Miers on Music by Jeff Miers

Magic in Toronto

On Monday, a capacity crowd inside Toronto's Air Canada Centre helped Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band celebrate the second night of their brief jaunt through Canada, part of the band's first leg of what promises to be an incredibly lengthy tour.

The show was phenomenal, even by this band's standards. Centered around the torrid and emotionally resonant "Magic" material, the gig took some interesting left-turns - "For You" and "Incident on 57th Street" were jaw-dropping - and rose to an incredible adrenaline high during the encore section.

Only 9 shows into the tour, Springsteen and band have fully hit their stride.

Here's the complete set-list from Monday:

Radio Nowhere
Night
Lonesome Day
Candy's Room
She's the One
Livin' In the Future
The Promised Land
Town Called Heartbreak
Incident On 57th Street
Darlington County
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last To Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
Encore:
Girls In Their Summer Clothes
Thundercrack
Born to Run
Dancing In the Dark
American Land

On Sunday evening, when the band played Ottawa, the Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Regine Chassagne showed up during the encore! They joined the band for "State Trooper" and their own "Keep the Car Running." Check out video of the performance here www.Pitchfork.com. No word on a Buffalo date yet, but plan on being there when it finally does happen. The "magic" tour is already starting to make "The Rising" look like a mere warm-up!

Born to Promote!

Yes, this is another Bruce Springsteen-related posting. Deal with it!

The guy's got the number one record in the country. More importantly, it's the first record to make No. 1 in eons that actually deserves the honor. And Springsteen, who (like so many other artists in his age group who are still making new music, and not merely riding the whole nostalgia-oldies gravy train) has been using television to reach his fan-base. There was the Today Show, there was 60 Minutes, and now there's VH1's 24-hour Bruce-fest, which culminates in a live cut-in of a few songs from this evening's Springsteen & the E Street Band show at the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey, airing at 8 p.m.

Springsteen looked terribly uncomfortable on the "Today Show," which,  aside from the brilliant, full-on concert he and the band offered,  was an embarassment. Matt Lauer, bless him, didn't seem to have a clue what to ask Bruce. "60 Minutes" was far better, but again, it would be nice if someone who is an actual Springsteen scholar sat down with the man.

Ask and you shall receive! VH1 is airing, as part of its Bruce bonanza, "Inside Track: Bruce Springsteen," a pretty intense 30-minute sit-down between Springsteen and Dave Marsh, who has been writing eloquently and insightfully on the man pretty much from the beginning of his career, including the two massive tomes "Born to Run" and "Glory Days."

Marsh asked great questions. Springsteen gave thoughtful, intense answers. It was almost enough to wipe out the memory of Matt Lauer.

Check out the programming schedule for the Springsteen marathon at www.vh1.com.

Concert tix: How much is too much?

First, the good news. Neil Young is playing Buffalo for the first time in what seems like forever. He'll bring his "Chrome Dreams" tour to Shea's on November 30th.

Unfortunately, tickets aren't cheap. The best are going for $132 each. The remaining are either $92 or $62. (Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday.)

Hey Neil Young fans out there -- is this too much to pay for ol' Shakey?

What's the most you've ever paid for a single ticket?

Was it worth it?

Hasn't all of this gone far enough? 

Summer concert season 2007

For me, this summer went by in a blur, like the scenery outside the window of a bullet train.

Last evening concluded the Thursday at the Square season with an over-packed Dropkick Murphys gig (shown at left). The evening previous, Heaven & Hell bid goodnight to Darien Lake's summer run. It's hard to get your head around the past three months so soon after all of this -- can't see the forest for the trees, and all that. Today's Gusto offers some photos from the past few months of concert activity, and my picks for some of the top shows. Tough, very, to narrow it all down to just a handful. So here are a few honorable mentions that could've made the cut, but perhaps rather arbitrarily, didn't .

Please post your own list of favorites here!

--The Derek Trucks Band at UB: This band just keeps getting better, and this intimate gig found Trucks and Co. digging deep during a set-opening run of Delta blues-based stuff. Trucks' playing was sublime.

--Roger Hodgson, Avalon Theater, Fallsview Casino: Who could've expected a show this powerful? Even without Supertramp fleshing them out so immaculately, Hodgson's song connected in an extremely powerful manner.

--Heaven & Hell, with Alice Cooper and Queensryche, Darien Lake PAC: Alice (at right) came awful close to stealing the show here. He and his band were fantastic, and the set list was well-chosen. Queensryche played powerfully, and absolutely killed a cover of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine." The Dio-led Black Sabbath spat out an immense wall of sound punctuated by the sort of dynamic interplay that only playing together for decades can provide. This is as good as heavy metal gets.

--Alice in Chains and Velvet Revolver, Darien Lake PAC: Velvet Revolver was a bit of a let-down. All the pieces were there, but they never came together. The group seemed scattered, but still, individually powerful, especially Slash and Scott Weiland. Alice in Chains, on the other hand, gave us an inspired set. This band needs to make a new album! 

--Elvis Costello, Rockin' at the Knox: Costello and pianist Steve Nieve were in top form. This particular gig -- outdoors, in a festival-type setting -- might've benefited from the full-band approach, a la Elvis & the Imposters. Some of the intimate intricacies were lost in translation. Still, the brightest moments were transcendent.

Genesis set list

Saturday's Genesis gig at HSBC Arena was pretty sublime, as close to perfect as one could expect, minus a full-on reunion with Peter Gabriel. Many of you wrote asking for the set list, so here it is. See the full review from Sunday's Buffalo News, and the official, band-sanctioned recording of the show is available through www.genesis-music.com.

SET LIST:
Behind the Lines/Duke's End
Turn It On Again
No Son Of Mine
Land of Confusion
In the Cage/Cinema Show/Duke's Travels
Afterglow
Hold On My heart
Home By the Sea/Second Home By the Sea
Follow You Follow Me
Firth Of Fifth/I Know What I Like
Mama
Ripples
Throwing It All Away
Domino
Phil Collins/Chester Thompson drum duet
Los Endos
Tonight Tonight Tonight
Invisible Touch
I Can't Dance
The Carpet Crawlers

Daughtry

I'm feeling the heat, following my rather scathing review of Daughtry's appearance at the Erie County Fair last week, which goes down as one of the shoddiest shows I've seen this summer.

However, I'd like - well, maybe "like" isn't the right word; let's just say I feel it would be right to hear from some more of you Daughtry fans. What is it about this guy that's anything other than hopelessly average and transparently contrived?

What am I missing? I'd love to be convinced...

Allman joy!

The Allman Brothers/RatDog double bill at Darien Lake will certainly be at, or very near, the top of this summer's "best of" list.

It's hard to say which band was "better," so we''l call it a draw, possibly giving the Allmans a slight edge, just becasue Derek Trucks was incredible throughout the gig.

That said, RatDog played impeccably, and guitarist Steve Kimock seems to have made his mark on the band. Bob Weir looked and sounded fantastic, and the whole gig revealed a level of friendly competition between the two bands - everyone had showed up bringing their A-game.

So, who was there? And what did you think?

Alice in Velvet

Thursday found Alice in Chains and Velvet Revolver joining forces at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in what turned out to be a pretty forceful argument that guitar-based rock 'n' roll is not dead, even if it does, on occasion, smell pretty bad. Both bands were quite good, but for my money, Alice in Chains took top honors.

Though Scott Weiland (at left) and Slash were both great, Velvet Revolver never seemed to quite gell on stage. Alice, on the other hand, was simply mighty, self-assured, clear in purpose & intent. Any thoughts?

Police raid Toronto

Reunion tours can be dodgy affairs. It's tough to avoid skepticism when a mega-popular band gets back together after several decades apart to tour the world, particularly when that band has no new album to promote. The whole thing can reek of "cash-in."

Maybe the Police reformed to tour for the first time in 23 years solely for the money. But if that's the truth, the band certainly did a pretty good job of hiding it when it landed in Toronto for a pair of shows at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday and Monday. In what is certainly a rare occurrence, the reformed Police not only lived up to a well-deserved legacy; Sting (shown at left during a tour stop in Philly last week), Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland also managed to dig even deeper into their collective sound, offering new arrangements, expanded sections, altered tempos and a raw sophistication that ably married the elegant fury of the earlier work to the well-crafted grace of the later.

Here's the set list from Monday, the second night of the Police's Toronto stand.

Message In A Bottle
Synchronicity 2
Walking On the Moon
Voices Inside My Head/When the World Is Running Down
Don't Stand So Close To Me
Driven To Tears
Truth Hits Everybody
Bed's Too Big Without You
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Wrapped Around Your Finger
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Walking In Your Footsteps
Can't Stand Losing You
Roxanne

Encores:
So Lonely
King Of Pain
Every Breath You Take
Next To You

It should also be noted that opening act Fiction Plane --  fronted by Sting's son, bassist/vocalist Joe Sumner -- offered a torrid performance of tunes from its new album, "Left Side of the Brain," to an audience that seemed wholly familiar with its sound. Despite the seeming lack of familiarity, the band earned an enthused response by show's end. Check out this great trio at www.fictionplane.co.uk or www.myspace.com/fictionplane.

What an incredible show! Now how about a Buffalo date?!?

Roger Waters, "Leaving Beirut"

Thursday's Roger Waters show at Darien Lake was phenomenal, yes, and hearing "Dark Side of the Moon" in its entirety was something no one who made it to the show is likely to forget for a good long while. But for me, the emotional center of the evening came just prior to the "Dark Side..." segment, when Waters was on the downward slope of his first set. "Leaving Beirut" was the pinnacle. In case anyone was unfamiliar with the hard-hitting song, its lyrics were scrolled larger-than-life on the rear projection screen. And they were anything but ambiguous.

Anyone have any thoughts on this song?