Last night, my wife and I went to see our (for once, mutual) current musical enthusiasm, Kelly Clarkson, in concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. I am here to tell you that if you have any interest whatsoever in Clarkson’s music, you owe it to yourself to see her live while she’s in her prime as a concert performer. There’s no other way to put it: Clarkson’s voice goes to 11. It’s a fun show, it’s cheap (our $49 tickets were a fraction of what I’d have had to pay to see U2 or Springsteen again), and there’s no substitute for the energy of a performer who’s still young (she’s 27), at the peak of her talent and still has something to prove. And as I’ll discuss below, her live show, at least at this stage of her career, is unmistakably a rock show.
Now, obviously, versatile a singer as she is, Clarkson’s music isn’t for everyone. There’s a reason why people are often a little embarrassed to like her music or describe it as a ‘guilty pleasure.’ Personally I have a fairly high tolerance for cheesy, as long as the end product is really fun music, real emotion, or both, rather than ersatz, generic Hallmark crapola. Thus, for example, music made by Meatloaf in the 1970s or Aerosmith or Bryan Adams in the 1980s: cheesy, but good. Music made by any of those artists from about 1990 on: makes me want to gouge out my eardrums. And Clarkson is definitely cheesy, cheerfully and unapologetically so; she makes Jon Bon Jovi look like Mark Knopfler by comparison. But she succeeds on both grounds: she makes a lot of fun music, and she pours genuine emotion into nearly everything she sings, even the fluffier pop tunes. I may be an emotional guy, but I’m a grown man and I have well over 2,000 songs on my iPod and more than that in my CD and tape collections, and I can count on one hand with room to spare the songs that still have the power to choke me up a little after repeated listening – but Clarkson’s unreleased song “Close Your Eyes” is definitely one of them. Not without reason, she has swiftly surpassed Blondie as my favorite female artist and surpassed – well, nobody – as my favorite young (under-40) artist. As has been often pointed out, she’s not just a singer of songs but an interpreter of them, and that talent has matured significantly in the years since her arrival at age 20. And very gradually, she’s been accumulating some actual respect for being, basically, a musician’s musician, the kind of artist other people in the industry want to work with: veteran performers, including rock warhorses like Jeff Beck, Melissa Etheridge, and Joe Perry, always come away impressed from working with her. Cheesy or not, my own guess is that if Clarkson’s voice holds up well enough to have a long career in the business, she’ll end up as one of those pop music stars (like Brian Wilson or Tony Bennett) who comes in for a round of more serious later-in-life re-evaluation. But whether that day comes or not, I’m not the type to miss a good show just because it’s uncool.
The Ghost of Concerts Past
The concert was definitely a break from my past concert-going habits in two ways: Clarkson’s the first female headliner I’ve seen, and the first who was younger than me. Here’s the full roster of previous concerts I’ve seen, so far as memory (supplemented by Wikipedia) holds:
-Billy Joel, Worcester Centrum (Storm Front tour Nov. 1989) (no opening act)
-Tom Petty, Worcester Centrum (Full Moon Fever tour circa spring 1990) (opening act: Lenny Kravitz)
-Billy Joel, Giants Stadium (Storm Front tour summer 1990) (no opening act)
-Rush, Worcester Centrum (Roll the Bones tour, December 1991) (opening act was a guitar-only guy…Joe Satriani, maybe? Eric Johnson? I think it was Satriani.)
-Meatloaf, Holy Cross College (May 1992) (no opening act I can recall)
-U2, Yankee Stadium (Achtung Baby “Zoo TV” tour, August 1992) (opening acts: Primus and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy)
-Bruce Springsteen, Boston Garden (Human Touch/Lucky Town tour, December 1992) (no opening act)
-Billy Joel, Nassau Coliseum (River of Dreams tour…this must have been December 1993 or January 1994, though I thought I remembered it being later in the 1990s than that) (no opening act)
-Rolling Stones, Giants Stadium (Voodoo Lounge tour, August 1994) (opening act: Counting Crows)
-Harry Connick Jr., Jones Beach (She tour, I believe summer 1995) (no opening act I can recall)
-Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Giants Stadium (Reunion tour August 1999) (no opening act)
-U2, Madison Square Garden (All That You Can’t Leave Behind “Elevation” tour, June 17, 2001) (opening act: PJ Harvey)
-Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Giants Stadium (Rising tour circa July 2003) (no opening act)
-Saw Doctors, Irving Plaza, Manhattan (March 14, 2003; reviewed briefly here) (opening act: ex-band member Padraig Stevens)
-Saw Doctors, Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan (March 20, 2004) (no opening act I can recall)
That’s the full shows I’ve paid to see (although the Meatloaf show, I believe, was just a few bucks), excluding things like seeing Bruce do a few songs at Rockefeller Center for the Today show in 2007 when he released the Magic album, and excluding cover bands and people like John Cafferty or the Mighty Mighty Bosstones that I’ve caught pieces of shows by. I’ve been fortunate: I’ve never seen a bad concert.
The best show, unquestionably, was the first Bruce show, even though he was playing without the E Street Band (thus: no “Rosalita,” although we did get “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”). Partly that was seeing my all-time favorite artist live for the first time, and it was a classic college adventure: a friend loaned us her car for the drive to Boston on condition that we first dig it out of a foot of ice and snow. But it was also a sensational show: Bruce went on at 8:20 and played past midnight, closing the show when the Garden clocks struck 12 by bringing out Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for a duet of “In the Midnight Hour,” after which the crowd screamed for 10 minutes for more encores. After “Badlands,” always the emotional high point of any Bruce show, he played a blazing stop-and-start version of “Light of Day” that held the entire crowd in his hand for close to 20 minutes.
The show that sold me the most on a band was the first Saw Doctors show; my younger brother had given me one of their CDs, the Sing a Powerful Song collection, so I knew I’d have a good time, but I was totally sold after that on a whole raft of songs I heard for the first time live – “Tommy K,” “Galway and Mayo,” “Villains,” “That’s What She Said Last Night,” etc. Definitely another act a lot of people haven’t seen, but they’re amazing live, and I highly, highly recommend them.
The band that sounded most exactly like their records was Rush. A high-quality, impressive and enjoyable show, but the only spontaneous moment was the fistfight that broke out near my seats. But then, you listen to Rush to think, not to feel, which is different from what I usually look for in music.
Hard to pick the worst. Meatloaf was at the low ebb of his career, on the eve of his mid-90s comeback; that’s why he was available for a small-college campus gig. At the time, I was unprepared for the crudity of his stage act, but his voice was tremendous and he performed his biggest hits with verve. The most pot smoke was definitely at the Petty show, the most beer-drinking crowd at the Stones show. The worst crowd was the third Billy Joel show, a Friday night crowd of working adults too worn out to get out of their seats, and that’s probably the least-fun of the shows I’ve seen, but while he wasn’t quite as good as the first two times I saw him, it was still a good set.
Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve never seen a bad opening act. None have been all that great – Lenny Kravitz was pretty good…as for Rush’s opening act, my patience for guitar-only guys is pretty limited no matter how technically impressive. The most disappointing opening act was the Counting Crows, who literally were barely audible; they just weren’t loud enough to be heard in a huge stadium on a sound system designed for the Stones. By far and away the two worst acts I have ever seen were the two opening acts for U2 at Yankee Stadium in 1992. Primus, a metal band, lived up to their fans’ slogan (“Primus Sucks!”) by, so far as I could tell, hitting one note and staying there for 45 minutes. I love metal as much as the next guy – Zeppelin, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, Guns n’ Roses**, Pearl Jam, even a little Metallica – but these guys forgot that good metal is still supposed to be music. The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were even worse – granted, I (like probably a majority of U2 fans) loathe most rap anyway, but these clowns’ big hit was some song called “California Uber Alles” about – I kid you not – how Pete Wilson, that icon of squishy liberal Republicanism, was a fascist. I’m sure that one goes over real well in concert in the 21st century. The fact that there were two opening acts only added to the atrocity. U2 was great, but they didn’t take the stage until around 10:30; throw in gridlock on the Tappan Zee Bridge, and we didn’t get home until after 2am.
The Continuing Story….
I thought, after penning an exhaustive profile of Clarkson for The New Ledger back in mid-June, that I was done writing about her, but I confess that I’ve stayed hooked on keeping an eye on her doings as the perennial scrappy underdog of pop music, the populist pop star who sings what she wants, says what she thinks, and doesn’t give a damn about being cool, trendy or fashionable – and watching the ongoing befuddlement of a celebrity culture and music industry that still don’t know quite what to make of her. She is, as a result, great copy. She’s had an eventful and newsworthy few months since then, being embroiled in a series of increasingly ridiculous controversies, none of her own making (although in a few cases she poured gasoline on an existing fire):
Continue reading Concert Review: Kelly Clarkson, Without Shame or Reservation*