30-VII-2000.

The Jethro Tull concert at Wolf Trap, near Vienna VA. Go and I got into the car after lunch, and drove to DC first. Somehow I found, on the memorized map and dead reckoning, the crazy house where Burt lives... as a subtennant. Most of the house is for Zyanna and her husband; the big room above Burt's space is the music room, where the band practices. The house is literally crazy, something like a fairy tale castle combined with witch's hut, with a hallway connecting the main house with the smaller house on the hill, where the servants used to live when it was built. Spent some time with them, took a bunch of pictures (one of them was included on the sleeve of her next album). Her voice is somewhere close to Nico's, and the music, and the whole design - name, imagery, album sleeves, website, texts - are somewhat gothic, also close to what Nico made after VU. OTOH, it's sufficiently different to stand on its own. It's been a while since I had a chance to be a rocker's photographer, so I enjoyed every bit of the session. Including the couple of smokes we had on the side terrace during the brief cloudburst. The rainbow I saw then is not on the picture where I expected it to be, or it's just barely visible if you know where to look.

Then went with Burt to Rosslyn station to pick Ricardo. There he got lost, went to find his brother who'll also attend... We buzzed around the station until he appeared. Interesting place, modern design and architecture, and in a niche on the side there was a mobile sculpture of sorts, a black cylinder about a meter wide and at least three meters tall, all full of holes, and with a pointed source of light such that it would project text on the wall as it slowly rotates. In several languages. I memorized some bits, and later found out that it was the text from Georgia guidestones. In the following years I'd try to find it again, but no web search would find it, among hundreds of photos not one would show it, never happened. Yet I clearly remember it, and how I read the text as it scrolled sideways, and how we found then that about a dozen of these were scattered across the States.

And then the three of us went to... dunno, his place or somewhere. I still don't quite understand how I navigated and found places to park in DC, but it worked.

At the concert... Wolf Trap is just a huge hillside, a kind of amphitheatre on grass, probably engineered by backhoes a bit, and a proper stage with all the lights. The parking is huge, but then it's simply a piece of wooden fence around a grass field, plain dirt, no pavement. Luckily, what rain happened to fall didn't even soak the dust, it just washed the air. Even the grass was dry to sit on. I sat with Burt while Go was with Ricardo elsewhere.

The audience was an incredible mix of kids and boomers and any age in between. I've even seen a few Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs. And the top moment was when Ian strummed the first chords for "Thick as a brick" - the collective aaaahhhh was perfectly synchronized on four seconds after the start. Everyone recognized it.

The concert as such was what you'd expect from Tull - everything thoroughly rehearsed, no improvisation, every joke told exactly in same accent as in Baltimore or San Fran or Vancouver. I've downloaded the video of it, from somewhere, it's identical to what I've seen. Not saying it's not good - Tull is always good on the stage - it's just not quite that old rock'n'roll anymore, there's nothing happening. It's just an instance of "this is what we prepared for you". At times gets you wishing that some amplifier would burn, or some light would unscrew and fall.

Leaving, we somehow managed to find Go and Ricardo. So she went back to A-burg with me, and Burt hitched a ride with Ricardo (or vice versa, Ricardo and Burt with his brother).

Later I collected the photos, such as they turned out, and hung them on the then edition of sGradlj.com, and shared the link with Zyanna, Go and Burt. Everyone always liked to view the pictures, and to have them, and now here's the internet enabling me to make it right away and for free. This is where the custom began, and I'll keep doing that for many years, to publish the shots a day or two after an event and share the link with those present.

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Mentions: 01-I-2005., Annenburg (A-burg), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jethro Tull, Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), sGradlj.com, Zyanna, in serbian

18-VII-2020 - 18-II-2026