Ohio still loves Todd Rundgren. (who'd have guessed?) The fans were packed like sardines into Ludlow's to demonstrate their long-time devotion to our hero. Todd saw many familiar faces in this crowd, and his energy level was verification of that. Not too many drunken fools screaming "Hello It's Me!"
Most of the first half of the show was plagued by technical difficulties, which forced Todd to repeat a few songs, and eliminate the acoustic portion of the program. BUT, that left ALL the power guitar songs for us to absorb, which is a good thing indeed! I don't think we missed one of the non-acoustic songs on the list.
!!!!!!!! IMPORTANT!!!!!!! - all future reviewers please take note!
TR-i is sick and tired of his babies (guitars) being referred to as "the green guitar" and "the orange guitar" . We were instructed to, in the future please refer to his guitars as follows: the guitar formerly known as "green" is named "Foamy" - the guitar formerly known as "orange" is "Percy" (or perhaps Persi?), Todd obviously deriving their names from the colors foam green and persimmon. The crowd was quizzed about these names throughout the show, and scored a perfect 100!
We also learned that Todd can be very patient with extremely sub-standard sound. His mic blew entirely, and after singing duet-style with Kas for a song, and Kas being so kind as to lend Todd his mic for the beginning of the next song, Todd decided it was time to take a break from it all and let his crew get things in order.
No new surprises in the set, per se, but the definite highlight of the evening was Jesse joining Todd for some truly mind blowing rock and roll jams! The extremely quick and right-on dual guitars on IKON were almost too much for me to handle. As a matter of fact, I'm still somewhat breathless from that one. What a treat to have Jesse in the house for some great rockin' fun! (By the way, if any of you get a chance to catch him on tour with Tony Levin Band, from what I hear, you won't be disappointed.)
A few other highlights were Couldn't I Just Tell You, BD&B (with Jesse), One World, Secret Society, Black and White, and Worldwide Epiphany (with Jesse).
This is one tour I'm very sorry that I won't be able to see many shows from, having used up my vacation time already. For those of you not too foolish to have already made other plans, I suggest calling your travel agent TODAY and see as many of these wonderful shows as you can. Todd hasn't rocked this hard since the "Fan Appreciation Tour" of the summer of 1983.
It's times like these that make me feel so warm and squishy about being a part of Todd's Secret Society of fans and rekindles that sparkle of hope that, to quote Todd, "in the blink of an eye, the world changes."
