7.7.2010 - Santana and Steve Winwood
July 10, 2010
Verizon Wireless
Noblesville, IN
How special - our very first review of an arena show! I kid - I know that we, like some of you, typically prefer to enjoy live music in a more intimate setting - you know, where you can afford to sit close enough to see that the artist indeed has facial features! Typically, Santana and Steve Winwood wouldn't have been on our must-see list of live music, but when I saw that lawn tickets were Ticketmaster's $10 ticket of the day a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned this to my mom who is a big fan of both artists, and offered to buy our tickets if we'd go with her. Long story short, she ended up having to back out, but we still went and enjoyed ourselves anyway.
When we arrived at Verizon, there were signs of the current downturn in the live music industry everywhere. You could procure pavilion upgrade seats for as low as $10 per person (I bet there were a lot of unhappy people who paid full price for those tickets!), there were LiveNation reps positioned throughout the venue selling lawn tickets for between $10 and $25 for upcoming shows, and Verizon was seriously far from packed. Nearly an entire section of pavilion seats remained empty for the entire show. And I've never attended an event there where you could spread out on the lawn and not be encroached upon by people. It really is sad that the economy is such that artists have trouble selling out events, but can also be a bonus for concert-goers who end up getting really great deals out of the hardship. We elected to stick with lawn seating, and spread out at the very front of one of the lawn sections.
The crowd at this show was different from what we've been used to recently. As you (hopefully) already know from reading our other reviews, we typically stick to smaller venues and more "emerging" or "indie" artists. Seeing as both Santana and Steve Winwood have been rocking for decades now, the crowd was quite a bit more representative of the middle-age-and-beyond music lovers. Also quite a few families and you can't forget the crazy drunk people dancing/stumbling around.
Steve Winwood played for about a half an hour, and played some of his old hits like "Higher Love" and "Gimme Some Lovin". He can still rock after all these years. Split his time between playing guitar and keyboard. There wasn't a whole lot of excitement in the crowd for him until he played the hits that everyone knew the words to. Mel and I were discussing how his music spans generations - if only because everyone hears his songs on the easy listening station at the dentist's office. But really, I enjoyed his music and love that he still performs live.
Santana and his huge band then took the stage. There were two lead singers, bongos, drums, keyboard, guitar, etc. Carlos Santana plays a mean guitar, but that's not news to anyone I'm sure. He played some of his big hits, like "Maria, Maria", "Smooth", and a cover of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love". We were kinda prepared to be blown away by Santana, but ended up feeling that it was a good show, just not fantastic. Most of the songs were drug out for a lot longer than necessary for some reason.
Then there were Carlos' interesting comments about how Obama is doing a crappy job because he hasn't brought our troops home, how marijuana should be legalized and we should use the money for schools and education, how when the women are happy everyone is happy, and a dissertation on how everyone is made up of only two things - "light and love". It didn't really seem to go with the flow of the evening, seemed more like a "brain dump" of political leanings.
All in all, a decent night. And we left a bit early to try to beat traffic - which is managed much better now than it was the last time I was at Verizon about 6 years ago when it took 4 hours to get out of the parking lot after a John Mellencamp show. So I have better feelings about hitting up the other shows we have coming up at Verizon.
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