Last Saturday my eardrums were graced with the sweet sound of pure grade-a rock ‘n’ roll infused with the cheer of thousands as I attended the Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers / Steve Winwood show at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Now, considering I was given the tickets for free and the seats were quite excellent (half court, row C), I’d have to say the night as a whole was pretty damn good.
My friend Rachel won a pair of tickets off the radio a bit after she bought some tickets for herself, her sister and mom. Now, while I was very appreciative of getting the tickets, I did feel a bit bad that the tickets she won were considerably better than the ones she bought. But alas, her brother-in-law Travis and I were 2 people while they were 3. We win.
We got to the Palace about an hour before the show, and jesus, was it busy. I hadn’t been to a show this large in years, and it felt strange wading through such an enormous crowd to get into the stadium and to our seats. This feeling certainly didn’t fade when Travis and I took our seats and I was able to take in the enormity of the place. Thousands of people had gathered here with only one thing in mind: to ROCK and freakin’ ROLL. We sat for a bit waiting for the show to start and discussed, for the majority of the time, the band’s stage setup. To the back of the stage there was what appeared to be a large metal “tree” of sorts covered in LED lights, holding LED screens and some odd hanging cubes. It turned out that the company Travis worked for designed and created much of the lighting equipment set up at the show that night and he went through all of the pieces that were being used.
Before long, and even before the seats seemed to be half-filled, the lights dimmed and the place erupted in applause. The lights came up on stage and out walked Steve Winwood accompanied by his band.
Danish metallers Pyramaze are currently one of my favorite bands. Their style of aggresive, often progressive power metal makes for quite a few interesting and epic tunes that never cease to get my head banging and the devil horns waving. The songs “Mighty Abyss” and “What Lies Beyond” are a couple of my all time favorite tunes and really show Pyramaze’s talent at constructing well-crafted and catchy material. With their newest release, Immortal, they tapped ex-Iced Earth frontman Matt Barlow to fill the band’s vacant vocalist slot. Barlow had long been working as police officer in Delaware after retiring from the music industry in 2003, and I couldn’t have been happier to hear he had seemingly returned to his true calling after 5 years of silence. Since my ears were first blessed with Barlow’s diverse, powerful voice, I’ve been a huge fan and I was happy to see I’d be able to rock out to some new tunes fronted by the man himself.
