Audrey's Blog

Bowling for Soup ROCKED!

Monday night, Chris and I along with our friends Jim & Angie ventured down to the Dallas House of Blues to see one of my all time favorite bands, Bowling for Soup (aka BFS), in concert.  The concert & venue were a wonderful culmination to what was dubbed the 2nd and final show in the Shnook-ukah concert series. (The 1st show in the series was Daughtry & Nickelback.)  We started the evening with dinner at the House of Blues restaurant which was pretty tasty and then we got to "Pass the Line" (as in the line of people waiting in the 100 degree heat outside to get into the concert hall ... hah!) to get in before everyone else and stake out what turned out to be pretty good seats for the night.  (I love a well laid out plan! See that's me smiling about such a well laid out plan ...)

Three bands opened for BFS:

Army of Freshmen - The best way to describe them was spastically energetic & oddly entertaining.  I’m certainly intrigued enough to investigate their music.  They have a very BFS sound and presence.

Quietdrive - I'll never be able to listen to their mostly mediocre music without picturing an emaciated beanpole who thinks he's the next Mick Jagger.  Their cover of Cyndi Lauper's time after time might have actually been their best song of the set.  What does that say about them?  I'll let you decide.

Melee - What's to say?  IMHO, they pretty much sucked, and all I felt like I could do I was pray for it to stop.

And then there was Bowling For Soup.  Eeeeeee!  (That was my excited squeal.)  I’ve been listening to them for a little more than 2 years.  They completely won me over with their down to earth lyrics combined with an incredibly upbeat punk-rock sound, and I’ve been a raving fan every since.  It doesn’t hurt that they’re good ol’ Texas boys (hailing from Denton County – just north of DFW) who happen to be just about the same age as us.  They opened with Punk Rock 101 (very apropos I thought).  I had no idea what to expect from their live performance, but let’s just say I was bowled over (oh, I know – that was just bad, wasn’t it?).  Their sound was incredible, and their stage presence and rapport with the audience was by far the best that I’ve ever seen.  The smaller venue was definitely to their advantage.  I don’t think they’d do quite as well in a large area setting. Their stage presence is such a huge part of their appeal and that would be lost in a larger venue.

Anyway, I digress.  They played an hour and 15 minute set which seemed to fly by.  They played most of my favorites: 1985, High School Never Ends, I’m Gay,  A Friendly Goodbye, and, of course, Ohio (come Back to Texas) during which they unveiled the BFS Texas flag.  

Part of what I love about their music is that you just can’t help but want to sing along, and this is one of the few times when a band pulled the “let us hear you sing it” that I wasn’t totally ticked off (feeling like they had completely copped out since I had paid good money to hear them sing it!).  It was awesome to sing totally off key but as loud as I could (considering my throat/voice still aren’t 100% after that bought of bronchitis last week).

I will definitely pay good money to see them again (and again and again and again … well, you get the idea).  ;-)

Daughtry & Nickelback

It's been a very long time since a concert has come to town that could entice us to fight crowds of people, damage our hearing,  and having spent a good chunk of change to do so.  But, when I heard on the radio that Daughtry and Nickleback (2 of my favorite bands!) were coming to Pizza Hut Park in Frisco (about 15 minutes from our house) just a week after my birthday, I knew we HAD to get tickets.  It ended up that us and 10 other folks (including Jim and Angie) got tickets together.  The concert didn’t start until 7pm.  It was a little warm when we got there around 6:30, but the sun was quickly setting.  By the time the warm up band was finished and Daughtry took the stage, we were being treated to a beautiful sun set (since we were facing west) and a light breeze was picking up.  Not a bad night for a concert!

Puddle of Mudd – These guys were the warm up band, and I was completely unimpressed.  Their sound was okay, but the lead singer was far more impressed with himself than we were.  His feeble attempts to energize the audience were met with only the most luke warm of reactions, and at one point, he even forgot that it was Daughtry coming on after him instead asking us if we were excited for Finger 11.  Geez.  I’d say they’re destinted to be the “warm up band” for a very long time.

Daughtry – OMG, they ROCKED the park for almost 40 minutes!  They sounded incredible live (which is always a huge fear of ours – spend good money to see a band live only to find out that a sound board in a recording studio is their only salvation).  The band put on an awesome show, and (bonus!) Chris Daughtry (the lead singer of the band – for those not familiar) looked seriously HOT.  When he launched into one of their biggest hits “Home”, I was reminded of one of the reasons I find him to be so incredibly sexy – He is reported to be a devoted husband and father (to one step-daughter and one adopted son).  In this age of celebrity misconduct, it’s refreshing to be able to admire someone’s talent AND character.  Does this mean that I have to admit to a certain degree of maturity?  My Chris pointed out one other interesting thing about his performance … he didn’t feel the need to curse once during the entire set.  Not that cursing at a rock concert bothers me, but I choose to believe that his abstinence from cursing says something about him.  He also had a better talent for working the crowd that the Puddle of Mudd dude.  Overall, I was thoroughly thrilled to have finally gotten to see them live!

On a side note – It was a definite sign of the times when the lights dimmed at one point during the show and the crowd would have normally taken out lighters in a quintessentially concert moment most folks instead reached for their cell phones to create the effect.  Good that so many people have apparently quit smoking, I guess?  But strange none the less.

Thankfully, none of the set changes took more than about 20 minutes. (We have waited as long as an hour for a set change at a concert.)  So by 9:00, the headline act was taking the stage.

Nickelback – The show opened with most of us almost crapping our pants – seriously.  They decided that they way to catch out attention in an otherwise dark venue was to crack off something sounding way too much like a gun shot.  When it happened again and the band took the stage amid some impressive pyrotechnics, we were relieved and excited all at once.  They opened with a pounding rendition of their hit “Animals”.  The entire show was a phenomenal compilation of stellar audio/visual compilation and energizing pyrotechnics.  Oh, and the band wasn’t half bad either!  ;-)  Again, we weren’t disappointed.  They sounded incredible!  Chad Kroeger was awesome on lead vocals and guitar (and not just strum-along guitar … we’re talking some riff-rippin’ guitar!).  I’m beyond impressed with anyone who can excel at what I can only image is the musical equivalent of rubbing their belly and patting their head at the same time (and I can’t even do that).  Chad isn’t the cutest thing to ever grace a concert stage, but he obviously has the charisma to charm and energize the crowd at the same time. 

Note to Monica – During Animals & Too Bad my legs were twitching!  They were trying to pedal as fast as they could, but there were no pedals.  Hah!

The only damper on the evening was the fact that I was steadily feeling worse and worse.  I started with a slightly annoying cough last Wednesday that just got worse through the week and weekend.  I woke up Sunday morning with almost no voice left from coughing all night, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give up the outing that we had been looking forward to for weeks.  So, I rested up most of the day and held up pretty well until the concert was over.  Then I realized that I had only made things worse.  (A trip to my MD today confirmed a case of bronchitis.  Ugh!  Z-Pac and narcotic cough syrup here I come.)

All of this can be summarized very simply – Daughtry and Nickelback ROCKED!  Given the chance, I’d pay money to see them again.