Jon & Kathy

Kathy and I were talking, sometime in July, and decided that we hadn’t been to a good concert in a while. August normally wraps up concert season around here, so we started shopping around. We found some good tickets for a lot of different artists, both on ebay and stubhub.com. We narrowed the selection down to Heart or Styx/Kansas. I bought the first set of tickets that went on sale on-line for the Styx/Kansas concert and we ended up having excellent seats (4th row right in front of Tommy Shaw). We also had really great seats at the Heart concert as you can tell in the video below.

As you can tell from the video, Heart still puts on an excellent show and hasn’t lost a thing. Ann (the singer you morons) is 60 and her sister, Nancy (the guitar player), is 56. That isn’t old, but they’re not just over 20 like they were when they recorded a lot of their hits. The show was at the Ryman in Nashville, and it was a great place to have a concert. I think it used to be a church years ago. Heart actually just released a new album and they played some of those songs too. They were really good and were very similar to their old music.

Kansas was ok. It was good to see them, but I built them up a lot in my head, and I was a little disappointed. They’re also all 60+, but Steve Walsh (singer) has really lost his voice. I went to the concert only knowing what they used to sound like. We still enjoyed it, but I doubt they’ll tour much longer.

Styx was every bit as good as Heart. I’ve seen Styx before with Dennis DeYoung (the guy that started the band) back in the 90′s when he briefly toured with them. No one knew at the time it would be a brief reunion, and shortly after they picked up the new guy on piano and he’s been with them ever since. He does an excellent job and sounds a lot like Dennis, but isn’t crazy like him. They really put on a great show… so much so that we’re looking for another set of tickets to see them again next month.

Overall, we’ve had a great time and my mom and dad have really helped out a lot watching Olivia. I’m a little sad that she’ll never get to see any of these bands in concert. At least we have some video and some stories for her. I’m really fortunate to have seen a lot of the bands that I have. Kathy and I counted the other day and I’ve seen about 40 or so major bands in concert. I also really got a kick out of Kathy. She’s hooked on old rock and roll now and really likes bands that sing harmonies. She’s the world’s worse with band names and songs. I had to play her all of these band’s songs from youtube or amazon so she’d know who they were before we went. We now have all of their music in iTunes We will be concert junkies for a long time I suppose, but we’ve learned some lessons. For one, if it isn’t an outdoor or open seating, then buy the best seats you can afford. Security sucks and lets Joe blow pothead sneak up and squeeze in and smell awful and sing off key (listen at the end of lady). Get seats toward the middle of a row. I don’t ever plan on going to the bathroom, so I’ll deal with it. It’ll at least be a buffer for the drunk/stoned morons. If it is open seating, wear a t-shirt. It allows you to really swing elbows when necessary . I really think that we’ll stick to indoor concerts from now on if we can help it though. The sound is much better.