I’m going to bullet-point this to help sort it out better for me:

  • I don’t go to many concerts. I’ve been to four in my life, and they were all Billy Joel concerts. Two of them were Joel paired up with Elton John. So it doesn’t surprise me in the least when I go to a concert that’s packed with multiple generations of attendees. A quick look around from my seat showed me people aged 8 to their 50s.
  • Like with those concerts, there were far too many people at this concert who were content to sit on their hands the entire night. As usual, there are those girlfriends in the audience scattered around who stood up the entire time, anyway. Good for them. One middle-aged bald gentleman with the all-too-cool grey goatee actually got up in the middle of one song, walked two rows down, and asked one girl to sit down because she was blocking his view. To her credit, she refused.
  • Cyndi Lauper is amazing. She was the opening act and put on a nearly-full set, stretching out to an hour and fifteen minutes. I always feel badly for anyone who has to be an opening act. People aren’t there to see them and often let them know it. When Lauper started her set off with a couple of upbeat tunes, nobody stood up except the people who were filing into the arena, or going back out for a beer. It was a steady stream.
  • “She-Bop” has a new arrangement, as sort of a French lullabye thing, complete with accordian backup. Lotsa fun, albeit slow.
  • Lauper loves to have false endings to songs. One song had three false endings.
  • She loves to walk up and down the aisles as she sings, even to the point of walking all the way to the back of the arena to the area in the back where people are seated in lawn chairs to sing to them. The down side of that was that the band couldn’t see her for the lights all the way back there and kept playing the chorus an extra half dozen times until Lauper flagged down someone’s glow stick to wave off the band.
  • Meat Loaf played a large number of songs from the new album which, as he reminded us often, isn’t due out until September 24th. Those included “Couldn’t Have Said It Better,” “Testify,” “Tear Me Down,” and “Mercury.” I think I was the only one in the arena who could sing along to all of them. Heh heh. I love Amazon.co.uk.
  • “Couldn’t Have Said It Better” will be the first single and will enter the rotation on WPLJ 95.5 (New York City) on Tuesday.
  • Just like with the Joel/John shows, the crowd doesn’t seem to care about any songs until the Greatest Hits come up. In Meat Loaf’s case, that means songs from BAT OUT OF HELL. It still gives me chills to hear better than 10,000 people singing along to any given song, and “2 Out Of 3″ was particularly good for that.
  • It’s tough to sing along to one of his songs. For starters, who has a voice strong enough to even try to hit those notes? And then he doesn’t follow the usual arrangements. I don’t think too many lines got away unscathed last night. Meat Loaf likes to play around with his timing on songs, extending syllables and think whipping through others to make up time. At times, to be honest, it can be annoying. It’s almost like he’s bored with the songs. Could you blame him? He really only has three albums’ worth of material to work with here.
  • People were tailgating before the concert. They all had BAT OUT OF HELL playing. Don’t any of them own another Meat Loaf album? BAT OUT OF HELL 2, perhaps? WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD? DEAD RINGER? Even COULDN’T HAVE SAID IT BETTER? ::sigh::
  • The concert went really quickly, and I couldn’t believe it was over. But, then, when each song is 15 minutes long, it doesn’t take many songs to fill out a concert, does it? Meat Loaf stopped at the end of one song to yell at a guy for calling him Meatball and another guy for having his cell phone out. When he threatened to throw it across the room, the crowd cheered.
  • Ironic: They were sold out of XXL t-shirts after the concert. You’d think they’d overstock those for a Meat Loaf concert. I prefer them because they’re a bit longer and I’m 6′4″. I took the XL, in the meantime. It fits.