Halestorm & Evanescence

My daughter is a huge music fan. Some people don't get too into music, others tend to almost base their lives around it. My daughter is one of the latter. It's probably her artistic nature, as well as the fact that she has a lot of time to listen to music while working on her art.

I did something right when raising her, though, because she likes mostly the same music as me. She's been jealous of me for a while as I've been telling her stories of the concerts I went to when I was younger. For example, She's a big fan of Rush. I saw them in January, 1992:

Now, Neil Peart, the drummer, is dead, and the band has called it quits. It's a band she can never see, and she's jealous about that.

I've told her I would take her to any concert she wanted to go see. All she had to do was find the show she wanted and let me know to buy tickets. She started looking...and then Covid hit. Concerts were canceled, heck every single public gathering was canceled from baseball games to Broadway plays.

It was a long morose couple of years, but things are finally getting back to normal...in some ways, anyway. Concerts are starting to come back. So, my daughter started looking for a show to see.

The band Evanescence, who burst onto the scene back in 2003 with their biggest hit, "Bring Me to Life," had a new album for 2021. I've always been a fan, so I checked the album out, and found it to be really good. I made a disc of it that I could listen to in the car, and after a while of riding with me, my daughter had become intrigued and started listening to it on her own as well.

She liked the album as much as I did, and when I told her that they were coming in concert, supported by another group that I really liked called Halestorm, she was all in. She decided that had to be her first concert.

I suppose here is where I need to make a quick aside. My daughter has actually been to a big concert before. In 2008, we got tickets to a Fourth of July fireworks show and concert that was featuring the vocal stylings of Miley Cyrus. These days, my daughter is a little embarrassed to admit that she ever went to a Miley Cyrus show, and since she doesn't even really remember it at all, having been only four years old at the time, she doesn't count it as her first concert.

Anyway, back to the present. We got tickets for the show, and the days steadily passed until it was time to go see some music. Luckily, my daughter was paying attention, because I had completely forgotten that the day had arrived. If it had been up to me, we would have sat at home that night, completely wasting the money we spent on those tickets.

Since it's a Covid-era show, we had to have our vaccine cards to prove we'd been jabbed just to get in the door. This of course made the line take a lot slower.

Our tickets claimed the show started at 7:30 PM, and we got inside at 7:39 PM, but the opening band, which sounded like they might be pretty good, wrapped up their set about one minute later. We didn't even know who they were, because the tickets didn't name an opener, but my daughter searched later and discovered that they were called Plush.

It would be kind of funny for them to turn out to be really great, and a band that we later grew to love, since we missed them by so small a margin. It would be like the time back in 1991 when I went to the Clash of the Titans concert.

The opening band that day was called Alice in Chains. At the time, they had one song on the radio called "Man in the Box." I saw them perform, but barely paid attention. I really wanted them to move on to the big headliners like Anthrax, which was one of my favorite bands at the time. Me and my friends sat around, making fun of Alice in Chains when we weren't completely ignoring them.

Later, Alice in Chains became one of the biggest bands in the world, and could have had Megadeth, Slayer, or Anthrax as their opening band. They became one of my all-time favorite bands. I love pretty much anything they ever did.

I never saw them in concert again, and the lead singer died years ago, so I never can see that version of Alice in Chains again. I could have said that I saw Alice in Chains before they were cool, but I didn't bother to pay attention to them as they played songs that are now some of my favorites right in front of me. I wish I could go back and watch that show again.

I looked up that band, Plush, and they seem to be right down my alley. I may really regret missing them later.

This show wasn't much like the Astroworld concert from a week ago that caused the deaths of nine people. Instead, it's a bunch of people who are similarly old like me, who couldn't be bothered to put in the effort to push to the front of the crowd. I sent my wife a selfie of us waiting for the next band to come out, and her comment was:

That's probably fine. When I told my daughter that the concert was being put on by Live Nation, the same promoter that put on the Astroworld event, she had second thoughts. I told it would be fine, and it was. Us oldsters just can't be asked to put in the kind of effort needed for a stampede. Somebody would have to burn the building down to get us running.

It wasn't long after we got there that Halestorm started playing. When the first blast of super loud Rock and Roll hit us like a wall of sound, vibrating our chests, a big smile spread across my daughter's face, and never left it until the show was done.

I got a couple of videos to share on the blog. My guess is that if you're younger than me you don't even need to bother clicking because you won't enjoy the music. It's pretty heavy, too, so you may not enjoy it even if you're younger than me. Maybe watch it on mute, the light show is pretty good, anyway.

About halfway through the show, the song that I came to see was played. In 2020, the singers from both Halestorm and Evanescence put out a duet of an older Halestorm song, and it is really beautiful. I knew, since both bands were touring together, that there was no way they would put on a concert and not perform that song, so I grabbed video of that song too.

Don't mind all those phones being held up in the shot. They're being held up for effect, instead of people endlessly recording and taking pictures. When I was younger, all the smokers in the audience would hold up their lighters at times like these. The flashlights on everyone's phones have taken the place of lighters now. It looks kind of like this:

Which is a pretty cool effect, and that's just the back end of the venue. If I'd taken the picture from right next to the stage, I bet it would look even cooler. My daughter was a fan, and held her phone up with the flashlight on for several songs, even when they didn't come out and ask for it.

Unfortunately, as I complained in yesterday's post, our view often looked like this:

That's a little annoying, I must say. Phones weren't even the worst thing, however. There were plenty of tall people in front of us that we often had to move from side to side whenever taller people managed to get in front of us.

Funny my hypocrisy, right? Complaining about phones up in the way after providing you with several videos I took doing the same thing myself. Then complaining about tall people being in front of us when I am 6' 1" and surely block the view of a lot of people behind me. I guess I'm a human. We're all pretty hypocritical when you think about it, and we all hate hypocrites at the same time too. It's pretty hypocritical for a hypocrite to hate hypocrites, isn't it?

The first band, Halestorm, finished their show after some intense songs filled with awesome dueling guitar solos. My daughter was so impressed that she decided that she wanted a Halestorm T-shirt instead of an Evanescence shirt. She knew Evanescence more, but now she was won over to Halestorm (also, I think their T-shirts had better designs on them, and that is probably the most important for an artist like my daughter).

I was really thirsty, so in between bands, we went in search of some water. There were no drinking fountains, of course, which wasn't a big surprise. If there were fountains, then how could they charge people exorbitant prices?

When I asked the bartender for water, he told me he only had canned water. I've never seen canned water in my life, but I bought one for each of us. We laughed a lot when we saw the brand name of the water.

Yes, their water came in a can that looked like an energy drink or a beer can, and the name was Liquid Death. LIQUID DEATH! That seems like a silly name for water, but fun, I guess. I was thirsty enough that it tasted like pure life instead of liquid death. Gotta do something to get that diabetes under control before it causes my death, huh?

Next thing you know, Evanescence hit the stage and started playing.

That video was one of their ballads, but they're more known for heavy rockers than ballads. One of their heavy songs, and their biggest song was "Bring Me to Life," and I got some good video of that one.

I don't know if it comes through in the videos, but Evanescence had so much more of a wall of sound pumping from their speakers than Halestorm did. When their drummer did a solo, the thumps of his drums vibrated our chest so much that I felt like it might cause a heart arrhythmia or something. Confusing our hearts so that they didn't know what was a drumbeat and what was a heartbeat. Luckily, our bodies aren't generally that stupid, so our hearts continued their normal function. Their guitars were much more distorted and chunky than the relatively clean and crisp sound of Halestorm.

Not to be outdone by Halestorm, Evanescence did a duet with Halestorm's singer just as Halestorm had done with Amy Lee, the Evanescence singer. Instead of doing one of their songs, they did a cover of a Linkin Park song called "Heavy." 

I got video of that moment, because it seemed significant, but truthfully, I didn't like the song as much. I don't know what my daughter thought, but I think she might have dug it more than me. She's a fairly big Linkin Park fan as well.

The show came to a big finale when they played my favorite song from the new album. The first time I listened to the album, many of the songs didn't grab me right away, but track twelve had an amazing melody to it, and I found it strange that they saved that one for the very last. It wasn't one of the singles that they released, and I was guessing that they may not play it at all, so I was pretty excited to see that it was actually their big finale.

Then the lights came on, and everybody cleared out. So, that was my daughter's first real concert. She had a great time, and was all for going to more shows...if only they weren't so expensive. I'll have to see if I can find some more affordable shows. Maybe some cool up and coming bands, because they tend to be much cheaper. Stay tuned for further blog posts.