Oh, what a very excellent show. A few more photos at the same place I put the others, and scans of all four setlists.

I'd found out that the capacity of the place the show was at, La Boule Noire, is only about 200, so I figured I didn't need to be so very early, but, since I have that American concert-goer mindset, I still arrived too early. There wasn't a line or anybody outside waiting, so I went around to try the door, which was locked. Then this guy walking along toward me eating a sandwich shook his head and pointed at another door a little further down and said (in English) "That one." He looks familiar, I thought, isn't that the guy who played Q on Star Trek: the Next Generation? And then, very startled, I said, "Jonathan?"

He just said "yep" and we both went inside, but it wasn't open to the public yet, so I left and trotted up around the Sacré-Coeur for a few minutes. When I was finally able to go in I sat down to wait (there were still very few people there) and after a bit Jonathan came out again and saw me and came over and started talking to me.

It was a very strange experience. I don't usually want to try to talk to bands I've come to see, because I really don't know what I could possibly say; so I wasn't trying to get Jonathan's attention or anything, he just came up to me, and he was really nice. He asked me what I was doing in Paris, and I told him I'm a student of French, and at that point he started talking to me in French. This put me into a serious pickle because I couldn't decide whether I should call him "tu" or "vous." I mean, I felt sure he wouldn't have been offended if I'd called him "tu," but then he's rather older than me and after all we're complete strangers, so I was thinking maybe it would be better to call him "vous"--and so while I was struggling with that irrelevant question I was completely unable to answer anything that he said to me because I couldn't speak directly back to him. Luckily he switched back to English, and then he went away, and I was relieved of the anxiety of trying to talk with him as if he were a normal person and not a member of a band that I admire immensely.

I think the crowd was a little more active than the one in London, but it was hard to tell because I was right in the front and so couldn't really see the hundred or so other people who were there. There was a French couple next to me, perhaps in their 40s, and whenever I went (in my American way) "whoo!" the lady would laugh. Not like she was being mean, she was just amused. I like to think that our American "whoo" was a sound she had never heard before. But at the end of the show, when the band had gone offstage and we were waiting for the encore, she started doing it too, first kind of timidly, and then later in a full-throated, enthusiastic, throughly American fashion, and I felt pleased.

Is it fair that Germany gets six Camper Van Beethoven shows and France only one? I think not.