Sour and sweet

Olivia Rodrigo fever hits Denver

0

Bursts of wind inspired intermittent screams from a mass of young people and their parents as they stood in line outside Mission Ballroom for the second show of a two-night run by Olivia Rodrigo. The line snaked from 41st Street out along Brighton Boulevard.

“The survey is over,” my 12-year-old, Sidney, joked as we waited in the cold. “It’s only teenage girls here.” 

As we neared the entrance, Sidney pointed at a nearby ambulance and said, “That’s in case some teenage girls kill each other tonight.”

The 19-year-old Rodrigo—who grew up in the idyllic California resort town of Temecula and moved to Los Angeles as a preteen to pursue acting—packed throngs of wailing teenage girls into the 3,950-capacity Mission in Denver on Monday and Tuesday, just a week after winning three Grammy awards for Sour. The angsty debut album catapulted Rodrigo from Disney Channel star to rock star overnight, and Colorado girls flocked to the Mission to see their heroine—smartphones in hand to capture Rodrigo, as well as photos of their own happy faces.

22-year-old opener Gracie Abrams, the Los Angeles-native daughter of Star Wars and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams, received a rousing reception from the Denver audience as she jubilantly sang her pop-rock. Wearing a sport coat, bikini top and baggy leather pants and flanked by a guitar-keyboardist and a drummer, Abrams smiled and often sang in a baby voice not unlike early Billie Eilish, spinning tales of curfews, 21st birthdays and lovers she’s “sorry” live “in Glendale or somewhere far.”

Abrams’ set was tight and impressive, and she seemed gleeful grabbing phones from fans to take selfies while singing. 

“You guys are really nice people,” Abrams told the screaming crowd. “Thank you for living here.”

Sharing her own excitement about Rodrigo, and participating in her “Sour Tour,” Abrams told the crowd Rodrigo’s show was going to be “so epic you will lose your shit.”

Abrams slid behind the big black curtain separating her opening-act setup from Rodrigo’s much larger setup, leaving her bandmates to help roadies quickly clear that part of the stage, and around 9pm the lights went down, the sound of “Olivia” by One Direction faded and the familiar distorted-guitar chugging of “Brutal” pulsed.

My kid, and many others, stood up and waved at Rodrigo as she stalked near our seats while singing, dressed in a purple-heavy outfit that would not have been out of place in Britney Spears’ provocative “Baby One More Time” video. Like Spears, Rodrigo made the leap from Disney to music stardom, but the hard-rocking and self-contemptuous “Brutal” seemed like a strange juxtaposition with sexy-schoolgirl clothes.

“That child has high heels on,” Sidney quipped about a concertgoer younger than her. There were notable outfits all around, maybe including Sidney’s: a cozy Platform 9 ¾ shirt I got her at the King’s Cross station in London and a comfy fleece we picked up on a cold night in San Francisco last fall. Appropriateness of dress was tangible last night, as the girls in line outside with crop tops, shorts and no coats looked miserable in the freezing wind.

Inside, Rodrigo wondered “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” and mused “I hate every song I write.” With its jaded take on life and love, Rodrigo’s “Brutal” inspired me to introduce Sidney to Veruca Salt’s “Seether” last year. Rodrigo is captivating in the way someone like Gavin Rossdale was captivating in the footsteps of Nirvana, or like Chris Martin was in the hole Radiohead left by refusing to capitalize on stardom by chasing pop stardom. But she’s also just plain captivating.

Sure, Rodrigo plays the angsty rocker well and commands a large audience, but she also closed the curtain on her band at one point and delivered a couple gorgeous solo performances with nothing but an acoustic guitar and her voice. 

“Drivers License” was also impressively delivered and—like some of Abrams’ singing and on-stage banter about feeling sad, alone and anxious—brought Billie Eilish to mind. Eilish has begun to stray from the baby-voiced singing of her first two smash-hit albums, but the mark that it has left, along with her outspokenness about teenage anxiety and depression, is obvious in the work of Rodrigo and many others. Seeing Rodrigo a few years after Eilish exploded is not unlike seeing Blink 182 a few years after Green Day broke through with Dookie, but the diversity of Rodrigo’s musical talent— even if she played a one-hour set with no encore—proves she’s not just cashing in on the trail Eilish blazed.

But the biggest difference between Rodrigo and Eilish, let alone Kurt Cobain or Billie Joe Armstrong, is that when the songs about wanting to disappear end, she is downright sweet and  mannerly to the audience, like someone raised to be charming and courteous and/or someone raised in the entertainment business. Along with the cordial personality between songs, the more obviously pop stuff Rodrigo performs can seem as out of place after “Brutal” as a Bon Jovi song would’ve sounded during a Nirvana show. Still, the contrast is not off-putting – It’s just surprising.

After dedicating a cover of “Complicated” to Avril Lavigne, an artist Rodrigo said she admires, Rodrigo told the audience how much she loves her mother, and then launched into a song she said her mother had turned her onto. It was “Seether.” Sidney looked at me and I felt happy, and right, and old.

Some of Rodrigo’s songs have good lessons for kids, like not being “the kinda girl who needs to be saved” and embracing time alone, but as my sixth grader and I left Mission Ballroom, I wished Rodrigo had taught her fans something else by pulling a Jack White and outlawing the use of phones during the concert. Sidney is not allowed to have a smartphone, so I cherished the ability to witness my child experiencing a memorable concert directly (with wonder as well as discernment) instead of through a phone, or while taking selfies. 

I was shocked to see so many kids, and their parents right along with them, glued to their phones, mostly watching the show through the devices they were using to record it when they weren’t just taking selfies. To paraphrase Rodrigo, I just can’t imagine how you could be so OK with that.