Saturday, September 13, 2008

After Concert Blogging

What do you do if you are an ageing classic rock band whose lead singer is no longer with you? You get another singer who is half your age, sounds a lot like your old one, has a tremendous amount of energy and you carry on. That's exactly what Journey has done; and I was surprised at the results. They have a new cd, which I haven't listened to, and they did a few songs from that; and a whole bunch of older ones and Arnel Pineda did a fine job with them. He really does sound a lot like Steve Perry. Richard said they found him in a karaoke bar. Go figure. Apparently the new album has been nominated for classic rock album of the year and was #1 on Billboard.

Cheap Trick opened, and I've never been a fan; but the songs I knew they did well. I forgot they are the band that does the theme song from "That 70's Show", and they opened with that. All in all they were ok.

The band we were really going for was Heart. Since they were 2nd they only played an hour, and Sio, Chris, John and I agreed they did too much of their slower stuff and not enough of their kick ass stuff. They were better when we saw them last year at Napervilles Ribfest. However, when we saw them at Ribfest, and again last night, they did an excellent cover of The Who's "Rain on Me". I blogged awhile back on cover songs, and actually I have to say that if I had video of Heart last night I would post it. I have to say it's one of the best covers I've ever seen. They were just really great; it was the highpoint of their show. Plus it rained, kind of a steady drizzle, but getting a bit harder at times, the entire night, so it was a fitting song.

Speaking of rain, one of the high points of the show for me was when Sio called Melissa during Barracuda and held up her cell phone so Melissa could hear where we were. A couple minutes later Melissa texted back "You rule." Then Sio sent another text, because the show was so short and said "It kind of sucked". Melissa replied in a text saying "At least it wasn't rained out" Siobhan took a picture of John dripping water in his rain poncho to send to Melissa, but she couldn't figure out how to send pics, so she sent another text describing the picture. It was pretty funny.

The rain held over into today and we spent most of the morning getting water out of the basement. Sio and I are both thinking that Celticfest has been cancelled, so I guess we'll probably just go out to eat. It kind of ended up being a let down weekend.

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