STP on NYE

11 days into the new year and I'm finally sitting down to blog. For shame! But in my defense, I was trying to avoid the resolution blogging cliche. Not a good enough excuse? Fine. Take this:

New Year's Eve rocked! For Christmas, my mom got Joe tickets to see Stone Temple Pilots on NYE, so we loaded up on Advil and water in anticipation of the night to come and headed to Club Nokia for a rockin' night! (Note: not to be confused with the Nokia Theatre)

Our tickets were crappy in the sense that we were told the event was almost sold out and so we would have to sit in the wheelchair accessible seating and have chairs brought in. After making our way through the security line and finding our supposed seats, we found them already occupied by people in wheelchairs. Go figure.

Luckily, a very nice usher asked us if we needed help, and after explaining the situation to her she said they never should have sold us those seats. She then led us to new seats that were AWESOME! Mind you, anywhere you sit in Club Nokia is awesome- even the seats we originally had. But these were capital AWESOME!

We scurried off to grab drinks and found ourselves at a magical bar! I deem it magical because the bartender was sweet as pie and made one of the best lemon drops I've ever had! As a self-proclaimed lemon drop aficionado, let me tell ya, good ones are hard to come by.

Back to our seats we went, only to have that same usher rush over to us again. She was extremely apologetic as she explained that the row she put us in was actually sold out and she'd have to move us back one row. We didn't care one bit. What's a single row to us, who had recently been on the sidelines? Even though we tried to convince her that it was no biggie, she still wanted to make it up to us by giving us VIP access to their lounge upstairs. Okay, if you insist ;)

We still had a fair amount of time before the show, so we took our time finishing our drinks and then went to the VIP lounge to see what it was all about. To be perfectly honest, it was lame. Overly crowded, lackadaisically vibed, burnt out bartenders and undrinkably bad $11 lemon drops that made me want to vomit. We sat down long enough to snap a picture and were over it.

We were smart and hit up the bar one last time before the show started because A) no way were we missing any of the show, B) we did have to drive home in a few hours, and C) we couldn't even begin to fathom how crowed it would be as it got closer to midnight. So 3 glasses of champagne later (they gave us a free glass!) and we were back in our seats. We stowed 2 of the glasses under our seats for later use ;)

There were 2 opening bands but I really only remember the second band, Billy Boy on Poison. They were uber everything great! Highly entertaining! I just tried to post a video of them playing that night, but don't know how to (or even if I can) embed something from Youtube. You can find them on myspace here though.

And then it happened ... STP began to play. I knew I liked them. I mean, I really liked them. But it wasn't until then that I realized how much I loved them! They played all my favorites and gave me one of my best concert moments, which was laying my head back on Joe with my eyes closed during "Creep". Thank you STP :)We rang in the New Year with great music, kisses, champagne and balloons! It was truly the best new Year's Eve I've ever had!