I just saw Viagra Boys last night. Sebastian Murphy, the lead singer totally has a dad bod, which gives me hope that I could also front a Swedish post punk electronica band.
Finally! After years of trying to see the Russian Surf band Messer Chups live, I finally caught them at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach last night. It was a great show , but now I have the earworm from Hell burrowed deep into my brain.
Cheap Trick rescheduled! Will see them in a few weeks.
Trivia: I was at every show The Dead did at Sam Boyd’s Silver Bowl. The only other place they ever played in Vegas was the Aladin, years earlier.
Saw Gogol Bordello two weeks ago, had great fun absolutely exhausting myself in the mosh pit. Nearly lost a shoe and my glasses, somehow managed to recover both unharmed. Resolved to take my old glasses to future concerts.
Then Parkway Drive last Saturday, supported by The Amity Affliction (whom I didn’t know) and Thy Art Is Murder (whom I don’t particularly care for). Did bring the old glasses; managed to forget them in the car. The band said it was their largest headliner concert outside of Australia, and boy did they deliver a show, fire and rain and a bridge lowered and raised from the ceiling several times, enabling various musicians to play the crowd from above. Got to briefly support Winston McCall when he crowdsurfed over us, desperately trying to direct the crowd to return him to the stage.
Also, I got tickets to see System of a Down next year in July—an apparently sold-out show with 80,000 fans! Not sure how I feel about that, tbh. We’ll see, but young HMHW wouldn’t have been pleased if I hadn’t grasped the opportunity…
Also, learned that my memory isn’t what it used to be.
I saw El Vez last night for the first time since 1992. It was one of his acclaimed “Merry MeX-mas” shows. I’ve been a fan of Robert Lopez since the days of his punk band The Zeros c1980. He’s still one of the greatest showmen of my generation.
Interesting side note: I have tickets for Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys and Deke Dickerson and the Whippersnappers at the same venue (The Casbah, San Diego) this Friday. Turns out El Vez’s band The Centuries are also Deke’s Whippersnappers. Small world.
I’m happy to say I’m going to see Triumph on their reunion tour in the upcoming year. I never got to see them back in the day despite them being one of my favorite bands. I did see Rik Emmet several times more recently doing his acoustic show with Dave Dunlop. Met him once and got pictures.
I saw Hank Williams jr. In 1989. That was at the height of his career.
He ended the show by going around the stage playing various instruments. Drums, bass, piano, banjo, mandolin, and others. He’s very talented.
I saw Triumph twice back in the day. They did put on a good show.
The one thing I remember about both concerts is that they did NOT play “Hold On” at either show. Don’t know why.
For many years, I played music with a guy who had seen Hank Williams (Sr.) in concert. Twice. My friend passed away last year at the age of 95.
So many,
Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath (in that order - they alternated) with Ronnie James Dio on vocals for Sabbath. My First Concert. Both bands had elaborate setups, yet Sabbath often complained that BOC took a long time to set up their Godzilla and other things. Ended at 1 AM, both my friend got in a bit of trouble, even though my older brother was there too.
The (Bob) Dylan and (Grateful) Dead shows I saw - three of them. As good as I’ve seen Dylan play, and often as good as the Dead played.
Over a hundred Dead shows, in both Madison Square Garden and the Nassau Coliseum, Virginia (Hampton Coliseum), Hershey Park (Pennsylvania), Foxborough (outside Boston), Boston Garden, Soldier Field (Chicago), Saratoga Springs (upstate New York). We’d often try to see a baseball game if applicable.
About 20 CSNs, generally at Jones Beach. Generally quite good.
Jimmy Buffett. Jones Beach.
Leon Russel at the Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansettt Long Island, circa 1990. I was in my very early 20’s on the standby line, and all these folks with me were talking Mad Dogs and Englishmen at MSG nearly 20 years before. He was great.
Hot Tuna, same little venue out East on Long Island. Had a front row table, so Jorma or Jack were playing right in front of us.
Lollapalooza (2nd in 1992)
Lush opened, then Pearl Jam with Eddie Vedder - as he did in those days - scaling the left speaker tower to finish “I’m still alive!” on the top, and I can’t recall the order of the rest of the lineup, which was Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube, Soundgarden, and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
The “Crackdown Concert” at MSG on Halloween 1986, ended around 1 AM: The Allman Brothers Band, Babatunde Olatunji and his drums of Passion, Paul Butterfield, Mick Taylor, Felix Cavaliere,
Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash (Crosby just released from Jail), Run-D.M.C, Rubén Blades. Every guitarist got a solo in a very long Jessica.
So many,
Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath (in that order - they alternated) with Ronnie James Dio on vocals for Sabbath. My First Concert. Both bands had elaborate setups, yet Sabbath often complained that BOC took a long time to set up their Godzilla and other things. Ended at 1 AM, both my friend got in a bit of trouble, even though my older brother was there too.
The (Bob) Dylan and (Grateful) Dead shows I saw - three of them. As good as I’ve seen Dylan play, and often as good as the Dead played.
Over a hundred Dead shows, in both Madison Square Garden and the Nassau Coliseum, Virginia (Hampton Coliseum), Hershey Park (Pennsylvania), Foxborough (outside Boston), Boston Garden, Soldier Field (Chicago), Saratoga Springs (upstate New York). We’d often try to see a baseball game if applicable.
About 20 CSNs, generally at Jones Beach. Generally quite good.
Jimmy Buffett. Jones Beach.
Leon Russel at the Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansettt Long Island, circa 1990. I was in my very early 20’s on the standby line, and all these folks with me were talking Mad Dogs and Englishmen at MSG nearly 20 years before. He was great.
Hot Tuna, same little venue out East on Long Island. Had a front row table, so Jorma or Jack were playing right in front of us.
Lollapalooza (2nd in 1992)
Lush opened, then Pearl Jam with Eddie Vedder - as he did in those days - scaling the left speaker tower to finish “I’m still alive!” on the top, and I can’t recall the order of the rest of the lineup, which was Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube, Soundgarden, and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
The “Crackdown Concert” at MSG on Halloween 1986, ended around 1 AM: The Allman Brothers Band, Babatunde Olatunji and his drums of Passion, Paul Butterfield, Mick Taylor, Felix Cavaliere,
Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash (Crosby just released from Jail), Run-D.M.C, Rubén Blades. Every guitarist got a solo in a very long Jessica.
Another worth mentioning: Me and my brother were seeing Peter Gabriel at MSG in 1986. At first we walked past smashed doors and glass all over cops patting down everyone. Showed our tickets, and were told this was the adjacent “Felt Forum” (I believe Paramount Theater now) then went to MSG. I didn’t know till the train ride home that a lot of people has seen some band I’d never heard of: Metallica.
We saw him tonight in Fall River, MA. It was a fantastic show; I think his guitar playing, particularly 12-string, really shines live.
And in a correspondence of sorts to your experience, two rows ahead of us a burly guy had a black “2A” cap backwards on his head, with the letters (at least the ‘A’ anyway) made of assault rifles. I was really wondering what his perspective was, but he just quietly shotgunned beers the whole show.
Awesome that you got to see him. He does put on a great live show.
Other acts I’ve seen over the winter, all venues in Chicago:
Basia Bulat (Old Town School of Folk Music): Haven’t really followed her but have had her old single “Infamous” in my play lists forever. Enjoyed the new album and the show although the sound quality wasn’t great, making hard to make out her words when everyone was playing. The acoustic mini-set she did was much better. Goos stage presence and patter. Signed my album after the show.
Mikayla Geier (Beat Kitchen): Up and coming ballerina-turned-pop singer from Canada who did a four stop US tour. I was a good 25+ years over the median audience age. The amount of dancing and movement she put into the performance was amazing and she’s lucky she only has about 45min of recorded music because I think a full standard set might have killed the poor thing. Fun show though she’s still getting her show legs under her. Opening act was local Chicago performer Adan Diaz who was a lot of fun.
Susan Werner (Old Town School of Folk Music): Susan Werner was my wife & I’s first date and we try to catch her on a regular basis (though not every show). A witty, humorous and outspoken Iowa lady with everything from classic standards to folk gospel under her belt, she’s always a solid show.
Sarah McLachlan (Auditorium Theater): Easily the largest show I’ve seen lately. My wife & I gave her newest album a play via streaming on the way up but, like I assume most people, mainly followed her 1995-2005 career. McLachlan was no fool and interspersed classics from her first three or four albums almost 1:1 with the new songs and even the new stuff was a good listen. Weirdly (to me) she’s back in town soon and I joked with my wife that we should go and see if her stories/patter are the same.
Lights (Concord Music Hall): Despite being on the scene since ~2008, I only recently learned of Valerie Poxleitner (aka Lights) but have enjoyed her latest album a lot and grabbed the opportunity to see her live. My wife had to bail on me so I went alone, once again surrounded by our nation’s youth. Which strikes me as a little odd for someone who has been around this long but maybe the other old people don’t do standing room venues these days. I was lucky enough to grab a spot on the balcony rail and watch from above as I leaned my aging bones. Excellent show, excellent stage presence – you could tell she’s been doing this for a while and knows how to work her crowds with the benefit of relatively small venues. Opener was Softcult who I enjoyed in a messy garage band sort of way and bought a Softcult t-shirt with an angry cat on it.
Cowboy Junkies (Old Town School of Folk Music): Man, we’re at Old Town a lot. A nice enough show and Margo Timmins made sure to include a good number of older songs from the first four albums. Sang “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning” so I got what I came for. My wife mentioned after the first set that Timmins was losing her upper register and, sure enough, I could tell she was singing around the higher notes in her older songs. How dare she age along with the rest of us? Still a good night but likely the last time I try to catch them live.
Upcoming shows: Rilo Kiley reunion show in May, Amelie Farran in May (never heard of her but my wife is jazzed up) and Girli in June
I’ve gone to more concerts than I can remember, but I’ll list off some of the most memorable ones;
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The Who at the Hollywood Bowl in 2002. It was the first show they did after John Entwistle died. They recruited session bassist Pino Palladino (who played bass for them for the next 14 years) on two days notice. He was playing most of the songs from sheet music, and obviously he wasn’t going to do any of the ridiculous solos the Ox was known for, but he performed admirably. The whole show was kind of an impromptu wake for Entwistle. My girlfriend and I brought binoculars so we could people-watch, and we spotted Ray Manzarek and Eddie Vedder in the front row.
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Speaking of Ray Manzarek, I saw the Doors the following year on their reunion tour, when they recruited Ian Astbury of the Cult to fill Jim Morrison’s shoes. Aside from having a British accent, he did a really good job of sounding like Jim would’ve if he’d made it to his forties. During the second encore, people started charging the stage during “Soul Kitchen” to the point that security gave up trying to stop her, to the point that there were dozens of people dancing around and you couldn’t even see the band who were still playing.
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Ozzfest 2003. Great performance from Ozzy, the first of five times I saw him live (twice with Sabbath). The lineup for that year’s tour was stellar - the main stage featured Korn, Disturbed, Marilyn Manson, and Iron Maiden, and the second stage had a few bands that would get big years later.
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Heaven and Hell, 2008. This was a reunion of the Ronnie James Dio era Black Sabbath, under a different name because Ozzy and Tony Iommi were involved in a legal dispute over the Sabbath name at the time. It was the last tour Dio did before he died of cancer less than a year later. They exclusively played songs from the four albums Dio recorded with the band, but that was fine with me. I especially remember their renditions of “Children of the Sea”, “I”, and “Bible Black” as being amazing.
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Rush, the Gorge in central Washington, 2008. This was the Snakes & Arrows tour. The Gorge is one of the most amazing concert venues in America (and probably in the world), and all three shows I’ve seen there were amazing. (The other two were Sabbath in 2013 and Dead & Company (the Grateful Dead + John Mayer) in 2016.) They did pretty much all of their big hits and a number of deep cuts, and Neil Peart did an extended solo where he switched from conventional drums to electric drums to MIDI pads that were triggering brass band samples in which he performed a cover of a Duke Ellington song. They had some comedy sketches they played on the jumbotron between songs, such as Bob & Doug McKenzie explaining how to enjoy a Rush concert, a South Park short where the boys have become a Rush cover band, and a backstage vignette where Geddy Lee says he counted three women in the audience and that’s a record for them. (I also saw them on their following tour where they played Moving Pictures all the way through, but that was a less impressive ampitheater and it was raining.)
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Roger Waters on his 2010 tour where he performed The Wall in its entirety, complete with a revival of the original tour’s stage show where they literally build a wall across the stage during the first act and the band mostly performs behind it during the second half. I wouldn’t pay to see him again now that he’s gone full on Putinist tankie, but it was an amazing performance and a great piece of stagecraft.
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The Protomen, 2010. This was the indie-est show I’ve ever been to. The venue was a small auditorium in a converted movie theater in Portland. The maximum occupancy was 100 people, and since there were ten people in the band and three bartenders, that meant the audience capacity was 87. It was a sellout. There was no stage - the band just set up their equipment at the end of the room where the movie screen used to be and encouraged everyone to gather around them. Near the end of their first song, the sheer volume of electricity being used by their instruments (two guitars, bass, drums, four keyboards, a trumpet, and a guy in a robot costume banging on a steel pipe with a sledgehammer) tripped the circuit breaker and turned off the power, leading those of us in the audience to finish the song by singing along to the drums and trumpet. Once the breaker got turned back on they started their second song - and after about fifteen seconds the breaker tripped again. Clearly something was gonna have to give, and the band had a brief discussion with the theater manager about what they could turn off so they could play. The video packages accompanying their songs had to go. The AC was next. (Mind you, this was August.) Finally, they decided to turn off almost all of the lights aside from the emergency lights, which lead the singer to ask the audience “We know we can play in total darkness. The question is, can you ROCK in total darkness?” Turned out we could. At the end of the show, which they closed with a cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, the guy in the robot suit informed us that we were no longer mere denizens of Portland, but WARRIORS. I’ve seen them several times since then, both in Seattle and in Portland, and every time they come back to Portland they make a point of referring to the audience as warriors.
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Motorhead, 2010. This was their final show in Seattle before Lemmy passed away a few years later. It was at a smallish venue that used to be a warehouse. I was standing ten feet away from Lemmy. He took the stage and said “Is everyone feeling good tonight? (audience cheers) We’ll fix that.” This concert KICKED MY ASS with sound. I drove home with the radio off because it felt painful to hear things. The concert was on a Friday night and my hearing didn’t fully recover until Sunday afternoon. There’s a good chance I suffered some permanent hearing damage that night. Still an awesome night.
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Taylor Swift, 2011. I was probably the oldest man at this concert who wasn’t there with his girlfriend or chaperoning his daughter. I wore my Motorhead shirt that I bought at the above concert and got a high-five from someone’s dad. This was when she was still playing arenas instead of stadiums and it was possible to buy a ticket to her concert without jumping through hoops of fire and taking out a loan. Most excited crowd I’ve ever seen at a live show. The audience knew all the words to EVERY SINGLE SONG and were singing along. A few songs into her set, a woman who was walking up and down the aisles in the lower bowl where I was seated, holding a baby in her arm, approached me with an offer - security wouldn’t let her bring her baby onto the floor, so would I mind trading my seat for her eighth-row floor seat? Of course I said yes. Later in the show, Taylor did a walk up and down the aisles on the floor and was reaching out to the audience through the wall of security lining the aisles to stop people from mobbing her. Her hand touched mine. I have not washed that hand in 15 years. (I keed, I keed.)
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Santana, 2011. He opened the show with a cover of “Back in Black” and closed with a cover of “Sunshine of your Love”. He had two different singers, one to do the songs with English lyrics and one to do the songs with Spanish lyrics. At a few points he and the band just played some improvisational jazz-rock. In between songs, he did some monologues where he talked like the old hippy he is about Bruce Lee and Coltrane and Jesus.
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Roger Daltrey, 2011. This was a solo show, but he had most of the Who’s backing band (including Pete Townshend’s brother Simon) with him. The first half of the show was a full performance of Tommy. The finale almost felt like a religious experience. For the second half, he performed a mix of Who songs, songs from his solo albums, and covers, including a cover of Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” which Eddie Vedder himself joined in on partway through. Sometimes Eddie Vedder just shows up onstage at concerts in Seattle. I have never once seen Pearl Jam, but I’ve seen him sing live three times at concerts I had no reason to expect he’d be at.
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Blind Guardian, 2016. This one is memorable not so much because of the performance itself - it was good - but because the venue was shit. It was a now-closed place in south Seattle called “Studio Seven”. It was about the size of a one-bedroom apartment and had WAY too many people packed into it, to the point that I’m pretty sure that if a fire broke out it would’ve been the Great White disaster all over again. I couldn’t even see the band without trying to force my way into a human crush, whether I stayed on the ground floor or went up to the bar on the balcony. I found myself spending most of the concert lying on a couch in a back room attached to the bar, watching the band on a CRT monitor that was distorted and blurry like trying to watch scrambled TV porn in the '90s. I did get to meet the lead singer of Skelator, a Seattle-based power metal band, who was also hanging out on the balcony, and we had a brief conversation about how Blind Guardian was one of the bands that inspired his musical style.
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Bruce Springsteen & the E St Band, 2016. On this tour, they were starting the show by playing The River all the way through, then spending another two hours performing a mix of hits, deep cuts, and audience requests that Bruce saw people waving signs for. The show started at eight and ended a quarter after midnight and there was no intermission. Longest single set I’ve ever seen and it blows my mind that a bunch of guys in their late sixties had that much stamina. This was also one of the shows Eddie Vedder showed up at, joining Bruce for “Bobby Jean”.
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Queen, 2017. Adam Lambert of American Idol fame was their lead singer on this tour. He doesn’t look or sound like Freddie Mercury. He reminds me more of George Michael than anything else. Still, he brings his own style to the music and makes it work. There were a few songs where they used tapes of Mercury’s singing to “duet” with Lambert, particularly on Bohemian Rhapsody. Dr. Brian May did a solo acoustic version of “Love of My Life”, which, through the magic of special effects, concluded with Freddie appearing on the Jumbotron and giving the real May a hug. Roger Taylor did a drum battle against his own son, who was their second drummer.
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Ghost, 2026. This is my favorite currently active heavy metal band and they put on a hell of a live show. I’ve seen them twice, and when I go to their shows I cosplay as one of the incarnations of the character played by the lead singer - “Papa Emeritus”, a sort of Satanic antipope with skeleton makeup. I was one of several hundreds of people who were cosplaying that night. Despite the fact that the band’s gimmick is that they’re the public face of a Satanic cult attempting to bring about the birth of the Antichrist and most of their songs are about Satan, they’ve got one of the most wholesome and welcoming and chill fanbases of any metal band out there. They refer to their concerts as “rituals” and it’s a sort of fun, secular, vaguely irreverant religious service of people just being themselves and enjoying some rock & roll. I was seated across the aisle from two people wearing fursuits. I told them that wasn’t the kind of costume I EXPECTED to see at this show, but I appreciated their dedication and willingness to let their freak flag fly. At the end of the show, the singer asked everyone to do three things going forward; be kind to each other, help people out if they need help, and if you don’t have anyone to fuck when you get home, then you can go fuck yourself.
I don’t have any upcoming concerts booked right now, but I’m always keeping my eyes peeled.