The 6th stop on the Hello Gone Days tour brought Dashboard Confessional, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, and Armor for Sleep to Columbus, OH on Monday, August 8th, 2022
Rage Against the Machine’s sophomore studio release was named to show what Ronald Reagan called Russia could also be applied to the U.S. Evil Empire protested the U.S. – in it’s military spending, economic inequality, domestic violence and a lot more. A few songs are on a personal level like Snakecharmer and Born of a Broken Man, but every word has purpose and meaning, as we all should.
Last night in Columbus, it was a heavy 98• spring day. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power in the late afternoon, and are still without power as I write this. Unaware of the situation, I parked my car on the street and checked out the venue’s website. Where previously the page announced the show along with the opener’s name, it now read ‘The Unlikely Candidates is Still Happening’.
Recently I listened to an unknown satellite station in a bar, where I heard an entire Weezer concert set from their current tour. It made me think I should check out this year’s Spring tour with the Pixies. During their March 20th performance in Columbus, Weezer played music picked from their entire discography. There were a few LPs omitted, that I have only recently gone back to find I really enjoy, but you can’t please everyone all of the time. There are so many songs that I love by Weezer, it is naive of me to believe they could play a show of just my favorites. I don’t think they have that much time to perform. They would have to continue playing even while the workers are going home.
The loudest sound in downtown Columbus is the freight train. It’s a howling menace claiming its territory at a leisurely pace. As It thunderously coasts through Columbus, it emits a rhythmic, yet abrasive screeching. This echoes throughout the city as the metal wheels of each car grind the metal track that guides it. The intrusive scraping is magnified at every uneven stretch. One such section occurs right outside of Promowest’s Express LIVE! concert venue. On the second Weds in August this year, the train was silenced for a few hours by Lindsey Stirling’s inspiring outside performance.
On a warm summer night in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the Foo Fighters transformed Blossom Music Center into one of rock's finest cathedrals. With The Struts opening and Dave Grohl leading the full six-piece lineup through nearly three hours of music, the Concrete and Gold Tour stop was everything a Foo Fighters show promises — and then some.
Some productions announce themselves before the headliner ever appears. At FirstEnergy Stadium on July 17, 2018, the stage itself was the opening argument — a structure so deliberately conceived that it functioned less like a platform and more like a manifesto rendered in steel, light, and LED.
Camila Cabello and Charli XCX opened the evening, each bringing their own focused intensity to a crowd that had been gathering since afternoon. By the time the sun dropped behind the stadium rim, the room had been shaped into something ready.
Then Taylor Swift walked in.
The Reputation tour was built on a single premise: that Swift had earned the right to author her own story. The production honored that premise at every turn. Over 10,000 square feet of video surfaces wrapped a stage floor that was itself a screen, all beneath a structure standing 110 feet tall and rigged with more than 1,200 touring lights. The V-shaped screen wall split into flanking panels on either side, putting Swift's image in the peripheral vision of every seat in the building. No matter where you stood, she was in front of you. From the floor, with a camera up, the effect was total — the kind of scale that doesn't compress into a frame and demands you pause just to take it in.
Swift opened with "…Ready For It?" and moved immediately into "I Did Something Bad," setting a pace that never once felt like performance for its own sake. Every song had a reason to be where it was. A medley of "Style," "Love Story," and "You Belong With Me" reminded the room how long this catalog runs deep, while the piano moment — a quiet, devastating bridge between "Long Live" and "New Year's Day" — stilled sixty thousand people into something close to reverence.
The Reputation tour was built on a single premise: that Swift had earned the right to author her own story. The production honored that premise at every turn. Over 10,000 square feet of video surfaces wrapped a stage floor that was itself a screen, all beneath a structure standing 110 feet tall and rigged with more than 1,200 touring lights. The V-shaped screen wall split into flanking panels on either side, putting Swift's image in the peripheral vision of every seat in the building. No matter where you stood, she was in front of you. From the floor, with a camera up, the effect was total — the kind of scale that doesn't compress into a frame and demands you pause just to take it in.
Swift opened with "…Ready For It?" and moved immediately into "I Did Something Bad," setting a pace that never once felt like performance for its own sake. Every song had a reason to be where it was. A medley of "Style," "Love Story," and "You Belong With Me" reminded the room how long this catalog runs deep, while the piano moment — a quiet, devastating bridge between "Long Live" and "New Year's Day" — stilled sixty thousand people into something close to reverence.
As a Columbus-based photographer working the floor that night, what the lens kept returning to wasn't the stage — it was the faces. The crowd at a Taylor Swift show carries a reputation of its own, but any preconception dissolved the moment sixty thousand people opened their mouths in unison. Age, background, the reason they'd come — none of it was visible once the music started. Even the fathers who had shown up quietly, simply so their daughter could be there with her closest friends, knew every word. Every single one.
The evening also carried a footnote worth noting: Cleveland was the city where Swift performed "Babe" — her collaboration with Sugarland — live for the very first time. Those present didn't know in the moment they were hearing a premiere. That's the kind of detail that only sharpens with time.
Swift closed the night with fireworks and a momentum that had been earned, not manufactured. "And in the death of her reputation, she truly felt alive" — her own words, projected as she left the stage. At the time, it read like a conclusion. In retrospect, it was more of an introduction.
Act 1
reputation (Video Introduction)
Act 2
Look What You Made Me Do (Interlude)
Look What You Made Me Do (with Tiffany Haddish speech)
Act 3
Shake It Off (with Charli XCX and Camila Cabello)
Dancing With Our Hands Tied (Acoustic)
Babe (Acoustic; Taylor Swift debut)
Act 4
Act 5
Long Live / New Year's Day (On piano)
Act 6
Why She Disappeared
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together / This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
If you’ve had the misfortune of traveling with me, you know things don’t go as planned. I don’t mean you forgot to pack your deodorant and you have to make time to pick some up near your destination. I mean, you find out that your cousin Eddie has Asteroids, and you arrive at Wally World to find the park is closed. I’ve been photographing music festivals since 2014, where at my first festival, I fell asleep transferring files from my camera to my laptop. This caused the battery to die on my camera before the headliner performed on the last day—novice mistake. The next year, I bought a fancy, bluetooth hard drive that I essentially catapulted into the rain on the second day. None of the files were salvageable. In Chicago, I was pick-pocketed on the L and lost my tickets and car keys. I couldn’t go back to the show, or drive home.
Green Day is the only band I can remember where I was when I first heard them. No, I wasn’t first on the scene. It was the latter half of 1993 at two in the morning. I was staying over at my friend Buz’s house. We spammed the Breeders Last Splash during another evening of shared drawing space on his drafting table. Buz had already gone to bed while I was just finishing up. In the 90’s, we had something that would intermittently report on music called Music Television. It was here were they introduced Green Day’s live performance at a festival and played Longview. I bought the album as soon as it came out.
was able to follow up on his interview from last year’s Nelsonville Music Festival when they made their way to Columbus’ Rumba Café. Mackenzie Howe and Sharon Silva were available for questions.
Twenty thousand seats is a long way for a performance to travel. The back of the Schottenstein Center sits closer to the parking lot than the stage, and most bands lean on spectacle to close the distance — IMAG screens, runways into the crowd, fireworks on the downbeats. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had the screens and used them sparingly. What they brought to close the gap was a bassist.
Flea came out in a sleeveless patchwork vest and matching pieced pants — hot pink, teal, and striped green panels stitched into something closer to a quilt than a costume. The cut of the vest framed a portrait tattoo of Jimi Hendrix on his upper right arm, visible from the pit and implied from the seats. His hair carried faint leopard spots, small and deliberate. Teal Adidas sneakers with red laces finished the outfit, and those shoes did real work. Over the course of "Snow ((Hey Oh))," twosongs in, he left the ground often enough that a single photographer in the pit — working one camera, one lens — came away with five separate jumps clean in the frame, knees tucked into his chest, bass held at a different angle in each one. Five leaps, five decisions to be ready, five shutter clicks that caught him suspended before his own weight could catch up. He was legible from the rafters, which is the job when the room is this size, and he made the job look like a choice.
That physicality would be a novelty act if the playing underneath it were ordinary. It was the opposite. Flea's runs on "Suck My Kiss" carried both muscle and slack, shaping the pocket in real time, pushing Chad Smith forward on some phrases and settling behind him on others. "Dark Necessities" turned on his melodic line, which carried the song's weight while Anthony Kiedis worked the hook above it. Kiedis arrived in a red tee, dark shorts, a black ball cap, and knee-high patterned socks covered in daisies, peace-sign hands, and '60s flower-power motifs. He let the songs and the socks do the costuming.
That physicality would be a novelty act if the playing underneath it were ordinary. It was the opposite. Flea's runs on "Suck My Kiss" carried both muscle and slack, shaping the pocket in real time, pushing Chad Smith forward on some phrases and settling behind him on others. "Dark Necessities" turned on his melodic line, which carried the song's weight while Anthony Kiedis worked the hook above it. Kiedis arrived in a red tee, dark shorts, a black ball cap, and knee-high patterned socks covered in daisies, peace-sign hands, and '60s flower-power motifs. He let the songs and the socks do the costuming.
Then there was Smith's kit. The kick drum, front and center, carried the official Michigan block-M logo. Smith himself was in a scarlet sleeveless shirt and a scarlet backwards cap — the color of the Ohio State Buckeyes, in the arena the Buckeyes play in, in one of the two cities where the Ohio State–Michigan rivalry hits hardest. Smith was raised in the Detroit area and is a lifelong Michigan fan, which makes every Columbus tour stop a kind of home-field provocation for him. When he closed the night with a solo drum coda of "Michigan Fight Song" — "The Victors," track 19 on the setlist — it was the punchline to a bit he had been telegraphing all evening: wear their color, play their arena, beat their rival's fight song out of a drum that bears their rival's logo. The crowd's groan was the warm kind, the groan you save for an in-law you actually like, and it was the loudest sign of the night that the band was playing to Columbus rather than at it.
Josh Klinghoffer deserves his own paragraph, because he earned it. Stepping into a guitar chair previously held by a generational player is a real job, and Klinghoffer spent the night playing his own game. One frame of him catches his hair mid-flight, a half-smile on his face, bathed in deep purple wash, working the fretboard of a beat-to-hell Stratocaster whose finish had been chewed down to bare wood around the pickups — a guitar that had clearly lived a life. On "Otherside" he handled the familiar figures with a light touch that let the room sing the chorus back louder than the PA. His solos across the night were conversational — he answered Flea's phrases, set up Smith's fills, and stepped forward when the arrangement asked him to. The cover of Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)," mid-set, landed because of his touch on the verses, a soft-shoe chord voicing that gave Kiedis room to croon the thing straight. Then came the encore. The band left him alone on stage to open it with "Heaven" — a Talking Heads cover, played solo, and a live debut at that. Handing a guitarist the opening slot of the encore, unaccompanied, on a song the band has never performed before, is a vote of confidence that travels. He cashed it.
The lighting design worked in long washes and slow color shifts, which gave the stage the quality of weather. "Goodbye Angels" sat second in the encore and pulled the band into a deep wash that made the four players look like silhouettes of themselves. The Schottenstein Center is a college basketball arena; across nineteen items on the setlist, it became a club with bad sightlines, which is the highest compliment an arena show can earn.
Nineteen tracks, two covers, one meticulously staged rivalry joke, and a bassist who treated every measure like it was being photographed.