Phoenix 8/9

From Tom. He coins 2 new terms. See if you can spot them:

Before the show (see pics below) you could feel a real upbeat energy. That energy came from everyone knowing that the Magical Misery Tour was about to come to a close and we had survived. The problems with the bus have been documented throughout these little tour dispatches, so I don’t need to continue to rattle on about that other than to say that as the tour went on we all came to feel that, beyond all the obvious issues, the bus did not feel safe, and it felt less so with every drive.
This is probably a good time to mention that Lucinda is very lucky that she has a great family of band and crew that really bonded together when things got tough. To a man they all really care about Lucinda and they all know what a trooper she is. That goes beyond being true pros – here it comes- the eye rolling joke and here comes the rimshot -they are pros and bros -or you could say brofessionals. Yes, just typed that. In any case -everyone did a fantastic job not letting this big mess go off the rails.
The above mentioned energy also came from knowing that we were going to come out rockin’ and we had a full house that was completely on board with that-in fact 20 of the 22 songs were requests. As has been mentioned previously some nights you can just feel a certain electricity in the building -and you could definitely feel it on this night.
So let’s get to the show -which was pretty epic. Lucinda came out to a huge applause and it was on. She said, with a big grin on her face, “OK–We are gonna rock tonight” -and with that the band kicked into a red hot version of Protection. From there it just took off, with a little breather for the stripped down middle section of the set.
After that is was pedal to the metal -Foolishness, Come On and Essence back to back to back -pure fire. When we got to the encore -instead of Lu picking two or three songs she said “come on let’s just do all five”. The adrenalin was full on. A ripping version of the Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go (Lu has just loved doing that song) to easily the best version of Bruce’s The Rising (we didn’t know until after the show that Nils Lofgren was in the house) to this tour’s summary statement, Rockin’ In The Free World. Nobody in the room wanted it to end, but there were planes to catch for some, and one more drive home for the rest of us. But there it was -we made it -and what a perfect way to end it -over the two nights in Phoenix Lucinda played 40 different songs -and we still didn’t get a lot of songs in. Thank you Phoenix for supporting that experiment. In some circles Phoenix has a reputation as place that can be tough to sell tickets. Two sold out nights worked pretty damn great for us. After the adventures of the last three weeks it all felt like a little bit of a triumph.

But the night wasn’t quite over yet, Mark Humphries, Lu’s front of house sound engineer came back and said “hey-my friend Nils Lofgren is here and wanted to know if it would be ok to come back and say hi”. Yeah I think that would be ok. Going to have to do a separate post about that, as well as a tour recap—and yes I think we finally got some pics of Red Fred The Driver.