenstein, donned a strait-jacket for Ballad of Dwight Frye, swung a cane around for No More Mr. Nice Guy, carried a crutch for Eighteen and at the end, an insane amount of streamers and confetti spewed out of the stage canons during School’s Out. A rock spectacle, people!
And Alice looks fucking great. We should all be so lucky as to be belting out tunes to adoring crowds at 65. Secretly my favorite part was when I caught him sliding down one of his three giant belts to cover a little pot belly. Cute!
Not so cute was the guy in front of us who was dropping fart bombs left, right and center, mostly center. During He’s Back (The Man Behind The Mask) Richard pointed to the guy in front of us and said, “He’s the Man Behind The Gas.” Seriously the guy farted all night long and it was disgusting, not to mention inescapable.
Anyway, in the middle of the set a voice from beyond announced to Alice that he would soon be joining the other Hollywood Vampires (his drinking buddies from the 70’s) and they proceeded to churn through a medley of songs by his friends – the dead rock giants Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix. This all seemed very unnecessary to me since Alice has so many great songs of his own, like Elected, that he didn’t play – but hey – they’re pretty cool friends, right? This medley was also the moment they brought up a mysterious fourth guitar player in a floppy suede hat. Wait, who is that? It’s Johnny Depp! We had to laugh, having hoped to spot him in the lobby across the street. He must have sneaked past us!
Here’s Johnny Depp in his floppy hat. He was very low-key on stage and stayed for the rest of the set which was pretty cool. Far from hogging a brief selfish spotlight, he hung around and was basically just part of the band, looking slightly terrified to do his solo. Adorable!
Afterwards we went back to the Eastern pad to try and catch Johnny Depp in the lobby so he would invite us to the after-party. That didn’t happen, but we did see him on the security camera scuttling into his apartment with his bodyguard and girlfriend. Close enough. It was way past my bedtime anyway.
Thanks for the nightmare, Alice!
And thanks to Kathryn for getting these pictures off my damn phone.
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