Sunday, October 18, 2009

Concert Review II: WP/ABB

Friday night we went to the Widespread Panic/Allman Brothers Band concert at Starplex Amphitheatre in Dallas. It was a great time. The Greers and Horsch's were in full force at the concert.

This is most likely the Allman Brothers last full-scale tour (the original members are in their mid to late '60s and the guitarists that tour with them, Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes, have their own bands and only tour with ABB as a goodwill gesture), so I was excited to finally get to see ABB live. I have seen WP quite a few times. This particular concert WP played quite a few songs from the "Earth to America" and "Free Somehow" albums, neither of which I own. It still sounded good, just wasn't as familiar with some of it.

I was running late from work on Friday, and we had to book it down to Fair Park. With traffic from the State Fair and Texas/OU, we did not like our chances to get to Starplex before the show started. With some great navigation, precision driving, and ingenuitive parking by myself, we found our seats right as the concert was starting. An assist to Hip Hop Paul Greer for handing off the tickets to my truck as we drove into the parking lot.

Our section had a Hall of Fame security guy. Nobody without an appropriate ticket was allowed anywhere near Section 201. Approximately 800 people tried to sit in the seats in front of us without a ticket and were promptly removed from the section. Truly an award-winning security performance. Although only standing about 5'2", this security guy's performance was on par with the music that we actually paid to see. I wish I had gotten a picture of him, but I figured he'd throw me out too.

These pictures aren't great quality, but you get the idea.


WP opened with an old classic "Radio Child".


They also played "Wondering" and "Space Wrangler" and the Neil Young song "Don't Be Denied".


I was excited to see what kind of collaborations between ABB and WP might happen. I was not disappointed. Slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks came out to lend his strings for two songs with WP, highlighted with his solo on "Blackout Blues".



In between the WP and ABB sets, we saw Connor.

ABB did a remarkable job of playing everything I wanted to hear. They opened with "Statesboro Blues" with a photo tribute montage of Duane Allman in the background.


They followed that up with "Come and Go Blues" and "Midnight Rider". JB came out and played a Bob Dylan cover with them. Highlights of the set for me were "One Way Out", a 30-minute version of "Jessica", and they closed with "Whipping Post", which was the song I most wanted to hear them play. Nicely done.


Special thanks to Lauren Caverlee (her last week as "Lauren Caverlee") for babysitting Charlie until 1am, which was about 2 hours longer than we expected to be gone. Thanks Lauren.

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