When Wilco Played 'The Brit'
Shannon and I were excited to learn that Wilco was going to come back to our state in the fall, this time at the Brit Festival Pavilion in Jacksonville, Oregon. It was the second time we arranged to travel to their show during that year. The first time was in February when Shannon was still pregnant, and we ended up backstage thanks to Wilco’s band member Mikal Jorgensen.
We were lucky to find childcare, and we made our way for a weekend escape to southern Oregon, where we planned on hanging out with Shannon’s friend Ian and his girlfriend.
“Don’t expect us to end up backstage again,” Shannon said while I was driving to Jacksonville with Ian driving his car behind. She tweeted Mikal, saying that she was looking forward to seeing the band again. He quickly responded saying that there will be guest passes at will call for all four of us. It was a great moment, we pulled over to give the good news to our travel partners, where we were jumping around like teenagers, excited about the news.
Jacksonville’s live music scene was an unexpected and refreshing experience for me. The cute little town just outside of Medford, Oregon seemed to be a community that fully embraced local live music, unlike what we were experiencing with Bend City Council at the time. The town provides a great music tourism destination for music fans of all genres.
We enjoyed a great dinner, and then headed over to the Brit Pavilion early so we could secure our position on the ground next to the stage. That’s where we discovered line-sitters, very clever local people offer to sit in line for you while you go enjoy a beer and food downtown. So, we hired a line-sitter and went for a walk to enjoy a local craft beer.
The venue is a very unique way to experience music, with the artist playing to the crowd up front at nearly eye-level on the ground, It was a great show, with a much more relaxed, but tighter presentation of their album “Whole Love”. While waiting for the crowd to thin out, the venue had all the people with guest access to stand in line. We discovered that Rainn Wilson, from the hit television series The Office was in the crowd behind us.
We then made our way into a backstage area, a large room on the other side of the stage with couches. The band and crew were walking around, and for the first time, I was kind of star struck. I asked John Stirratt, the bass player of the band to sign our show poster that we purchased earlier, and I was really tonged tied. We spent the rest of our time hanging out with our host Mikal talking about random stuff. Jeff wasn’t around again, that didn’t bother us.
As time went on, Shannon and I coordinated a majority of our family vacations around Wilco shows. It may seem really odd to some people, but Wilco became our family band and enabled us to introduce amazing places and people around the country to our children. Mikal was always gracious when Shannon reached out, and when he could, we’d end up hanging out with the band after the show.