2007年 Jul 7日 Saturday, 18:27

Fri 6 Jul – Def Leppard, Styx, REO Speedwagon

My friend and I got tickets to go see Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Def Leppard quite awhile ago, so we were looking forward to it. After work got out (around 5) we immediately headed out to the venue.
About 10 miles from the place we met all the OTHER people going to the concert….at which point traffic slowed to a crawl. Mind you, this is 90s weather in slow traffic. About 1 and 1/2 miles from the place, traffic utterly stopped, at which point my car just said "no" and overheated =P. At this point we were already about 30 min late to the concert and so we just pulled the car to the side of the road, got out, and started walking. We hitched a little bit of the way with some middle-aged women, but we decided after awhile that walking was probably faster.
We EVENTUALLY got there just about 1 hour late, having completely missed Styx and the first 1 or 2 songs of REO. After making our way through the 20-30 thousand some people, we randomly ran into a couple friends of ours and hooked up to go find a place to stand in the lawn. After getting a decent spot we began to actually enjoy the music =P.

–REO Speedwagon–
Now, I came to this concert knowing and loving Styx and REO with only a little knowledge of Def Leppard. I'd already seen Styx last summer, so I was MOSTLY going to this concert for REO. Their performance basically consisted of Kevin Cronin just eating up the crowd and playing mostly his pop songs which made them famous. This was a shame since all of my favorite REO songs were from T.W.O..
Anyway, they still played ones I loved: Roll With the Changes, Take it On the Run, Ridin' the Storm Out, etc., so it was still enjoyable.

–Def Leppard–
After giving our legs a break, out came the headliner. I was entertained by REO, but HERE'S where I remembered that I came to see a rock concert. They were pretty feakin sweet, I gotta say. Even though I didn't know most of the songs (I did know a COUPLE, though: Pour Some Suger on Me, Photograph, Animal) they had a great energy and kept my adrenaline high. They also played about twice as long as the previous two (whom I pretty much forgot about awhile of these guys). The singer was great, having pretty much all of it still there and the guitarists were amazing. The one-handed drummer with his bare-footed drum mastery was pretty amusing too, and you wouldn't have even known if they didn't show a close up of him on the big screens. Made me more of a Def Leppard fan, definitely.

Also, went to get a t-shirt, but unfortunately they were out of larges :(. Oh well, that just means EBay's gonna see me looking for some in a month or two.