Tag Archive for: Live

The indomitable Dublin quartet U2 has been a force on the live music stage for so long that I have witnessed it go from playing on cafeteria tables in a little club in Memphis to the world's largest stadiums. But at some point during every show in more than four decades of witnessing them, U2 and their audience transcend the rock concert sturm und drang and it more closely resembles a big tent revival, as it did that night in Boston June 2001 during this medley of "Bad" into "Where the Streets Have No Name".

It is a miracle that "American Girl", on the 1976 debut Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers   released forty-five years ago, was ever discovered to be played on album rock radio: it was sequenced tenth, last song on side 2! Here TP and the best working band in America then stripped it down to its essence in order to "make it last all night..." during a multi-night stand at San Francisco's Fillmore in February 1997.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee-to-be Todd Rundgren performed a concert in Connecticut in 2015 that was breathtaking in it's career overview, from the Nazz to Utopia, and including almost five decades of brilliant solo songs such as "Can We Still Be Friends?".