Picking up where Part One left off, I was starting to feel like an experienced, savvy concert goer by the late 1980s, and was choosing who I went to see with a bit more discrimination. The arrival of family and kids meant less time (and cash) for live rock and roll, too, but I still squeezed in a number of “gotta see” shows in the ensuing years. I felt like I was becoming a bit more selective and possibly jaded now that I was a seasoned veteran of the concert wars but, in truth, I wasn’t. There’s something about the electric atmosphere of a live show that has never failed to thrill me to my socks every single time, like it was the first. I don’t know how many more concerts I’ll see in my time here, but I’m certain that feeling will never go away.
• Bob Dylan w/ Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Pine Knob Music Theater 1986 – The first thing I noticed when we took our seats on a beautiful July afternoon was the crowd looking considerably younger than I was expecting for a Dylan show. Tom and the Heartbreakers were between albums, Southern Accents had come out the year before, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) would arrive in ’87, but they were still one of hottest concert draws in the U.S. when they hit the road as Dylan’s backing band, and their younger generation of fans had obviously descended on the outdoor theater en masse.
Bob was in a transitional phase, the tour was ostensibly for his Empire Burlesque album, a record that had been met with a collective yawn by his long-time fans due to its mid-eighties, somewhat synthesized production, which has only sounded thinner and more dated with each passing year. He was 45 years old in 1986. The album, even the clothes he wore onstage - leather vest with no shirt, tight black leather pants and high-heeled boots - seemed like an attempt to recapture a seemingly fading relevance.
All of those concerns became moot when he and the Heartbreakers took the stage. I still clearly recall the structure of the show. Bob and the band came out together and played together for four or five songs, including the terrific opener, “Positively 4th Street” and the lone nod to the recent album, “Clean Cut Kid,” the record’s hardest rocker. The first segment ended on a beautiful version of “That Lucky Old Sun,” not quite Ray Charles’ version, but what is? I was half expecting the younger segment of the crowd to take bathroom breaks during Bob’s part of the show, but Dylan was too much in charge to allow that to happen. He stood at center stage, Stratocaster on his hip, in especially strong and confident voice, basically pinning us in our seats. Then he left, giving way to the support team. Tom and boys ripped through a blazing three-song mini-set, ending with a revelatory “Straight Into Darkness,” one of his earlier singles I had kind of slept on. That performance moved the tune up several notches on my list of favorite Petty songs. Then it was their turn to exit stage left.
Next up, a Bob solo acoustic slot, which is when I really expected the youngsters to clear out and, this time, quite a few of them did. The folks in the bathroom or beer lines missed some truly epic stuff. “To Ramona,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Masters of War” in quick succession before the Heartbreakers returned. Then back to the full-on rock show. Another Empire Burlesque gem, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” was amazing and the untouchable “Ballad of a Thin Man” closed out the segment in epic style. Dylan left one more time, Tom and the band played another incredible trio of songs, this time including their great but kinda goofy Southern Accents set piece “Spike” and finishing with a ripping version of Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny.”
Even after all of the brilliance that had already happened, it was the last set that put the show solidly on this list for me. All the lights were out for several minutes while the crowd and the band caught their breath after Tom’s Chuck-Berry-on-speed closer. The band started to play a familiar woozy New Orleans street march in the dark, the house lights flared white and red, Bob strutted back to center stage with his Fender and the crowd joined in the singing of “everybody must get stoned” with great gusto, even the kids. Unlike the rest of the show, Petty occupied front and center for the last set, prowling around Bob in the spotlight, leaning in to share a mic with him when a co-vocal was called for. The final songs of the night included a swaying-drunk duet with Tom on the 1950s country weeper “I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know,” and the reggae-leaning “I and I” from Infidels, everything leading up to a set-closing “Like a Rolling Stone” that would have taken the roof off, had there been one. Everybody left the stage but came back out shortly to celebrate a birthday. During the encore a cake with candles was wheeled out, local birthday boy Bob Seger joined the gang onstage, “Happy Birthday” was sung, and the evening ended with Tom and the two Bobs leading the crowd in a “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” singalong. I walked out realizing that even though the popularity tides were shifting, Dylan was still the commander in chief of any stage he was on.
• The Neville Brothers: Club Soda, Kalamazoo 1986 – The Neville Brothers were a band on my concert bucket list that I didn’t have high hopes to ever see. As big as they were in New Orleans and the deep south, their tours rarely took them anywhere that gets snow in the winter. Four brothers – Art, Aaron, Cyril, and Charles (and later Aaron’s son Ivan) – who were Crescent City legends since the days of the Wild Tchoupitoulas, a Mardi Gras mainstay. The WTs were founded by their uncle, Big Chief Jolly, who typically performed in full ceremonial headdress. I had discovered the Nevilles through a cassette tape of their classic Fiyo on the Bayou album and kept following them through the 80s until they hooked up with producer Daniel Lanois on Yellow Moon in 1989, the record that prompted Bob Dylan to hire Lanois for his next album. Yellow Moon’s commercial, and especially critical, success got the band opening slots for arena and stadium shows by the Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead, but nowhere near where my snow shovel and I lived.
Three years earlier, though, their career was stalled. They hadn’t released an album in a couple of years, and they were playing places like teeny tiny Club Soda in K'zoo and the almost imperceptibly larger Nectarine Ballroom in Ann Arbor the night before. Uptown, the album that would generate enough buzz to get them back on the map and lead to the recording budget for Yellow Moon, was still a year away. Their career doldrums were my good fortune, as it turned out.
Club Soda barely seemed big enough to be the popular student watering hole it was most of the time, much less a concert venue. Bar on the left, a handful of tables in the middle of the floor, and some booths lining the right wall. That’s it, other than a small stage on the far end, not even room for a dancefloor. No assigned seating, so we walked to the table closest to the stage and planted ourselves about five feet from where the band would be playing. I was still thinking it had to be some kind of mirage. Were we gonna sit here, within spitting distance of the stage, with full waitress service the entire evening, to watch one of my most favorite bands? Why yes, yes we were.
It was a tight fit for the Brothers, a seven-piece band. But what they lacked in elbow room they made up for with glorious, expansive New Orleans funk and soul music. Aaron at the front microphone, with his odd combination of face-tattoo biker looks and delicate upper register singing voice, was captivating through the whole show, especially when he took the spotlight to sing “Tell It Like It Is,” his only hit, from 1966, one of the few Neville recordings that found an audience outside of Louisiana. The band worked their asses off (I was close enough to see ‘em sweat) - Art with the golden funk keyboard fingers, Charles adding color and soul with a few saxophones, Cyril bouncing around between percussion setups like his life depended on it. They even had a secret weapon, a really hot-shit electric guitarist named Brian Stoltz who had recently joined up and would stay with them through Yellow Moon. The sound mix was loud, but not too loud for the small room, and they played everything I wanted to hear. “Brother John” and “Hey Pocky Way” from the Wild Tchoupitoulas days, the amazing “Sitting in Limbo,” “Fiyo on the Bayou,” Aaron’s exquisite cover of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa,” and the try-sitting-down-while-it’s-playing “Mardi Gras Mambo.” I soaked up the whole show, and several beers brought by our ever-attentive waitress, in a state of mild disbelief and much gratitude.
• Paul Simon: Pine Knob Music Theater 1987 – Paul Simon and I have one thing in common that I know of. At some point in our lives, we both fell in love with an album called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, a joyous record of mbaqanga, South African street music. The base tracks for his career-reviving album Graceland were recorded on the sly in Johannesburg, due to the apartheid-based cultural boycott of South Africa. Paul took a lot of crap, even some threats, from anti-apartheid groups, but the musicians he played with were solidly on his side, believing that raising their profile on a world stage was an effective anti-apartheid tool. It didn’t hurt that they were paid the equivalent of triple NYC musician’s scale to contribute to the album and were handsomely rewarded to serve as Paul’s backup band for the ensuing tour.
This show was part of that tour. I was sitting on the grassy hill overlooking the stage on a gorgeous late-June day, barely believing my luck. I was obsessed with Graceland and looking forward to the show as much as any I’d ever attended. Saying it didn’t disappoint is a ridiculous understatement.
I think it’s a fairly well-known fact, but until you see him take the stage it doesn’t really hit home. Paul Simon is one short dude. I always thought Art Garfunkel was a giant, until I learned he’s the same height as me. Paul clears five feet with only a couple of inches to spare. I bring this up because the South African musicians who made up most of the Graceland touring band were uniformly tall, giving the whole show a look of great, let’s say, contrast. I also bring it up because once the music fired up and swept the audience away, that visual lost all significance.
Like every other stop on the tour, the setlist for this one included just about every song on the album, all sounding bigger, more dynamic, even more celebratory than their recorded counterparts. The horn parts were punchier, the multitude of drums and percussion instruments more talkative. The female backup singers reached a church-like gospel intensity that was breathtaking. The amazing South African guitarist Ray Phiri’s lovely, spiraling lines soared over the crowd. Paul stepped back to let the band play a couple of songs from the Indestructible Beat record and gave Ladysmith Black Mambazo their own mini-set, a huge hit with the crowd. The Pine Knob show was one of several on the tour with a guest appearance from Chevy Chase, reprising his role from the “You Can Call Me Al” video. Chevy is 6’4” by the way, so his performance provided some comedic relief standing next to Paul, intentional or not. “Gumboots” segued beautifully into the Del Vikings’ 1957 doo-wop classic “Whispering Bells,” a real highlight of the show for me with its masterful blending of musical genres. Neither Paul Simon solo nor Simon & Garfunkel hits played much of a role in the show. A mid-set version of “The Boxer” showed more rhythmic complexity than the familiar S&G hit, “Mother and Child Reunion” was a natural fit a little later on. At the end of the night, though, Paul stood by himself at the front of the stage, and he and his acoustic guitar offered a delicate “Sound of Silence” as a thank you and farewell. The audience did a pretty fine job of singing along with him, all smiles and gratitude for a remarkably uplifting evening.
• Neil Young: Desert Trip, Indio 2016 – I admit it, I kinda slept on this one. It was hard to wrap my head around the enormity of the “Woodstock for Boomers” weekend in the first place. Dylan, the Stones, Neil, Sir Paul, the Who, and Roger Waters, two per evening over three nights. It was bucket list central for me in the hot southern California desert. Through what I’ve come to blame as a trick of the heat, Neil and his young new band, Promise of the Real felt like lessers among giants going in. I was spectacularly wrong. I think part of my error was assuming Neil’s set wouldn’t translate as well as the others in front of the roughly 80,000 people that were crowding the polo grounds each day. This wasn't the loud, brawling Crazy Horse he was playing with. Again, really embarrassingly wrong.
Neil’s stage setup was unique, let's say. A landscape combining images of the desert southwest, complete with oversized teepees, and renewable energy structures like wind turbines. The setting sun was giving the whole earth-toned thing an impressive golden glow when he first appeared, all by himself, to start the show. Again, I briefly wondered if that was the right approach for a crowd this size. Neil sat at the piano to open things up with “After the Goldrush,” grabbed a Martin acoustic for “Heart of Gold” and “Comes a Time,” then back to the keyboard for “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” from Ragged Glory. The crowd was eating it up, but he seemed so tiny in such a gigantic setting. All he needed was his band.
It quickly became obvious to me that Promise of the Real, featuring two of Willie Nelson’s kids, is Neil’s updated version of the Stray Gators, the band he recorded (Harvest, notably) and toured with when he was feeling more nuance and versatility than Crazy Horse. The rest of the setlist was spectacular, kicking off with a perfect country-rock version of “Out on the Weekend,” smoking, loud, ragged-but-right takes on crowd favorites like “Powderfinger,” “Welfare Mothers,” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.” A few songs were thrown in from the album Neil and the Promise were about to drop that December, Peace Trail. They not only fit in the set alongside the other classics, they gave the feisty young band a chance to stretch out and demonstrate the insane chops that got them a gig with a legend in the first place.
But there was a highlight, indeed there was, that pushed an already fantastic show into the realm of one of the weekend’s best for me. Two thirds of the way in, Neil called on his new recruits to go “Down by the River.” Long, spooky, winding, a handful of mesmerizing guitar solos from NY’s famous "Black Beauty" Les Paul, the crowd given several opportunities over its 12 minutes to show Neil and the band some full-throated love. Easily one of the best single performances of the weekend. And this was as the opening act for Paul McCartney, mind you. Neil’s set fired up the crowd to a crazy high level and I was delighted, but not surprised, when Sir Paul invited him back to the stage for a few Beatle tunes during his set. Yeah, the man can hold his own on any stage, anywhere, and I still can’t believe I ever doubted him.
• Dawes: State Theater, Kalamazoo 2017 – A shining example of my belief that it’s never too late to find a new favorite band. A short, but favorable, review of Dawes’ second album, Nothing is Wrong, buried in the back pages of a U.K. music magazine led me to check them out, and I’ve been hooked ever since. The earliest version of Dawes was firmly rooted in the easy-rocking vocal harmony sound of 70s L.A. singer/songwriters, especially their biggest early supporter Jackson Browne. Jackson helped them get a major label contract and sang backup on a couple of songs on Nothing is Wrong so they could put his name in the credits. He no doubt recognized a kindred spirit in songwriter and vocalist Taylor Goldsmith, one of the most consistently impressive musicians working these days. The combination of his melodically rocking songs, the band’s prowess, and the brilliant harmony vocals of the rest of the band (which includes Taylor’s brother Griffin on drums) is a sound that never fails to impress.
The show at the lovely State Theater, built in 1927 as a luxury movie theater, was billed on the marquee as “An Evening with Dawes.” No opening act, the performance divided into two sets with intermission, and a crowd of around 2000 equally rabid fans. Rock and Roll founding father Chuck Berry had passed the day before the show, so the band walked onstage to the PA system blasting “Johnny B. Goode,” the first great vibe and crowd-pleasing moment in a night full of them. Taylor, besides being a phenomenal singer, is also a smokin’ guitarist, capable of wowing a crowd on his own, but for the tour Dawes fleshed out its lineup with L.A. guitarist Trevor Menear, who added some monstrous slide work and exciting dual-guitar fireworks to the already stellar songs. Compared to the sometimes laid-back rock on most of their albums, this was a seriously rocking, jammed-out show.
I could list all of my favorites they played that night, including an exquisite version of the long ballad, “Now That It’s Too Late, Maria,” but I’m not sure how familiar the titles are to the casual music fan. But there were some extremely memorable moments worth a mention – Set One closed with “When My Time Comes,” the biggest and most rock-sounding song on their debut, North Hills, tailor-made (no pun intended) to be a live show singalong. The crowd sang along with more enthusiasm than I’ve seen at most other shows. Yell-along might describe it better. Set Two opened with the guys at center stage with acoustic guitars, playing a few of their best ballads, then they plugged in again and rocked the rest of the set. The night ended with one of the greatest songs ever written about the nostalgic power of music fandom; the title song to 2015’s All Your Favorite Bands. A lighter raised, arm around your neighbor, swaying and singing along gem of a concert closer.
I’ve seen one more show since the last one on this list. The about-to-be-huge Michigan rockers Greta Van Fleet, playing a local club that won’t hold their audience size again until sometime in the distant future, when they’re old guys trading on nostalgia and former glory. I hope they get there, but not for a good long time.
I’d love to hear what shows you would put on your list. Outstanding concerts are one of life’s great joys, in my book. Which ones brought you the joy?
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