My Type of Crowd

John and I had a great time at the concert on Tuesday night, and despite the fact that we got home around midnight, I wasn’t very tired the next day since I’m still tired from the weekend! (Was that a run-on?)

This was the third time we’d seen Velvet Revolver and they were just as good as the previous concerts. Well… Scott Weiland’s voice was a bit off. I’m not sure if he was battling a sickness or drugs (hopefully not…even though the majority of their songs are about drugs), but he definitely didn’t sound like he normally does. Maybe we are too critical since we’ve seen them before? Despite the voice and lack of holding long notes, he put on a great show. John and I saw Stone Temple Pilots back in the 90s and it is always a treat to see Scott perform again (especially when we never thought we would).

It didn’t seem like there were as many odd rockers in the crowd this time. In the past we saw mostly mullets, flannel shirts, and we even saw a dude in a Slash hat. Everyone still went crazy during any Slash solo.

One of the highlights of the night, (and previous times), is when they sing Stone Temple Pilot and Guns N Roses songs. You think you’ll never hear those songs in concert again and then you do! They sang a few STP songs from their second album and sang Patience and Mr. Brownstone from GNR as well. The crowd totally went wild when they started playing them. We had a few hard-core rockers to our right that busted out in the full on head banging and throwing up the horns. I hadn’t been subjected to that since I was in Junior High when the ‘rockers’ of the class preformed a lip sync at the schools talent show!

Alice in Chains opened up for them and we were also very excited to see them. I read online that a ‘special guest’ was also performing. The concert started at 6:30, so I thought we’d at least be able to see Alice in Chains if we showed up around 7:30-8pm right? If the first act played for a half hour, then it took a half hour to change the stage it would be perfect! WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG. We parked at 7:15pm and what do we hear? One of Alice in Chains hits! I thought ‘why are they playing that song so soon into the set?’ Well their set ended at 7:30pm! What the crap? So I thought that the ‘special guest’ probably didn’t show up, but I was wrong. Later on in the show Scott thanked Sparta for joining them on tour. Can you believe it? How long did they play? 15 mins? I felt even worse for John though, because he really wanted to see them. The other time he had a chance to see them was when they opened for Metallica, but he missed them that time too. He said it just wasn’t meant to be, and I think he’s right.

Half way through the show John spotted a lady on the stage near the back totally rocking out. I didn’t think VR had hired back up dancers for this tour, and plus she didn’t really look like one…she was a totally old school 70’s rocker. As the song went on she kept easing more and more from the side of the stage! Eventually a stagehand asked her to move back to the side, but I was totally hoping she was going to make a run for it and stage dive into the crowd.

Near the end of the show a few bras got thrown up on stage. John was waiting for some underwear to be tossed, but that never happened. Oh and I mosh pit even formed! You can’t mosh to that type of music! Geesh!

This concert was definitely scaled down compared to the last time we saw them in SB, (the other time was in Paso). There weren’t any screens or other elaborate stage decorations. Kind of a bummer since we weren’t that close. We decided to walk towards the exit during their SECOND encore and when we did we noticed that about a quarter of the top part of the venue was empty! What a shocker! The last time it was sold out and we were 2 rows from the very last row.

Overall it was well worth the trip. I feel so lucky that we have a venue 1.5 hours away that gets decent names. Who will it be next?