The Blogg

Personalized Internet advertising gets a bad rap. I found it fortuitous, not creepy, that some algorithm figured out that I would want to know that Five Iron Frenzy had reformed for a very limited number of shows, including one in my old hometown. I certainly had not been searching for them in any recent years. A bit of background: in the mid-90′s the third wave of ska was in full swing, and I was exposed to it in 1996 when my parents dragged me to the Creation Festival. Five Iron Frenzy became the second popular music band that interested me and remained one of my favorite bands throughout my teenage years. The popularity of ska was fleeting, and while FIF hung on longer than most, they broke up in 2003, a few years after I had mostly lost interest. After a decade-long hiatus, they are apparently returning in a very limited way.

There was just one problem: the show was scheduled the same day as my employer’s baccalaureate service and the day before commencement. I vacillated for months before deciding that no one would miss me at the service, that I could get home in time to sleep a bit before the next day’s festivities, and that I could not pass up a likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be reminded of my childhood. And then … the show was sold out. Too invested to give up now, I scoured the web for sources on the secondary market, ineffectively until the morning of the show when two tickets showed up on Craigslist! Many thanks to the young lady with the pink flamingo purse who sold one to me at great personal inconvenience.

I had been to the Chameleon Club just one previously, more than a decade ago to see one of my classmates’ bands play. That had been a fairly sedate affair in which maybe 100 people showed up for some local bands. This night would be rather different. The advertised schedule was that doors opened at 7:00pm and the opening band would start playing at 8:00pm. I arrived at 6:50pm and the line of people waiting to be admitted already stretched down Water Street to the next intersection. Back in the day FIF shows were attended mostly by teenagers; today it was mostly people like me who had been teenagers during the band’s heyday. The doors did not open at 7:00pm. At 7:30pm the first trickle of a few dozen people were admitted, but then no more until 8:00pm, when another hundred or so were accepted. The rest of us waited, in the drizzling rain, until 8:30pm.

Once inside, there was an unbelievable crush of people. I fought my way to the third-level balcony, where I could see a corner of the stage when the three-deep people in front of me angled their arms just right. And I was lucky; it seemed that most people in the venue had no sightline at all. There were ventilation ducts in the wall near me, but they were not functioning, and the room quickly became as stiflingly hot as you might expect 1000 people packed into an enclosed space might be. The opening act, House Of Heroes played from 8:45pm until 9:35pm. They were a four-piece hard rock band with punk influences, and while I was not familiar with any of their music it was enjoyable enough.

Five Iron Frenzy started playing 9:50pm and stopped at 11:15pm without an encore. There were some fairly long breaks in the middle of their set, including a seven-minute one in which broken microphone cables needed to be replaced. I heard “Where The Zero Meets The Fifteen”, “Milestone”, “Handbook For The Sellout”, “Blue Comb ’78″, “Oh, Canada”, “Every New Day”, “One Girl Army”, “The Phantom Mullet”, “You Probably Shouldn’t Move Here”, “Pre-Ex-Girlfriend”, “You Can’t Handle This”, “Farsighted”, “At Least I’m Not Like All Those Other Old Guys”, “American Kryptonite”, and three or four songs that I did not recognize. At the beginning of the set the mixing was terrible: I had to recognize songs from the chord progressions / guitar riffs, because the horn parts and vocals were nearly inaudible. It got better as the night continued, but only marginally.

I made it out of Lancaster before midnight, but was so tired I had stop for a nap in a gas station parking lot before getting home at 3:00am. In spite of the delay, crowd, heat, and poor sound, I am very glad I had the opportunity to see the band again and relive my life as it had been 15 years ago. If they stay together, I’ll certainly try to see the band again. But I do not think I will be returning to the Chameleon Club any time soon. It may be the worst concert venue I have ever visited.

It was very kind of Bob Seger to schedule his stop in central Pennsylvania for the day after our last day of classes, so I could not deny him my business, even when all of the cheap seats sold out early. I ended up on the floor next to the soundboard (section N2, row 30, seat 10) in the Bryce Jordan Center. The opening act was semi-local act The Badlees, to whom I had just been introduced a month earlier when a friend unsuccessfully suggested that I come to one of their shows. They consisted of a lead guitarist and occasional harmonica player, a violinist, two guitarists, once of which also played some mandolin, and a bassist and drummer. I found the core of their music to be fairly boring mainstream pop, but it branched out often enough into alternative country and riffy hard rock to keep me interested. They claimed to have been the very first band to have played in BJC, and that this was their first time back since then. Their set lasted about 35 minutes.

After a 25 minute break the Silver Bullet Band started their marathon two hour set. The band is quite large: Bob himself, three background vocalists and percussionists, two guitarists, a pianist, a main saxophone player plus the four-part Memphis horns, a bassist, a drummer, and I think the occasional organ player was someone else entirely. Bob played acoustic guitar on those songs where it was appropriate, piano for two songs, and just sang the others. I recall them playing three or four new songs and most of the biggest hits from the late ’70s and early ’80s: “Beautiful Loser”, “Katmandu”, “Her Strut”, “Against The Wind”, “Roll Me Away”, “Like A Rock”, “Rock And Roll Never Forgets”, “Night Moves”, “The Fire Down Below”, “Sunspot Baby”, “Mainstreet”, “Come To Poppa”, “Tryin’ To Live My Life Without You”, “Hollywood Nights”, “Old Time Rock & Roll”, “We’ve Got Tonight”, and “Turn The Page”. They also covered “California Stars” by Wilco / Billy Bragg / Woody Guthrie. I do not believe there were any selections from Bob’s solo career that had not been more famously recorded by the band for ‘Live’ Bullet. The set included a pair of two-song encores.

Bob’s voice does not seem to have changed at all in 40 years. Having the Memphis horns back up the absurdly named Alto Reed added some interesting harmonies to a few songs, but most of the arrangements were unchanged. Being played live and loud really brought out the hard rock edge underlying the songs, though. “Her Strut”, in particular, was a nice, jaunty celebration of a beautiful woman on the 1980 record; live in 2013 it became dark, heavy, malevolent. Before playing “We’ve Got Tonight”, Bob explained that the lyrics were inspired by a scene from The Sting. Before “Like A Rock” he said that they had not played the song in decades. At the time I took that to mean that we were getting a unique experience, but it looks like he must have meant that this tour was the first one on which it had been played, because attendees of prior shows on the tour are reporting the same thing.

There are better hard rock bands out there, and better soul bands as well. But I doubt that anyone joins the two as well as the Silver Bullet Band, and it makes a great combination. (And they happen to be pretty good balladeers as well.) There were few surprises, but it was a great night of music.

The impending end of the semester means a lot of work to do, so while I was intrigued when I saw that Dylan would be playing at Stabler Arena in Bethlehem I was intrigued but unlikely to attend. I happened to mention it in passing to my father, though, and he was very excited by the opportunity to see a living legend for the first time when there may not be many more opportunities to do so. So we went, and as usually turns out to be the case I am glad that we did.

The opening act was . Prior to this concert, my knowledge of Dawes ended at the AV Club having run a adver-story about them to much ridicule. But their live show was fairly entertaining. The band is a four-piece: drums, bass, keyboards, and guitar, with the guitarist singing lead. Two of their songs, “Someone Will” and “From A Window Seat” were countrified boogie, which I enjoyed. “Most People” also had enough of a harmonic-ended riff to interest me. The rest were more slow, deliberate, and simple. That’s a stylistic choice that can only attract my attention when combined with breathtaking beauty, which only happened on “A Little Bit Of Everything”. They were a good choice to pair with Dylan, having songs dense with lyrics. Their set started on time at 7:30 and lasted 45 minutes.

Dylan and his band (not “the band”) came out after just 15 minutes of stage-setting, and played for 90 minutes virtually without rest. The band was a drummer, a bassist (both guitar and string), an acoustic guitarist, an electric guitarist, and a second electric guitarist who doubled on banjo and pedal steel. Dylan himself played piano on two thirds of the songs and harmonica on a third (not mutually exclusive) and sang everything. He did not play guitar at all. I would have expected 8 or 10 greatest hits and half a dozen selections from Tempest and Together Through Life. That is partially accurate: they did play “Early Roman Kings”, “Soon After Midnight”, “Pay In Blood”, and “Scarlet Town” from the newest album. But very few of the songs that anyone would recognize were in the setlist: I would say just “Tangled Up In Blue” and “All Along The Watchtower”. Perhaps that is what I should have expected from someone who has published more than 300 songs and been performing the more popular ones for 50 years.

I had heard reports that Dylan’s voice was in bad shape for the past few years, but he has sounded good in the studio to me, and he sounded good live last night as well. That’s not to say that it has not changed; is voice is raspier and more complex than ever. But while that would be bad for most singers, it just makes him sound even more Dylanesque than he used to. His singing is still highly expressive, with a full range, and plenty strong. It is very difficult to make out the lyrics if you do not already know them, but you can appreciate the vocals simply as a unique instrument. The rest of the band sounds great, and it was a very sprightly show. The arrangement of “All Along The Watchtower” sounds a lot more like Electric Ladyland than John Wesley Harding, but the way he sung it was pure Dylan — completely ignoring the rhythm and some of the melody of the original and instead holding some syllables for several measures, then spitting out half a verse in a few seconds. He did not speak during the entire concert. Not to thank us for coming, or to introduce the band members, or for any other reason. Prior to the show starting, someone else came out to request that we enjoy it in the moment, not through the lens of a smartphone. It made for a very late night, but one I am glad to have spent.

I was glad to hear that Skynyrd was coming to our little town, but when someone told me the cheapest seats (charitably described as “limited legroom”) were $61 I did not believe them. I had attended a wide variety of events at the Community Arts Center at much lower prices, and I had seen Skynyrd twice before, at the Festival Pier in 2003 and the Mann Center in 2005, also without paying that much. So I did not decide for sure that I would actually attend until 1:00pm the day of the show.

At 7:30 the opener Leogun started a 30 minute set. They are a bluesy, English, hard rock power trio, and they had some great, heavy songs written. Personally, though, I think it could use a lot more lead guitar. The people around me did not care for them at all, with one older woman commenting that it was an awful half hour of her life she will never have back. I was unable to ascertain how she felt about the headlining act, but their recent material is just as heavy.

After a half hour break Lnynyrd Skynyrd played for 75 minutes before their encore, including in their set list “Last Of A Dyin’ Breed”, “What’s Your Name”, “Down South Jukin’”, “That Smell”, “Saturday Night Special”, “I Know A Little”, “Simple Man”, “Gimme Back My Bullets” (abridged), “Whiskey Rock-A-Roller” (abridged), “The Needle And The Spoon” (abridged), “Tuesday’s Gone”, “Good Teacher”, “Gimme Three Steps”, “Call Me The Breeze”, “Sweet Home Alabama”, and “Freebird”. That’s two songs from the most recent album and nothing else from their post-crash output. Two more members had died since I last saw the band, leaving only Gary Rossington as an original member. The more recent replacements performed as admirably as the more seasoned ones had been, although keyboardist Peter Pisarczyk traded his piano for a synthesizer on much of “Tuesday’s Gone”, to disastrous effect in my opinion.

Hearing a band with three guitars and piano outside of the careful editing of the recording studio risks the important parts of the music being drowned out by all of the accompaniment, and that happened here, particularly with the solos of Allen Collins’s replacement, Rickey Medlocke. But it also means that occasionally a riff or fill that you never noticed before when it was buried by the sound engineer slides into the foreground, giving sections of songs an interesting new flavor. The band still seem to be having a lot of fun and are still doing these songs justice, but I think the third time was probably the charm for me, and do not expect to be back for another.