MPC: Crack a Can
Pop-up tour diary day 5/8
Welcome to Metal Prism Chutes, an eight-day pop-up newsletter from the Wilco/Waxahatchee Southern tour.
If you crack a can of pop in the catering room at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex—a converted dance rehearsal studio with twenty-five-foot ceilings and a linoleum floor—you’ll hear it reverberate for like a jillion seconds until it fades into a quiet mist.
Yesterday was our second attempt at a Birmingham show. The first take, on May 2, was at an outdoor venue and it was rained out. This one would’ve been rained out too if it weren’t for the BJCC’s majestic, aging cinderblock walls. The site of Katie’s first dance recitals as a kid.
The building was built in the ’70s for almost $1 billion in today-dollars. I’m sorry to say this, Birmingham, but the Complex gives off less of a “gem of the community” feeling and more of a “dilapidated Soviet satellite state monument” feeling today. But. It’s still hosting shows, still making art possible!
Katie bought Birmingham’s most delicious strawberry cake for Liam’s birthday. We feasted, we grilled, we suffused our skin with sticky Alabaman air. And chuted back to the East, for North Carolina today.
—Spoon
Thank goodness for the MPC because I was in constant wonder about what BJCC stood for! Also, re: Soviet-esque concrete bunker-type structures, ask one of the Wilcos about the place they once played in Zagreb, Croatia (which I think was actually a Soviet complex of some sort)…😂
Two of my children graduated high school in the same room at the BJCC where y'all played last night. That history made me worry about weird vibes for me, but the bonus is that both bands SOUNDED INCREDIBLE in that concert hall. Come back to Bham anytime!