New Orleans, LA - Media Reviews

Cheap Trick, Poison and Def Leppard bring 80's night to the New Orleans Arena By Alison Fensterstock

A commercial for tonight's triple bill of early 80's-vintage glam metal that ran in recent weeks on WKBU 95.7, New Orleans' classic-rock radio station, warned: "This show might cause you to wear tight, acid-washed jeans." And indeed, more than a few fans took the opportunity to sport their favorite neon, leggings, washed-out Aerosmith and Motley Crue concert tees and teased hairdos. No fewer than three male fans turned out in shaggy blonde wigs that could have been homages to any of the frontmen: Cheap Trick's Robin Zander, Poison's Bret Michaels or Def Leppard's Joe Elliott.

As many memories as the show generated for a crowd that appeared, on average, to be old enough to have seen all three monsters of rock the first time around, it was no nostalgia act.

Both Def Leppard and Cheap Trick have released new albums recently - Leppard's "Songs from the Sparkle Lounge" in April 2008 and Cheap Trick's "The Latest" in late July of this year. Poison's last studio album was in 2007, and singer Bret Michaels put out a solo effort - "Rock My World," a tie-in to his VH1 reality series "Rock of Love," in 2008.

Throughout a tightly run three-and-a-half-hour show, the energy barely flagged. If some of the electric bombast of the bands' first touring years seemed missing, it was replaced by a kind of self-assured ease, coming from consummate pros hanging out in their natural habitat: an arena stage.

By Alison Fensterstock @ The Times-Picayune 2009.

---

Underdogs Cheap Trick shine alongside monsters of rock By Alison Fensterstock

Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen is famous for his largesse with picks. Most rock n'roll guitarists toss out a couple at every show for the fans to scramble for, but Nielsen is almost ridiculously magnanimous. His microphone stand is tricked out with dozens, held in a special rack for easy throwing access; probably every ticket-holder in the first ten rows at the New Orleans arena took one adorned with his signature checkerboard pattern home. As the band's forty-minute opening set drew to a close, he stepped it up, taking handfuls of picks from his guitar tech to fling out like confetti.

And in New Orleans, we know how to go after throws.

Most of theaudience at the Arena Tuesday night looked about the right age to remember all three bands fondly from high school, and if the performers were, say, archetypes from a good 80's high-school movie (R.I.P John Hughes), it'd be easy to pinpoint which one each would be. The astonishingly successful Def Leppard, with their intense history of triumph over adversity, would be the straight-A-earning, star-athlete workhorse whom everyone likes. Poison would be the pretty, popular one.

Cheap Trick - the critical and underground power-pop favorites who never achieved the full level of mainstream success that Poison and Def Leppard did - would be the weird, smart kid who sits in the back of the class. Case in point: they signaled the start of their set with a recording of clips of odd pop-cultural references to themselves, including one of "The Simpsons" character Apu singing their hit "Dream Police."

All three bands, each of whose biggest hits charted between twenty and thirty years ago, brought vintage appeal to the show. Devil-horn fist salutes were raised. Lighters flickered during the power ballads - Cheap Trick's "Flame," Poison's "Something to Believe In" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," and Def Leppard's "Two Steps Behind."

In defense of slickness, Def Leppard's pitch-perfect stage show was explosive. Although at points some guitar parts and backing vocals appeared to be coming from a backing track instead of the live musicians, the group's technique, star power and legendary blow-out-the walls energy proved why they remain one of the best-selling acts in rock history.

A video screen behind the band played an ongoing montage that at times featured exploding rockets, the Union Jack, circus freaks, undulating womens' torsos, flames and pictures of dead rock icons. Right before they opened with "Rock! Rock! ("Til You Drop"), starting a set that relied heavily on their world-dominating third and fourth albums "Pyromania" and "Hysteria," the screen blared the letters: "That Was Then: This is Now," followed by the logo of the new album, "Songs From the Sparkle Lounge."

A song from that album, "Nine Lives" (which features country singer Tim McGraw, and which they recently performed on the show "Dancing With The Stars") was perfectly up to their catalog's standards, which means it rocked pretty hard.

But when you see Def Leppard do "Photograph" and "Armageddon It," it's clear that 'then' sounds more than good, now.

After three and a half hours, after Def Leppard's closer "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and encore "Let's Get Rocked," big, bad, 80's rock nostalgia was even thicker in the air than the Roscolux fog. Rick Nielsen changed guitars eight times. Rikki Rockett put on at least four different hats. And Joe Elliott wore three different shirts. The three monsters of rock had done what arena rock should do - it does not make you think. It makes you form your fist into a devil's salute and pump it in the air.

If most of the fans in the 16,000-capacity Arena Tuesday night grew to love those bands as Reagan-era tenth-graders, they now almost surely have responsibilities and worries far beyond high school. In these lean times, if a ticket that starts at $23 can bring you back to days of big riffs, bigger hair, and excess, it's money well spent.

By Alison Fensterstock @ The Times-Picayune 2009.

Back

share this page:

---

---