Last night, Kim and I headed downtown to see Ray LaMontagne play a solo show at the Ellie Caulkin Opera House. I’ve seen him a couple of times before, but I believe that he had always had at least one person playing with him. Playing solo last night definitely subdued the overall feel, but allowed for his wonderful voice to really shine. With that said, I still think that I’d prefer to see him play with other musicians included.

Prior to last night, I had always thought that Ray was sort of introverted. And though he admitted that he doesn’t really like to be in the spotlight, he opened up last night telling stories and laughing along with the crowd. That definitely helped lighten the load of rather somber music. In the room normally reserved for opera performances, the crowd remained seated the entire show. Pictures were not allowed at all, and the tuxedoed ushers made sure to enforce the rule.   I still managed to grab a couple of quick photos with my iPhone from our seventh row seats.

I realize that those pictures leave a lot to be desired.   Fortunately, I found a small collection of photos from his concert the night before, also at the same venue.   The Denver Post also has this review of the same performance posted online.   The setlist last night had many similarities to this one at the bottom of the review, including the same covers.   I’m not sure if our main set was shorter than the night before or not, but we actually had a four song encore instead of two.   Either way the hour and half performance was easily worth the price of our tickets.   I just hope that he brings along some additional musicians in the future.

Entries for the last two times I’ve seen Ray LaMontagne:

• September 20, 2005
• August 11, 2008

Last night I joined a few friends for a concert at the Bluebird Theater. They had already bought tickets, but won a couple of extras so invited me to come along. I didn’t know anything about the bands playing other than listening to a couple of tracks from the headliner earlier in the day. Overall it turned out to be a good time along with a loud and rocking show.

We walked in just as the second opening band of the night took the stage, The Features. This four piece band from outside of Nashville consisted of singer/guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, and drummer. They started out with some loud rock right from the start. We immediately noticed a similar sound as The Killers. They had some pretty strong vocal melodies, along with strong hooks. I was fairly impressed by the band. One thing I didn’t care for were the few times the members of the band would spit across the stage. I can’t say I’ve seen that move in years.

The headliner of the night was The Whigs. Again, the set from the traditional three-piece band from Athens, Georgia started off rocking. I was immediately impressed with the guitar playing and vocals of the front-man. And the drummer was no slouch either, though it took me awhile to figure out why the left-handed musician looked funny to me. The only disappointment for me was that the crowd seemed to thin as the night wore on, thus losing some of the energy that The Features had created. I feel sorry for them though as they missed the best song of the night, which was played last, “Right Hand on My Heart.”

Last night, despite the threat of an incoming storm, I headed out to the Bluebird Theater to catch a show.   It was my first solo show in many years, though I’m no stranger to going alone to shows in the past.   I really wanted to see the opening band, The Alternate Routes, who I hadn’t seen in years.   I found out that it was only going to be the front-man of the band playing, as the other band members were still stuck in California waiting on replacement parts for their tour van.   I decided to head to the show regardless, figuring it was only $15 and I could always leave when I wanted.

I arrived just in time to see Tim, the aforementioned front-man, take the stage.   I had forgotten how powerful his voice was, and despite playing solo he was easily able to hush the rather large crowd.   I was happy to hear song after song of material that I was very familiar with from their first album, Good & Reckless & True.   After four of these older songs, Tim invited a crew-member from the headlining band out to play guitar on a track from their latest CD, A Sucker’s Dream, titled “The Future’s Nothing New.”   While the guest, Toby, played guitar Tim commanded the microphone while playing a tambourine and amplified toolbox.   Yes, you read that correctly, he used a toolbox as a percussion instrument.   There are a number of videos on YouTube of this if you want to see what I mean.

From there, another guitar player by the name of Johnny sat in to play another new song, “On and On We Whisper.”   Johnny was the guitar player for the next musician Serena Ryder.   With two guitars on stage Tim was obviously singing the vocals, but he was also playing a small set of drums.   Though I’m not as familiar with the new songs as I am with the old, and I prefer the older tunes, this was an interesting way of seeing the new stuff for the first time.   On their last song of the night, Serena Ryder also joined the stage to sing along, while her bass player and drummer joined in as well.   This just confirmed that I really need to see the full band perform again sometime soon.

Though I was mainly there to see The Alternate Routes performance I decided to stick around for the other bands.   Next up was Serena Ryder, who I already mentioned above.   She started off her set a cappella, and though I immediately felt how strong her voice was, it almost reminded me of Amy Winehouse.   I’m glad to say that the rest of the set was far from that, and was much more rock and roll, though maybe a bit too twangy for my tastes.   Still she commanded the crowd and it was obvious how much the ladies in the room loved her performance.

The headliner for the night was Needtobreathe.   I was only familiar with their song “More Time” as it gets fairly regular radio play.   I admit that I do enjoy the song, and I was happy that they played it early in their set.   I stuck around to see what I would think about the rest of their material and I must say that it’s almost as if they have an identity crisis.   Very few of the songs featured the harmonies that I enjoyed on “More Time” and often the band drowned out the vocals completely.   This was not what I was expecting from a southern rock band from South Carolina.   Before the show I was worried about being bored from a slow performance, but it was pretty much the opposite, and I wished they would have turned down the amps and let the vocals shine through.   Again the fairly large crowd appeared to enjoy the band much more than I did.

Saturday night I headed to Red Rocks for likely the last time this summer.   Months ago I bought a couple of great seats in the 6th row for Jason Mraz’s performance, and the date finally arrived this past weekend.   Besides a short festival set last summer, this was the first time I’ve seen him headline in years, dating all the way back to 2003.   Since the show was Mraz’s first time playing the legendary venue, I figured we were in for a special treat.   Unfortunately, the show was a big disappointment, at least for myself.

I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t listened to much of his recent material, besides the songs that are on the radio.   From what I’ve heard of the latest disc, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things., it is better than 2005’s Mr. A-Z.   However, I don’t think either come anywhere close to being as good as his 2002 major label debut, Waiting for My Rocket to Come.   With that said, obviously I was not a fan of the Red Rocks show that included only one song from that debut release.   In addition there were only a small handful of songs that I recognized at all.

Some friends of ours were also in attendance, and they loved the show.   So obviously opinions are wide spread on the new material, but I received many messages from other friends around the country stating that they thought the same thing as I did when they attended other recent shows.   Again most of these people have been long time fans, and share the opinion that his music peaked many years ago back when we first started seeing him live.

Over the weekend, Kim and I took a quick trip to New York City.   One of my good friends and college roommate, Fighty, is in a cover band and this weekend was time for their annual booze cruise concert.   We flew in late on Friday night, and after meeting up with Fighty for a couple of late night drinks, we were back to the hotel to rest up for the following day.   Before the big cruise on Saturday, Kim and I took a walk throughout Manhattan and finally ended up at the World Trade Center site.   It has been years since my last trip to NYC and it was nice to see some progress being made, as well as some of the tributes around the site.   It wasn’t the best day for a walk, but it never really rained hard enough to completely soak us.

The cruise was later Saturday night, and it was awesome! 150+ party-goers paid $50 for an all you can drink cruise around NYC.   After the band started playing the hits, we first made our way out to the Statue of Liberty.   We were able to get pretty close to it, definitely the closest I have ever been.   After ten minutes or so there, we headed back toward where we came, and ended up sailing all the way up toward the Empire State Building.   But the best part of it all was the three entertaining hours   of great music.   The crowd was fully into it and the boat was successfully trashed when it was all over.

For years after high school, my friends and I would head out to Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati to see Poison every summer. That trend ended in 2002 after we saw the band perform at the same spot for three straight years. That was until last night when Kim and I headed down to Fiddler’s Green to see them open up for another old favorite band of mine, Def Leppard. Cheap Trick was also playing the show, but we didn’t arrive early enough to see them play. In fact we walked in after Poison had already taken the stage.

I must say that even after seven years have passed, Poison can still put on a heck of a show. Bret Michaels can still command a crowd, even if his voice is fading slightly. And the rest of the band still seems to be on top of their game. Their show isn’t overly flashy, but there is still a nice light show and even some blasts of fire from time to time.

After Poison wrapped up their set, Def Leppard took the stage after a rather lengthy set change. During the break I was amazed to see the size of the set that was being constructed on stage. When complete, there were three levels to the setup, complete with video screens along the front of each level and back behind the entire set. It was quite a difference from what Poison just had up on stage.

Def Leppard came out rocking, but I quickly noticed that singer Joe Elliott is losing his voice even more than Poison’s frontman. He blasts his way through the start of most songs, but when the high notes come, he just can’t sing like he used to. However, the rest of the band sounded just as good as I remembered. This was my first time seeing the band perform live, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. After a quick Google search it seems like my opinion is shared by many others. They are probably worth seeing once, but I doubt I’d put effort into seeing them again.

I finally got my recording of MER and Noah Gabriel’s performance from this year’s Pig-Fest uploaded. Unfortunately I forgot to set the recorder to automatically record another track after the three hour limit, so we missed the end of the show including the Paff Family All-Stars rendition of Friends in Low Places. What I do have is nearly three hours of solid tape of the two musicians playing together, as well as some songs played on their own. There’s a fair amount of wind in the recording, but it’s still very listenable. Check it out here or by using the embedded player below.

As I already mentioned, this past weekend was pretty much dedicated completely to the second annual Mile High Music Festival. Kim and I arrived before the music started on Saturday morning and lasted for nearly twelve hours in the heat. Sunday was a later start for us, but we managed to stay through at least part of the final act of the festival, Widespread Panic. Rather than breaking down each of the bands we saw, I’m going to highlight the good and the bad of the festival just like I did last year.

First the positives. My biggest complaint from last year was the lack of an affordable ride to the festival from downtown Denver. I’m so happy that this was corrected this year. We purchased roundtrip green shuttle passes for the weekend for $50 each. Even though the website said that the shuttles would run every hour on the hour, I found out that they actually seemed to run them more frequently than that. Whenever enough people were there to fill a van, that van was assigned a driver and ready to go.

The sound issues that really hurt one of the stages last year was corrected. The entire stage was moved from the grass fields and onto the street directly in front of the stadium. I wasn’t a huge fan of the paved viewing area, but the sound was much better than last year. In fact it provided a couple of my favorite sets of the second day, both John Butler and Robert Randolph. I’ll accept the negative stage placement for the improved sound quality.

One change that had both positive and negative impacts was that the entire festival grounds were shrunk significantly. It was nice that the walk between stages wasn’t as far as last year. But this came with a huge drawback in that the sound was really carrying over from one area to the next. This really affected the two tent stages, which were both setup very close to each of the two main stages. The sound from the very large main stages easily carried into the smaller tents, which were often featuring quieter bands. This problem was most noticeable for me during Railroad Earth (with Galactic playing nearby) and Guster (with Gogol Bordello nearby).

And the biggest disappointment for me was definitely the lineup. Obviously it was going to be tough to top the headliners from last year (Dave Matthews Band and Tom Petty). I really enjoyed many of the mid-level afternoon acts, but felt that the headliners were fairly disappointing. Tool was good on Saturday, but The Fray left a lot to be desired on Sunday evening. I definitely noticed the crowds were much smaller this year, though I’d still like to see some attendance figures.

Overall, I give this years festival a B- or C+. I was really glad that some of my biggest complaints were addressed this year, but I feel like some of the things I loved about last year were lost this year. With that said, I still hope the festival is around for years to come and I will likely continue to show up.

This weekend is shaping up to be a busy one. The Mile High Music Festival is back for it’s second year, and once again Kim and I will be attending both days. After the prices went up a bit from last year, and the lineup didn’t appear to be as good, we had a hard time deciding if we should even go. But after I found some weekend passes for well below face value on craigslist, it was an easy decision.

The festival starts at 11:15 tomorrow morning, and I plan to be there at that time. This may be a bit excessive, but I’ve put together a spreadsheet that breaks the entire lineup into fifteen minute intervals. I added highlights to each row, to prioritize what I’d like to see at that time. Green is the highest priority, followed by yellow, orange, and then red at the bottom. I’m curious to see if this helps at all, or I end up throwing it out after the first fifteen minutes. Either way, good times are definitely in the future.

After a rocking show at Red Rocks Friday night, Kim and I woke up fairly early Saturday morning for a flight to Kansas City and another O.A.R. show. Our friends Doni and Phil bought tickets for the show out at the newly reopened Sandstone and invited us to come along. We met up with them out at the airport, drove out towards the amphitheater and to our hotel near the Kansas Speedway. After some dinner and drinks we headed to the show and walked in just as Brett Dennen was finishing his opening set.

Obviously, for me, it was going to be hard for this show to live up to the night prior. The crowd was much smaller than the sold out crowd at Red Rocks, and obviously the scenery in Kansas cannot compare to the mountains in Colorado. With that said, I was happy to hear the band play mostly songs that they didn’t play the night before. Sure, there were a few repeats, but I have a feeling some of those are going to be played nearly every show this tour. “I Feel Home” opens us the acoustic set perfectly, while “On My Way” ends it just as well, complete with the full band coming back in full force for the end. The setlist may not have been as good as the night before, but we still got to hear some great tunes. “On Top The Cage” and “Risen” to name a few.

Unfortunately the wind nearly killed my recording. I tried to clean it up as best I could, but there are still some bad parts. I went ahead an posted it anyway, since I was the only one there taping. Better than nothing, right? Despite all of this, it was still a great show. I’d say better than most I’ve seen the past few years. Plus we got to hang with our old friends again, which is always a blast. Thanks guys!