Saturday, March 22, 2008

Joan Jett and The Blackhearts do Tahoe

Happy Easter, Readers!

I know the posts may be slow coming around here some weeks but the reviews for the remaining two sections of Ghosts are in the works. I feel we've got something good cooking for #3 and will be worth the wait but in the meantime I have this quick tidbit to hopefully tide you over.

As some of you may or may not remember last month the hubby and I took a vacation to the lovely Lake Tahoe, CA. It was my first trip to the west coast and it was fantastic, although it's unfair the amount of gorgeous scenery the west coast ended up with. Seriously, how awful would it be to have to look out your office window and see this everyday?


In between adventures in mountain climbing and relaxing in the hot tub we found time to catch a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts show. We passed a huge sign on the way into town announcing they'd be playing at Harrah's on Saturday night. My contact in town assured me that this venue never completely sells out so I didn't immediately bother with looking for tickets. So of course when I did call the day of the show the lady tells me the place is completely booked but that I might have a chance in the cancellation line since it had been snowing for three solid days with no signs of stopping. I wasn't thrilled with the prospect of waiting it out but figured what the hell. Lucky for us two inebriated fellows, Mike and Bob, spotted us rather quickly and offered two tickets for face value of $56 a piece but the catch was they were for a table and we'd have to stick it out with them. As I started to look over to my hubby to see if this was okay Mike, the more drunk of the two, says "Fuck it. I'll sell them both to you for $40." SOLD!

The venue is decent size and there really isn't a bad seat in the house but ours were supposed to be somewhat towards the back. No problem for me since I was fulling intending on doing a little video work but apparently a problem for Bob. So he used the ticket money he'd just made off us to see if the hostess could "upgrade" our seats. After a few minutes she came back and asked "Will front row seats be alright?" So we went from no tickets to front row seats in about 30 minutes. SCORE!

One cool thing about thing about this show being in a casino: no dreadful opening band to suffer through. It was get seated, watch some random roadies, and then -BAM- there's Joan and crew. They jumped right into the swing of things kicking off the show with "Bad Reputation".


Joan's starting to get up there in age a bit but Girlfriend still looks good and can still pull off a leather/rubber getup better than some other aging rockers we're all familiar with. *ahem*

After the first couple songs people started making their way to the front to watch which irritated some of the seated folks near the stage. You'd think they'd never been to a rock show before.



We watched a fight between a nice older, gray-haired guy who looked like he's probably an insurance agent or something else fairly harmless and two 20-something girls. It looked like he was just asking them to move but that didn't go over well and one of the girls attacked him. Now I normally don't condone violence against females but after knocking him back through four rows of seating while scratching at his face and breaking his glasses I feel the one face slap she received as he finally fell over backwards was probably deserved. Unfortunately for him the other audience members didn't agree and they jumped him. Eventually security sorted it out and tossed the three of them.

The rest of the show was pretty uneventful but still fun. Joan and the gang played a pretty well balanced set of old classics like "Crimson and Clover" and "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", to which some Granddad was reliving a youthful moment patting the ass of his much younger girlfriend, and the new stuff off their latest album Sinner. I obviously don't really follow Joan Jett but there seems to be several catchy songs from this release and I briefly considered purchasing it but because I'm lazy, I haven't.

All in all they played for about three hours and wrapped it up with "A.C.D.C." off their new record.



I really liked this song and wish I could have recorded it all but the old memory card was full. This is a problem that I'll have fixed shortly though. I can't be running out of space if I'm to record NIN when they come to Lolla this year, now can I?

To anyone living near one of the cities this tour will be coming through I'd recommend catching the show. Thanks again to Mike and Bob for making this all possible. *sniffle* We love guys! You can see the rest of the videos here and also a few pictures from the show and our trip here.

3 comments:

maise said...

Maise comes out of her hole, sees her shadow, and retreats to hide for another six weeks.

Actually, maybe it won't be that bad. I'm *almost* at the point where I feel like I have my shit together, but in the meantime, I've got another deadline to tackle.

Love you guys!

Anonymous said...

I'll never forget the first time I heard "Crimson and Clover" when I was like, six.

I have a funny picture of what I saw out the window of my office. I'll have to get that together when I am in the office tomorrow.

D:ANGEL said...

JJ will always have a soft spot in my heart. One of my old bands covered "I love Rock and Roll" and in a drunken stupor attempted her version of "Little Drummer Boy", the latter being a complete disaster.