You can never go wrong with a James Taylor concert. The guy doesn’t throw you any curve balls and he plays every song like it’s the last time he’s playing it. You have to imagine he’s played “Up On The Roof” 10 billion times and I’ve heard about half of those and last night was still the best version (save for the “Concert for NY” performance with the Paul Schaffer band, now that was good). He did have a couple of new faces in his band this time including Lou “Blue” Marini from the Blues Brothers Band on saxophone and Steve Gadd, who’s played with EVERYONE, on drums. They both sounded great and those backup singers! Arnold McCuller, that guy can sing.
Couple of notes: the only thing bigger than the woman on my side was the woman on Jen’s side. Sweet people but we were kinda squeezed out of our seats. The security there was nice enough to let us sit in an empty box section. Those were some comfortable seats. The other extraordinary thing was while James is playing “Carolina”, Darien Lake started their nightly fireworks display. Him and his guitar player seemed to get a real kick out of this and watched it as they played and as the fireworks are going off, he sings the line “Hey babe, the sky’s on fire…” with the same look on his face that I had, “wow, that was cool.” He didn’t finish the line, just left it there.
Another thing about James is he talks a lot during his shows, he’s probably one of few major concert entertainers that can get away with that because he talks so slow. You have to talk reeeeally slow for it to come threw on those PA speakers where people can understand you. We could hear him saying goodnight to the crowd as we walked to our cars under a beautiful summer night sky to my kick ass parking spot pointing right at the exit.
Jack’s first show was a huge success.