Well, after many years, I finally had my first dose of Crowded House live last night at the Wiltern Theater in LA. I had incredible seats that put me at third row, center!
The concert opened with Sheryl Crow. I had never heard her music before, and while the sound was terrible, she was not bad. Certainly, however, there was not comparison in my mind to Crowded House (as opined by the BAM reviewer).
Since I have never seen CH live before, I do not know if it was considered a "good" show. I enjoyed it, but then again, I think they lacked some emotion. I also thought that perhaps the LA crowd was a little too mellow for them. People did not start dancing until the encore. Neil and Paul seemed to get more into the concert when they noticed people standing and dancing.
I will not go over the entire play list of songs, but surprisingly missing was Nails In My Feet. Otherwise, I did enjoy their selection of music. One thing that was truly bad about the concert was the sound equipment, which in a lot of cases, popped in and out. Mark Hart actually missed a song because his guitar was not working. CH was suprisingly patient with it.
It was also interesting to see Nick Seymour constantly putting his mixture of Crazy Glue and Vinegar on his finger to "harden" it up.
Kerry Wolk
Neil invited everyone to dance if they wanted to. However, hardly anyone did throughout the whole show. Mark gave good harmonies at the start of the show then Paul did most of them thoroughout the rest of the show. Neil told everyone that Mark lives in Saugas-sp-CA which isn't that far from LA. Then Neil went told everyone that Mark had a tattoo on his butt and that he would show it later since this was the venue where Paul had shown his butt back in Dec 91. By the way, Paul was showing off his tattoo on his left shoulder which was 3 little weird TVs. Nick also has a tattoo. I guess that only leaves Neil to catch up. Or maybe he has one that only Sharon knows about!
Someone in the audience yelled out where was Tim. Neil responded he was in Sydney now. Or he asked were they refering to their other brother Jim. Paul went into a funny sticht about being the Bastard son of Tim. After that they performed one of the better versions of Into Temptation I have ever heard them do. The audience was comptetely silent until the last note. It was great.
Next was Private Universe where Mark had some great sounds coming out from the small slide type of guitar he was playing. Paul also gave a great drum bounding at the end. While Neil was singing When You Come, he broke into a Paul Kelly song I think it was-Leap & Bounds- which they have done at previous shows. They had a local LA musican named Mike Gonzlas playing keyboards on several songs as Mark played guitar. Paul started to sing the theme to Tommy at the start of Distant Son and Neil responded that they would write a musical for the next album, ha ha. Paul broke into a "Sassy" version of Black & White Boy.
As a side note, I had seen Mitchell Froom waliking around before the show. It would have been nice to see him come on stage and play with them again. It would have been interesting to hear his Hammond organ so as to give that different perspective to TA material. Well it didn't happen so forget it. They next performed a great version of Locked Out where Paul did a fantastic crashing drum ending. This ended the set.
An encore was done where Paul came down front with his snare. They did It's Only Natural and added a few new lyrics of a song I didn't know called Lonely Boy (You make me feel like a lonely boy). After that Paul did a fashion show with his outfit. Neil said it was from the Seymour Spring Collection. Before the next song, Nick became very unhappy with the sound. He said his bass note F was sounding like a B. Nick started to rag on the theatres' accoustics and Neil kind of brushed him off.
Meanwhile, Mark was having all kinds of problems with his guitar being out of tune. Paul went into a little poem about Marks' tattoo that he said Mark's daughter wrote. It goes like this-"Mark use to have a dog. It was a hairy mutt. When he walked out the door, you saw his hairy butt." Neil started to fill in with a song while Mark worked on his guitar. He performed a song that I tentatively will call Be My Guest. It sounded real good. Paul started playing & singing. Nick came in at the end as Mark finally was ready. Neil said that it was a first that they performed it.
Neil started into Pinapple Head but changed the lyrics to something about Mark since he continued to have was still problems. He finally got the problem resolved and they played on. 2 guys made their way up on stage after the song and Neil invited 1 guy to have a drink of his whisky which he did after being cheered on from the audience. They were sent back to their seats and Neil had the audience do a collective sigh after all that had happened.
As they pulled themselves back together, Nick broke into a song. Yes, Nick! He preformed a beautiful little song that I imagine is called Pale Blue Eyes. It was a ballad with a soft country feel to it. [Yes, it's the classic Velvet Underground tune. -mlb]
They did Sister Madly as the last song. Mark did this horrible piano solo at the end with all these off key notes. All I could think of was where was Eddie Rayner when you need him. Oh well. So ended the show. They played roughly for a 100 minutes.
Here are my overall thoghts on the show. The songs were excellent that they performed. They have done a good job with all the TA songs and it will be very enjoyable for all of you. Neils' voice was in good shape. He wasn't straining for a notes since it was the start of this tour. The performance aspect of the show was bad. Somthing just didn't click. I know that the regular sound guy they use and the lighting guy named Steve Swift was not with them. The lighting jumped all around. Mark nover had a spot light on him once but then again this might have been intentinal. It seemed that they were not ready for this show. Nick was very uncomfortale due to the sound. Hopefully, all these problems will be resolved before everyone else gets to see them.
Now as far as merchandising. They have 2 really good t-shirts on sale. One is a black shirt with the TA picture on the front and the tour citites on the back. The other short is the Nails in my feet picture from the cd single. It looked pretty cool. Both sold fro $22. There were black scarfs and a black hat for sale, I think $16 & $18 respectively. Outside the venue there were people selling bootleg shirts for as little as $5 after the show.