XDA

Went yesterday with the usual gang to Red Rocks Amphitheater at the base of the foothills to see young John Mayer and the lovely Sheryl Crow. Had the additional pleasure of hearing Marjorie Fair again. Well named, they are fair. It was pretty cold and I don't know what it is about Red Rocks but people apparently come there to talk while the bands play and they never shut up, even when the band plays its megahit. It must be the out of doors thing. We were on the 4th from the top row so the stage was a loooong way away. For Mayer, who played first, the sound was OK to good, but for Crow, they put the lead guitar (hell, all the guitars) on mute. Some bands have wailing guitars, Crow's band last night had whispering guitars. The only time you could hear them was on the last encore song, a cover of Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll (which she did pretty well--but even she couldn't hit Plant's notes in his prime and she had about 1/3 of his power) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I like John Mayer a lot just for the first album, Room for Squares, which has about 4 good songs-- which makes it a great CD nowadays. (My favorite is 3x5s so of course he didn't play that). They were fun, well crafted pop songs with a good hook/tune and minimal guitar work and his breathynasal voice (but in a good way). His second album Heavier Things was a nightmare with no good songs (the one about daughters was minimally OK) and if he has albums after that, I don't know them.

So how does he seem to position himself now?--as a pseudo guitar god, the new white king of the blues; except that he can't play that well, certainly not well enough to maintain in any person, with a reasonably knowledge of blues history, any abiding interest in his solos, such as they were--he was either stretching a wailing top not or fret wanking sloppily--with very little in between. I do like his new custom fender Strat in a color not found in nature, but it is a poor fan who admires the musician's instrument more than the playing of it, so I guess that's pretty faint praise.

In the possible lawsuit brewing department, one of Mayer's new songs, Mark and I noticed, sounded way too much like a motown tune we couldn't quite place (it finally came to me--it was Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready (Listen) by the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart the singer). It may be an unconscious lifting, but it is a palpable lifting (the tune not the words).

Now on to Sheryl Crow. Man, did she look good, especially her hair. Lance must be kicking himself. Here's the good songs she did--Strong Enough, A Change Would Do You Good, My Favorite Mistake, Soak up the Sun, and Steve McQueen. Here are the awful songs she persisted in singing--If it Makes You Happy, The First Cut is the Deepest, and Everyday is a Winding Road (which I always mis-sing "Everyday I'm a whining bitch.") all of which songs have her doing this wailing let loose line like a shriek. Just awful. Good songs she recorded but which she didn't bother to sing last night--All I Wanna Do and What I Can Do for You. What the heck? Who doesn't sing his or her biggest hit?

There was a time in the middle 70s after the really hot part of the renaissance had cooled a little where every band had 10 members including a conga player and two backup singers (usually women) and it was the death knell for good rock and roll--the Las Vegasation of what had been a youth movement as well as really good music, now and again. It took punk, as awful as that was, to redirect music for a while into semi-goodness. It looks like we're heading that way again with multi-member rock and roll bands past the maximum 5 (even though there were, thankfully, no conga players on stage last night). There was a cello and other strings though. So Sheryl is obviously preparing her act for when Celine Dion gets too old.

All in all the open air venue ate these guys up and robbed us of any intimacy of performance and good sound. (They might have been decent indoors). As for the future with these recording artists; been there, done that, passed on the T-shirt.

Jeff Beck on Thursday. Real music.