Lights Up

You want to know what crazy looks like? Crazy is a crowd of 500 sleeping on a sidewalk in a shuttered, half-deserted city, one still struggling to regain electricity after the biggest power outage in American history. Crazy is a tourist from Georgia shouting down a police officer because he can't predict, as if by magic, how long the lights will be out. Crazy is a sweltering city, robbed of its air conditioning and flashing lights. Crazy is a fleet of stalled busses, trains, subway cars, and airplanes, part of the most intricate and comprehensive transportation system on earth. Crazy is Penn Station, New York City, operating with only dim emergency lighting. Crazy is the 300-gate Port Authority Bus Station, doors locked, ominous yellow police tape stretched across them.

And crazy is a girl, dizzy with exhaustion and dehydration, stumbling 80 blocks at 7:00 in the morning, wearing the work clothes she'd walked home in 12 hours earlier. She is trying to escape. To get off the island. She is not a pretty sight. She has spent the night sweating and crying in the darkness, listening to classic rock on her battery-powered radio, the one window in her tiny apartment stoppered by a silent 70-pound air conditioner. When the lights came back on at 4:00 am, she was wide-awake. There was no fanfare, no screaming or cheers. Just the lights on her alarm clock, gently blinking 12:00... 12:00... 12:00.

It was the first thought that caroused through her sleep-deprived mind when she saw the lights. A jolt, keen and painful like an electric shock, glorious thing: Lights are back. I'm going to Albany.

Grownup? To borrow vocabulary from the new-and-improved, mature Hanson: Fuck that.

The Escape

I tried to get out of New York twice that empty, odd morning, with its slicing sunshine and pearly blue skies. When I saw Port Authority, the people on the sidewalks, the barred store windows, Times Square looking like a decrepit, after-hours carnival, all dark marquis and busted lightbulbs, I let go.

I walked home. Turned up my AC, a feeble consolation prize. I got pizza at the shop next door, the only thing they were selling after most of their fresh ingredients went bad. I changed my clothes, finally.

And I made one last phone call.

"Is there any way I can buy a ticket from Manhattan to Albany? I know Port Authority is closed."

"You sure can, ma'am, but you have no place to pick it up."

"But can I leave from some other station? Chinatown, maybe?"

"Well Port Authority is closed, but the busses are running."

"They are?"

"The gates are closed, but the busses are picking people up outside the station. Give cash to the driver, and he'll take you to Albany."

"Cash."

"Yes. Exact change."

I shut off the AC, locked my apartment with its refridgeratorfull of rotting food, stalked out onto Broadway in my ugliest pair of jeans carrying nothing except my purse, $53 in cash, and my dying cell phone, stuck my hand in the air and uttered to the cab driver the seven most irrational syllables to escape my mouth since I became a New Yorker:

"To Port Authority, please."

What I found was Calcutta.

A narrow alleyway next to the station jammed with shouting people waving cash, lumbering busses, and frazzled police officers flagging them all in different directions. Even with the midday heat pressing hard, and the tourists antsy with rage and sleeplessness, I felt excellent, queasy with sleeplessness and high on the prospect of accomplishing something big: A Hanson concert amidst the carnage.

I knew I had the right bus when, among the hundreds of people salivating and screaming in that alley, I spotted the Hanson fans. Two of them. Right in front of me in line.

We have a look about us. A snarling, exhausted, desperate look. The look of too many nights spent wondering about the precise texture of the hair under Ike's bottom lip. Hanson fans, even after all these years, look remarkably like Hanson fans. So I eavesdropped on their conversations until I was sure.

"Can I ask who you guys are going to see tonight?"

A beat of hesitation. Always, that hesitation. "Hanson."

"Yeah. Me too."

Strip Club

It is the punchline to some horrible joke, something we giggled about years ago when Hanson was selling out the Hollywood Bowl:

Outside of Albany, NY, Hanson played in a strip mall. RVs and boats on one side, Jim's Canvas and Tarps on the other. I said it to Amanda four times, "This is not it. This just can not be it."

It was it.

We were early to pick up our tickets, and 85% of the crowd was already there. You nutcases, you. Without the comforts of a Ruby Tuesday's or even a Target or something, we tested the foam-cushion beds in the RVs and picked out houseboats—you know, for the next tour—then took our usual place at the end of the line.

A word, briefly, about the lonesome bitter end of the line: It's not so bad. You can breathe. You don't have to show up at the crack to get a prime spot there. You have an excellent view of all the desperate fools at the front of the line, and the best part: They still let you into the concert eventually.

There was a rumor flying outside of Northern Lights in scenic Cliffton Park, NY that night: Apparently the venue oversold the concert by 150 tickets. We have no idea if this is true, but after glancing at the signs that declared the club's maximum capacity to be 300, we didn't have much trouble believing it. There were girls everywhere. Drunk girls at the bar. Sober girls smashed against the stage. Overly warm girls passing out at the back of the house. Overly warm nauseous girls puking their guts out at the front of the house. It was all very rock and roll, but the lack of air conditioning, the absence of free water, and the excitement level of the crowd that night, which bordered solidly on psychotic, all conspired to create a pretty miserable atmosphere inside Northern Lights, even after the band took the stage.

Isaac Saves

Gone was the silence, and the keen audience attention we'd seen earlier in the week in Manhattan. Now, it was just screaming. Screaming like it was still 1997. Screaming at the very sight of them, not at the music, or the musicianship. Screaming like crazy people. Screaming like kids. It was worst during "Broken Angel," which turned into its own kind of Hanson Stupid Contest, a phenomenon that occurs mostly online these days: Girls screamed at Zac. Other girls screamed at them to shut up. And so on. And on, and on.

Standing there, wilting with exhaustion, the thought crossed my mind: This is not worth it. This is not worth the hours spent traveling, or the money, or the misery and general embarrassment of being one of These People: Clueless, misbehaved, delusional. Pick your ugly adjective. The very thing that keeps this very excellent band from the legitimacy it craves so badly. The problem is not Hanson or their music. It never has been. The problem is us.

In that moment, I hated us so badly. It spilled over: I hated Hanson. I hated their music. Maybe that's what made the other fans, thousands and thousands of them, go away. The need to have a discourse that doesn't include foot-stomping and hair-tearing. The need, so familiar to kindergarten teachers and stay-at-home moms, to converse with grownups. The need to be something more important than a lobotomized teenybopper.

One song changed everything. It took one verse, no more. The sweltering heat suddenly evaporated. The screaming ebbed into the background, an unimportant hum amidst the more powerful noise coming from the stage. "Call Me" is a sweet little Isaac song. Its melody is among Isaac's strongest. It evokes James Taylor, or something equally honest and comforting. And in three minutes, it transcended every bit of insanity flying so dangerously in the air. There is nothing particularly original about "Call Me," or its theme. But its swoon-y gentleness was enough to take the edge off the frazzled crowd.

The energy on the stage, even, shifted after that. Whether they were giddy from the overexcited crowd, or just plain overly warm, it seemed to register with Hanson that we were all in this, heat and misery alike, together. Zac started bounding around and yammering in ways we haven't seen from him since he was a hyperactive eleven-year-old, taking out his pre-adolescent frustration on unsuspecting journalists and snare drums. Taylor perched himself dangerously close to the edge of the stage, his body looming and huge and finally visible to everyone in the room, and let the girls maul him at will. From there out, they played hard enough to take the paint off the walls.

For "This Time Around," Isaac and Taylor were both on their feet, limbs flying, and the crowd roared the song back at them, loud enough to shake the ceiling fans in their sockets and frazzle venue security, who spent most of the night rescuing nauseous and half-unconscious girls from the collective human vice at the front of the house. It's as if Hanson was unhappy with the crowd's performance at the other shows, and decided to give us more guidance by letting Isaac lead one half of the room while Taylor handled the other. It worked. Sure enough, with Ike's help, the "Wont go down" half of the room made itself known.

Another musical highlight was "Lost Without Each Other," a charming, hyper little pop song that still swims in the nether-universe of the Woefully Unrecorded. That's why we spent half the tour calling it simply "That Katrina and the Waves song." It has an oldschool-Hanson spit-and-polish about it that bodes well for the new album. But then so much does.

"Dirrty" with the surprise factor sapped, was distinctly less fun, but no less fascinating in Albany. It made you consider, seriously, how much time they must have spent figuring out how to play it like a real song, instead of the drum-machine-filled crapfest that is the original version. For those who hadn't seen it a few days before at the China Club, the excitement level remained, and Hanson did sound solidly kinky. Whether the heat came from outside or in, however, is still up for grabs.

Crazy Beautiful

Our conversations with fans, before this show and at others, only served to bolster our growing negative feelings toward "us" part of the Hanson equation. Most of the nasty-tasting fan-generated venom these days is directed at none other than Mrs. Natalie Hanson and child, who've been making regular crowd appearances at these shows, and rightfully so. They are, after all, part of the Hanson family. And if Diana, Walker, and Jessica are welcome members of the in-house cheering section, Natalie and Ezra should be there too.

Not so, if you talk to a lot of fans, who either snicker openly over the salacious details, or see Natalie's presence as a vicious, deliberate tease. One fan said it to me: How dare she show her face?

Yeah. Because she's only like, his wife or something. A role that I'm sure is an easy one to fill when you're young, and a mom, and your equally young husband is at the center of a nightly, continuing feminine frenzy.

A lot of fans seem to think their devotion to this band bought them a ticket to judge as well. Every time I saw a fan walk up to her, and there were many at Albany, to gawk, or ask questions that no person with an ounce of propriety would pose to a total stranger, I thought, I don't want be a part of this anymore.

But something that night, and at other shows, sparked a bit of hope. The fans approach Natalie. They ask her questions and ask to see the baby and embarrass themselves in all sorts of unique ways. She still shows up, though, at almost every show, Ezra sleeping contentedly in her arms, wearing his baby-sized ear protectors, oblivious to the cacophony on the other side.