Mrs C and I went to see Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 at the Cat's Cradle last Friday. This is the 5th time we've seen Robyn, but the first time we've seen him with a band. And this band was: Scott McCaughey (of the Minus 5, and formerly Young Fresh Fellows) and Bill Rieflin (also of the Minus 5 but who also played in a bunch of "industrial" bands from the early 90's, including Ministry and KFMDM, and is the unofficial replacement for Bill Berry of REM - what a resume!); and then Peter Buck, who also plays in the Minus 5 but is best known as being the guitar player for R.E.M.. So, not only did I get to see one of my all-time favorite songwriters, Robyn, but I got to see one of my all-time favorite guitar players, Peter Buck. His playing on the first five or so R.E.M. records is just awesome. He's not a flashy player, just a very tasty and melodic one. And, because we got there early (first in line!), we were front and center, leaning on the stage - no watching from the back of the room this time.

It's hard to overstate how thrilled I was to see Peter Buck playing those songs. He's played on Robyn's records before the Venus 3 (much to the surprise of the astonished guy who asked Buck to autograph 'the only thing he had with him', the cassette insert from Robyn's Globe Of Frogs - "I'll sign anything, but I did play on this one. See, here's the credit," Buck said, pointing to his name in the list of guest musicians), so hearing him play some of that stuff was cool. And we also got to see him play parts that David Rawlings (another of my favorite guitar players) played on Spooked, which was also cool. I was hoping they'd do an R.E.M. song, but no luck there. Buck's pretty low-key on-stage - not a lot of jumping around; he just chimes away with that semi-hollow Epiphone 12-string (or sometimes the Rick' 6-string, below).

The guy who played bass and did backup vocals is the singer from the Minus 5, Scott McCaughey. He played guitar and sang lead on one of the encores, a rockin little Minus 5 song called "Aww Shit Man". He was fun to watch.

Like I said, we were very close.

While the whole thing was great, perhaps the high point of the show, for me, was one of the encores: 8 Miles High. Both Robyn and Peter Buck play a lot of high jangly Byrds-style stuff anyway, so a Byrds song seems like a natural choice. And when they did that classic beautiful lead, in harmony... yum.

I was interested to see that Robyn was using the same amp as mine (Fender 1x12 "Hot Rod Deluxe") and a blue Telecaster Plus (my Tele+ is black). Great minds...

At the end of the show, my sweet wife grabbed the set list off the stage, and we got them all (less the drummer, who wouldn't come out) to sign it.

There was an opening band, but, well... let's not talk about them.