#bragging. It was awesome. Seventh row! Right behind Jimmy Kimmel! Openers Grizzly Bear brought Feist onstage and Girls only got to play for 20 minutes! We rushed the stage for Phoenix. Holy crap. There's a bit of Disney magic to Phoenix, Frenchmen with the same buttondowns show after show and a wildly popular song inexplicably called "Funky Squaredance." Emotional catharsis through Phoenix is usually more of FADER editor Peter Macia's thing, but when you get on an airplane to see a concert, it's ok to buy that bucket of Bud Light despite an extreme lack of tolerance and a strong penchant to sing along. It's better than that—Phoenix encourages it, a band somewhere between personal cheerleaders and hosts of all French pop karaoke party. As good as they are on their own, Phoenix's reinforcement of how good you think they are is just as monumental, their total enjoyment predicated on yours. So when they refuse to stop playing, it's something like a giant pat on the back to the entirety of Hollywood Bowl, something like four million people. To break that fourth wall, after the encore and after the encore's encore, they invited the crowd onstage and, because we are fans, we rushed. Ostensibly, they were playing "1901," but the song had really ended minutes before, with Phoenix now just in a pantomime of performance. It didn't matter, to them or to us. The photo above is the only one we got off from the stage, an appropriate blur of people just as excited to see us up there as we were to be there, continued communion with whoever. You don't have to be someone to be someone, just go see Phoenix. After the jump, take a look at a video from the stage someone else shot and try to find us. If you can't, we helped you out.
