This last week was musical one - I attended double the number of concerts in four days than I did in all of last year . . . that is to say, two. Don't get me wrong: I love music; real unabashed love, comparable to the love I feel for the cheese section in French supermarkets (as opposed to dirty, shameful love, like my love for reality television). For whatever reasons, (one of which rhymes with smothertruckin' wicketmaster pervice tees), I just hardly ever made it out to see live shows.
Cue last Wednesday - the first of the two concerts was a culmination of a musical oddyssey which began back in 2002 when some wonderfully demented soul unnaturally merged my pure love of music and my perverted love of reality TV and called it American Idol. A young brunette from Texas rocked her audition and then tripped and slid under the judges table and my never-ending girl crush on Kelly Clarkson began. So when I heard she was coming, and A-Mac was all, let's go!, I was all, yeaaaaah! and when the big night came I was so excited that the only thing that could dampen my enthusiasm was the absolutely ass-clownish incompetency of the Corel Centre management, which is a post all in itself but to give you the lowlights, involved us trying to spend our money to purchase services and being thwarted at every turn by their policy of, apparently, taking a succesful venue and running it into the ground through idiocy.
Idiocy of the "Let's close the kitchen right before the 30 minute intermission begins" kind. Idiocy of the "Let's scan people's tickets religiously during the opening act, including when the exit and enter the on-premises restaurant, but when Kelly’s about to start an earnest “Gee, I can’t seem to find my ticket” will suffice”.
Of course, this was almost totally redeemed by the awesomeness of a 50-something usher who openly mocked the Backstreet Boys by snarkily recapping their first performance as having an opening, closing and encore song, filling the rest of their hour with “We love you guys, we love you so much, we know you love us”.
And as asinine as that sounds – that’s really all that mattered to their pre-teen fans.
And, that’s, apparently, who Kelly Clarkson’s fans are too. Pre-Teen Girls (And The Fathers Who Love Them (Or At Least Couldn’t Stand One More Minute of “Dad, Can I Go to Kelly Clarkson? Canicanicanicani?”). These girls bought glow sticks and glow lanyards and glow-faux-backstage passes and wielded them with pride. They wore $40 concert tees and shouted “We love you Kelly!” in their loudest pre-pubescent voices, and knew all the words to her songs and sat patiently during her heartfelt performance of Annie Lennox’s “Why” which caused their parents to, for one brief fleeting moment, actually identify with the music while their daughters mostly waved their glow sticks and chatted with each other and wondered when she would get on to “Breakaway” already. They danced and sang and cursed the adolescent relationship they might one day have that would undoubtedly end in their being mistreated, but all the stronger for it (see “Low”), (oh, and “Since U Been Gone”) (oh, and “Behind These Hazel Eyes”) (oh, Kelly, you work that niche, girl!).
I expected her to rock the house, and she did - no surprise, as she has already proven herself as a live performer with a killer voice – but what she really needed was to take a page out of the Backstreet Boys’ book (How to Success in Pop Music for Ugly Dummies With No Talent) (sorry, boys, but the 11th grade love-affair is over - button up those shirts already) and engage in a little bold-faced currying of favour – even a “Hello Ottawa!” would have sufficed, but it was not to be. Girl can sing the hell out of arguably-catchy-yet-hardly-original pop, but for the love Pete, Kelly, learn how to banter. It’s not hard – you love us, we love you. “Hello Ottawa! I was driving down route 417…” “Hey, that’s right by my house!”
But she’s young, and she’ll get there, and I look forward to seeing her again as long as she abandons the totally unappealing washed-out blond look (pay attention Avril Lavigne/Lindsay Lohan/Brad Pitt) and returns to her former glorious hair colour.
If on Wednesday the dutiful dads and moms of Ottawa trucked out to the Corel Centre with their tweens, then Saturday was their chance to call up the sitter, dust off their concert shirts, double-fist the $6 cups of beer and mold their hand permanently into the devil horn’s/rock-on sign while one of this rockingest bands ever performed.
Oh yeah – we’re talking Def Leppard, baby.
Now as part of my complete immersion in classic rock growing up, I was pretty familiar with Def Leppard – their back to back 10-million plus selling albums, the drummer with one arm, the union jack shirts – but I certainly underestimated their ability to make grown men and women go completely apeshit with one riff. I saw grown women who probably wear baggy shirts and shorts at the beach shake of their awesome curves with pride in vintage AC/DC tops. I witnessed grown men who wouldn’t normally do more than shake hands engage in full body bear hugs repeatedly. I watched hardware engineers, accountants, managers, teachers, and god only knows who else engage some of the most passionate air guitar performances I have ever seen.
As for the band - well, they may have been old, they may have engaged in stereotypical classic rock grandstanding, and at least two of them were apparently, and unfortunately, allergic to their shirts – but goddamn, they knew how to rock. And by they end, when10,000 middle-aged suburbanites were screaming out the words to “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, you knew that every that everyone was back in their glory days before kids and mortgages, and that that feeling would last all the way until the next morning, when their $150 hangovers kicked in.
But boy, would it ever be worth it.
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