There’s a red house yonder…
Sunday night I went to the Experience Hendrix concert at the Paramount theater. Lots of good music, but as it was the first show on the tour, it could stand to get a little more organization. They were trying for a continuous music kind of thing, where each band played a couple songs, and then another band went on without needing to change the stage. Except they had trouble with smooth fast switches, especially Kenny Olson (Kid Rock’s lead guitarist) who played with a few of the bands.
Purple Haze, all through my brain…
Among the bands there were… part of Earth Wind and Fire (not bad), Indigenous (pretty good, never heard of them), Living Color (not too bad, except the singer was trying to get the crowd to sing Crosstown Traffic forever), some local guy who was pretty good but obviously new at playing for a big crowd, Jerry Cantrell (of Alice In Chains. really good guitar and his singing was good, but not his special guest…), Ann Wilson (of Heart. sucked, Jerry Cantrell should have kept singing. She’s washed up, and can’t sing Hendrix.), Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox (of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Pretty good as well, except when they brought out their special guest…), “The Voice” Paul Rodgers (apparently the singer from Bad Company; sings well, with a nice voice, but Hendrix shouldn’t have a nice voice. Plus, he was full of himself), Kenny Wayne Shepherd (really good), Hubert Sumlin (played with Howlin’ Wolf. really good old blues guy), Buddy Guy (really good Chicago electric blues player, been playing for 45 years professionally, he was awesome). Playing with half the band were Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon (of Double Trouble, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band), who were pretty good, though they just played bass and drums. Also, Mike McCready (of Pearl Jam) showed up to play a few songs, which was pretty cool.
Pretty much all the bands played two or three songs of Jimi’s, except Buddy Guy who played a few really old blues songs aucoustically, then he played some blues with Hubert Sumlin, and then played with pretty much everyone who was there. Buddy Guy was great, he plays with tons of emotion, he’s got a great blues voice, and was really cool to see.
I also found out that my mom likes Jimi Hendrix too, from back when Jimi was alive. She used to listen to his music on the radio, on stations that were a little more focused on good, important music, as opposed to popular music of the moment. So i picked a good concert to coincidentally occur at the same time as my mom’s visit.