The fans are getting older, including me.  Good to see a few people in the audience who must have been babies when “the Bends” came out.  But they were rare — just about all of us had gone through high school, college, and into their thirties with the band.

But I should really write about those lights.  Once the roadies had finished setting up the instruments, they dragged out what looked like a curtain of three-dozen long grey poles or tubes which hung suspended above the band.  Turns out these strange tubes were LCDs.  They lit up and glowed all throughout the night, from “15 Step” through “Videotape.”  At one point, during an organ solo, three tubes on the far left of the stage made an equalizer to rise and fall with the sound.  Another time, they created a waving line of pinpoint lights, like a space-age chandelier.  And then, at the end, the lights became an insane psychedelic technicolor swirl and I.  I was in a two-hour trance state.  I was in rainbows.

After, waiting in line on the 805 to come home, I regretted (briefly) that they performed neither ”Karma Police” nor “Idiotech.”  But I can forgive the oversight.  After all, how hard must it be for Thom Yorke to write a set list?  When you’ve got >60 brilliant tunes in your repertoire, it must be nearly impossible to choose which songs to leave out.  They could have done a cover of a Billy Ray Cyrus tune and it would have been gorgeous.

Best of all, the mob of nearly 10,000 San Diegans seemed almost excited.  Most of us made some noise to express our joy.  Almost as many bobbed our heads to the beat, and a few even tried to dance.  I had never seen the like; had given up on seeing San Diegans dance.  Such things are not done in San Diego.  Such is the power of one band.

There was a time, back when “Kid A” first arrived, I think, when I considered the possibility of writing a full-length research piece about this band from Oxford.  Wonder whatever happened to that essay.  It had something to do with pregnancy and heterosexual relationships and the postmodern inversion of the love song, which in turn implied a reversal of Petrarch’s trope of divine love.  Or something like that.  Should see if I can dig that up somewhere.  I could use a good laugh.