“Does anyone here have a weird relationship with their dad?” Phoebe Bridgers asked the sold-out Climate Pledge Arena on Friday night, and a wave of young voices erupted in a primal scream. Standing on a small spinning stage in the center of the crowd, Bridgers opened up about her own father. “He was… complicated,” she sighed. Although he instilled in her a love of music and leftist politics, he was often violent. “I’ve always thought that I’d rather die than be like that,” she said. “But then he died, and I felt a flood of empathy. That’s obviously what Lost Weekend is about.” Because of the album’s content, Bridgers shared that it was both unsettling to write and even more challenging to perform. “Eliminating cell phones on this tour was initially just a way for me to mitigate my fear of singing these songs live,” she explained, “but it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life.”
This no-phone/no-photography policy was the reason that my date for the evening was retired courtroom sketch artist Doug Keith. Since we always include photos with our live show reviews, I became fixated on the idea of hiring a professional sketch artist to cover the show with me and provide the imagery. I had seen fan-made art from the shows circulating on social media; would an artist—one who’s been trained to capture the energy of a scene—be able to document an arena concert? I searched “Seattle courtroom sketch artist” online and found an article mentioning Keith, who worked as a freelance sketch artist documenting trials for KIRO-TV, KOMO News, the Seattle Times, and more, back in the 1980s, even winning an Emmy for graphic design in 1982 at KIRO-TV. He appeared to be retired from courtroom depiction but was an active children’s book illustrator and garden art sculptor, with several other endeavors like museum dressing, custom-painted guitars, and playing in a band himself. When I nervously cold-called Keith to see if he was interested, he not only seemed enthusiastic about the idea, but also was familiar with Bridgers’s music (he likes “Motion Sickness”).
Keith and I arrived at the arena together right as the doors opened. As we waited in line for security, he remarked that he was probably the oldest person at the concert. There were times when I felt guilty for taking him on this adventure: seeing the large crowds and price-gouged snacks through his eyes made me realize just how much discomfort we accept in order to see our favorite pop stars. Keith and I fumbled through security—my bag was too big but they let me in anyway. Something in Keith’s pocket kept sounding the alarm (I realized later that it was his pencil sharpener). We said goodbye to our cellphones and locked them into little fabric bags called Yondr Pouches, secured with a magnetic lock that only employees could open. Inside, we were immediately met with a monstrous merch line and no place to put ourselves back together after the security fiasco. We made our way downstairs, where Keith found a standing table near the concession stand. He took out his sketchbook, pencils, and pastels, and began to capture fan costumes while I got in the merch line to buy my sister a gift.
The two merch lines on the second floor were so long that the ends of the lines briefly kissed. A girl in front of me flapped around her Yondr Pouch to the beat of an indie rock song that I couldn’t identify. The couple behind me fondled leaves on the plant wall and debated whether or not the foliage was real. At least a dozen young women wearing boygenius-style dress shirts and ties passed me—something I realized I hadn’t seen since the Avril Lavigne concert at Southcenter Mall in 2004. I also saw many different takes on Bridgers’s famous skeleton suit: bedazzled bone T-shirts, cozy-looking jumpsuits, and crocheted vests. There were almost too many alien antenna headbands to count. Elf ears were also popular. Perhaps the most impressive were the three separate people I saw dressed in full ghost sheets with the eyes cut out, replicating the Stranger in the Alps album cover. Niche costumes also appeared that I couldn’t identify: fuzzy red fox ears and tail, a full-body taco costume, and someone who painted their entire face blue.
I returned to Keith’s table with two beers and he cracked one open, remarking, “I could never drink a beer in my courtroom days.” All the waiting around gave me plenty of time to ask Keith about those days. He recalled being hired to sketch during a 1985 indictment of 10 (out of 23) neo-Nazis: “Each one of them had a lawyer, so it was like drawing the Sistine Chapel!” Keith also remembered a chilling moment when a convicted murderer, who he recalls being the last person in Washington to be sentenced to death by hanging—Charles Rodman Campbell—stared at him intensely while he sketched. “That guy was a real creep.”
We made our way through the tightly packed crowds to find our seats—a challenge, considering the arena was completely dark aside from thin sticks of light that surrounded opener Alex G in the center of the crowd. Something I had not considered about the presence of cell phones at concerts was how much light they emit. It then dawned on me that in movie theaters, opera productions, and Broadway shows, no-phone spaces don’t just eliminate distraction, but black out the rest of the world and allow the audience to escape their lives and put their full attention into the art in front of them a little bit.
While we waited for Phoebe, I watched the people around me play with lighters and ponder their Yondr Pouches. Without phones, we were eventually forced to entertain ourselves the old-fashioned way: talking to one another. The person in front of me showed me their merch haul. Sitting beside me was a fellow writer and his daughter—we discussed the best shows we’ve seen this year and our process for writing reviews. Eventually, someone in the crowd started a wave, and it circled around the arena at least a dozen times before arms got tired and it fizzled out.
Then, the lights shut off again. The giant igloo on the stage lit up. We heard Bridgers’s voice singing “The Outside,” but we couldn’t see where she was. “Is she going to be lifted down from the ceiling?” Keith asked me jokingly. The igloo then opened like a clamshell to reveal Bridgers in her full Hitchcock heroine beauty—perfectly waved platinum hair, a black minidress, and tears painted on with silver glitter. “What the fuck is up, Seattle!?” she screamed into the microphone. Fans roared Beatlemania-style as Bridgers went into “Motion Sickness.”
From the moment that Bridgers arrived onstage, I could see that this was a comically bad environment for drawing. Everyone stood up out of their seats, which made it impossible for Keith to sit and sketch. The lighting in the arena went from complete darkness to bright bursts of house lights. My eyes were struggling to adjust, and I knew Keith was experiencing the same. A close-up of Bridgers was projected in black and white on a curtain behind the stage, which could have been helpful if it weren’t for all the creases in the fabric that warped her image. All of this made for an amazing live spectacle, but an impossible drawing subject. “I could draw this guy,” Keith joked, pointing at the man standing in front of him who was blocking his view. Realizing that this was an absurd task, I encouraged Keith to put his sketch pad down and just enjoy the show, but he didn’t give up and completed two sketches of Bridgers by the end of the night.
Throughout the show, Bridgers moved back and forth from the main stage to a smaller B-stage, often by physically walking through the crowd greeting fans. On the B-stage, which slowly spun in the center of the pit, Bridgers sat cross-legged on the floor while playing an organ, then played an acoustic guitar beneath a UFO-like ray of light. As she sang the emotional “Still Standing,” fake snow and glittering sparklers fell around her.
Back on the main stage, Bridgers returned to her igloo. “I love introducing people to bands they wouldn’t hear about otherwise,” she said sarcastically. “This is Nirvana… you guys should check them out.” She then explained that the last time she sang this song was two months ago for BBC Radio 1, during which her appendix was “actively bursting” while she sang. “Hopefully nothing bad happens this time!” Bridgers’s rendition of the song was stunningly quiet and folk-influenced, bringing to mind Elliott Smith’s prolific live covers.
During her last song, “Scott Street,” a circular chain of young women began to dance down in the pit. Hundreds of fans held up paper hearts made of blue, green, and purple construction paper. Phoebe asked who coordinated the hearts and thanked the leader. She then graciously thanked the crowd for coming out and walked off the stage with no encores or fancy gimmicks (I love to see it!). I was struck by just how refreshingly authentic and in-the-moment she seemed—making jokes and connecting with the audience about childhood trauma and grief—compared to other pop stars, who are typically meticulously scripted and choreographed. I assume this is largely because they are aware that every move will be recorded and later scrutinized on social media. Without the looming presence of phones, Bridgers played the 17k+ crowd with the ease and freedom of a house show.
Exiting the show was another series of obstacles for me and Keith—leaving our seats was like trying to get off an airplane with people competing for a spot in the aisle, as was getting on the escalator to the main exit. We waited in line for our phones to be released, then waited again to leave the parking lot. Finally, close to midnight, I was headed back to Keith’s house to drop him off, where I learned how he met his wife, Beth (she asked him for a cigarette at a dance club in the 1980s), and we commiserated about having partners who don’t drive (hell hath no fury like a lifelong designated driver!). Although we shared disappointment about the circumstances for drawing at the concert, I came to realize that this project wasn’t about finding an alternative to the camera phone, but about embracing humanity and the joy and connection sparked from doing things the hard way.
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