The Counting Crows Are BIG!
There comes a point in the career of a mega-musician when no stadium can hope to contain his or her ego. That is usually the point they self distruct on a leathal crack-cocaine-heroine-methanphamine mixture. That was the fate I feared for the Counting Crows as I entered the gargantuan Clark County Fairgrounds just outside of Vancouver, Washington.
I was surprised to see that the Counting Crows would play such a big venue when they seem like such nice people. Especially since nasty Ticketma$ter is picking your pocket at the gates. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, I laid my money down for the Crows, whom quickly become one of my favorite bands over the last two years.
The throw-in of the Goo Goo Dolls really didn't sweeten the ticket, if you ask me. Its amazing how many people still care about them. There were these girls who stood and sang every song of there's, until the bassist Robby Takac sang, which I didn't blame them for going and buying beer during. I was surprise with how many songs I recognised, however Johnny Reznik's voice ain't what she used to be. He doesn't aim for the high notes any more (quite obvious on their City of Angels track 'Iris'), and his reliance on Takac singing lead vocals every other song proves either Reznik's voice is shredded, or his ears are so gone he can no longer hear how bad Takac's vocals are.
But the show was about the Counting Crows. First of all, lead singer Adam Duritz is big. I hate to even feel the need to metion that, except it isn't consistant with the scraggally boheimian I envision from August and Everything After. His vocals have probably improved with his size, but his stage antics of balancing on monitors is scarier more than exciting.
And then there is the music... simply awesome. I guess you have to be a fan, but I think every Counting Crows song is great, except for maybe the one on the Shrek 2 soundtrack. (Smash Mouth did the 'theme track' for the first movie, and having anything in common with Smash Mouth is wrong).
Still I felt they really mixed it up with songs from all their albums, and not just the singles either. Adam likes to change up how he sings the songs (especially Mr. Jones) which makes the sing-a-long difficult, but we loved it anyway. With a solid one hour plus show, I felt pretty good about seeing the Counting Crows. A late night dash back to C-town was the harsh reality of what my concert going future looked like.
| June 24, 2006 by carobert | 0 comments |
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