On May 23rd my good friend and music lover Richard invited me and my boyfriend to a Byran Adams show at the Shoreline Amphitheater in San Jose (not SF). Although I am familiar with all the Bryan Adams hits of the 80's and 90's... I was in for a bigger treat at his show then I was expecting. I've always thought of Bryan Adams as a great all American song writer...which is funny because he's from Canada. So let's just go with "great song writer." He personified the rock song that blazed through the late 80's and early 90's. I remember being a flower girl in wedding's in the 90's and the song the couple danced to was "Everything I do." He's written some of the most popular contemporary love songs.
Apart from hearing all the hits and some more obscure Bryan Adams material, I learned a lot more about him. For example, he performed with Tina Turner on the song "It's Only Love" and dedicated the song to her. They performed the song together in 1985. Bryan Adams hit the stage with "Reckless" which is a track I hadn't heard yet (when though it's from the 80's), and I totally dig it! I got way more familiar with his work; which I appreciate. During "Summer of 69" and "Everything I do" mushroom clouds of weed smoke came up from the audience. Bryan even mentioned it saying "Is weed legalized here yet?" to which the audience grunted "Nooooooo."
Bryan's band members were all wearing the same sort of get up- black pants and turtle necks. Bryan and the keyboardist had the same David Beckham style pompadour. At one point he selected a lady from the audience to be a "crazy, sexy dancing lady" and he picked a pretty young blond who was in the front rows. Afterwards he asked her named and joked "Is that your dad?" when asking who the guy with her was. It was totally her boyfriend. The audience was dancey and fun loving. Lots and lots of beers going around, along with the ever present concert cliche of the drunk guy high fiving everyone. He and his uniformed looking band returned to the stage for an encore, and then Bryan performed the last two songs solo on acoustic.
On a completely separate note, a can of beer (domestic beer you could purchase for a few dollars anywhere else) was marked up to a whopping $13.00. There were no water fountains, and small bottles of water cost upwards of $5.00, and they take the cap. I always like to take a mental note on how expensive things are at concerts and how much has changed. That aspect of concerts is just getting more and more insane...but that's another blog post!
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