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Thread: Los Angeles, CA 10-18-07

  1. #11
    Administrator sodascouts's Avatar
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    Look, a Nokia concert review from the LA Times!

    "Eagles. Dixie Chicks Throw Open Nokia's Doors"

    Always in our hearts, Never forgotten

  2. #12
    Moderator Ive always been a dreamer's Avatar
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    I know just how you feel, PLS. I would so have loved to have been at the show. The guys look great. However, I kept talking myself out of going by telling myself, hopefully, next spring I will be able to go to a show that is all Eagles with a full set list, and a little bit cheaper priced ticket. I guess we'll see, won't we!

    "People don't run out of dreams: People just run out of time ..."
    Glenn Frey 11/06/1948 - 01/18/2016

  3. #13
    Stuck on the Border tbs fanatic's Avatar
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    A great review. I'd love to go to the Nokia it sounds amazing.

  4. #14
    Moderator Brooke's Avatar
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    I felt the same way PLS! But the pics and reviews are helping me survive. They all look fabulous!
    https://i.imgur.com/CuSdAQM.jpg
    "They will never forget you 'till somebody new comes along"
    1948-2016 Gone but not forgotten

  5. #15

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    Disclaimer: Until I have that album in my hot little hands I cannot be held responsible for my behavior. Insanity due to Eagle deprivation is a medical condition and legally defensible.

  6. #16
    Moderator Ive always been a dreamer's Avatar
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    Excellent point, PLS.

    "People don't run out of dreams: People just run out of time ..."
    Glenn Frey 11/06/1948 - 01/18/2016

  7. #17
    Stuck on the Border
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    I hate to be a downer but:

    It's a good review, yes. But what a deeply conservative setlist. I suppose Glenn's 'new' song is How Long. He sang 5 songs, the same number as Joe. I'm sorry, but that is wrong. Presumably the acoustic set had to be dropped for time reasons. But most of it.... the same old, same old.

    When is Don Henley going to play drums on a recent song? The only time he ever did it was on The Girl From Yesterday. I know people want to see him down the front but...

  8. #18

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    Here's another review of the concert. Seems like this reviewer was expecting more from the new album as well.

    http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2007...-and-chic.html

    Eagles and Chicks help hatch L.A.'s Nokia Theatre
    Oct 19, 2007, 06:31 PM | by Chris Willman

    Categories: Music

    The Eagles are effectively — or spiritually — L.A.'s house band, so it makes sense that they're the first band anybody wants to book for local milestone events. (Who else you gonna call, the Doors? The Beach Boys? Every other quintessential Angeleno act has long gone fishin'.) They played the turn-of-the-millennium gig at the city's Staples Center almost eight years ago, and here they were literally just yards away from Staples on Thursday night, playing the opening night of the Nokia Theatre, a 7,100-seater that's looking to become Southern California's primary concert hall. The Nokia, a $100-million undertaking in itself, is part of the billion-dollar L.A. Live complex that is being billed as the city's answer to Times Square. (You may wonder how a privately owned outdoor mall can be the equivalent to Times Square, but as my New York friends remind me, Times Square is easily mistaken for a mall nowadays, so why sweat the difference?)

    I had a secret hope that the Eagles would play Don Henley's brilliant "The Last Resort," from the Hotel California album, as a bittersweetly ironic commentary on this arguably much-needed but controversial downtown L.A. development. But instead, they played Joe Walsh's "In the City," while behind them, on truly gigantic video screens, played several minutes of footage of urban street scenes... shot in New York City. Now, maybe this was the band's wry of saying, hey, you may try to rebuild Times Square in L.A., but you'll never beat New York at its own game. Or, more probably, the irony of visually celebrating New York on a night that was supposed to be a triumphant moment for li'l old Los Angeles was completely inadvertent.

    The Eagles may be headlining this six-night run of shows, but, as the opening act, the Dixie Chicks (pictured) got the first performance in at the new theater. (The Chicks most recently headlined the 20,000-seat Staples Center themselves, so this was clearly a no-expenses-spared night as far as talent acquisition went.) Great minds must think alike, because I had no sooner gotten to my seat and looked out over the vast expanse of the auditorium, thinking, "This is one hell of a wide-open space," when the band came out and sang, as their opening song... you guessed it, "Wide Open Spaces." There's something about the Nokia's layout and scope that creates the illusion that it holds about twice as many people as the 7K it does. Very few of the seats are in the smallish balcony and loge areas. And there's no amphitheatre-style tiered seating; the orchestra section that's responsible for at least 90% of the seats stretches out on one long, relatively smooth plane, as if you're looking at a gigantic wheat field where every golden stalk just happens to be a placidly drunk 48-year-old reliving his youth. But in spite of that seeming hugeness, "no seat is further from the stage than 220 feet" (as the publicity keeps reminding us), and the sightlines are nothing to complain about, even in that seemingly far-off balcony, as I determined from a brief visit to the back row.


    In the sense that tech people are always looking for a device that will be "an iPod-killer," the Nokia is clearly designed to be a Gibson Amphitheatre-killer — which is to say, the clear desire here was to create a hall that will steal business away from the 6,000-seat venue formerly known as the Universal Amphitheatre. Will it succeed in that particular venue-hicular homicide? Hard to say, but it is a given that more and more awards shows will gravitate here (the American Music Awards are already booked, and the Emmys are rumored to be ready to defect). Two good reasons it'll attract lots of kudocasts in years to come: The Nokia has bragging rights to the largest stage in L.A., period, which will make for quick, TV-friendly changeovers, And those extra thousand seats it holds on the Gibson or the Shrine means that awards shows hosted by guilds or other membership orgs can get an extra thousand of their needy members in, along with all the requisite celebrities.

    It's probably been a while since the Dixie Chicks played an opening gig, or gave any performance where much of the audience was still stumbling around trying to find their seats well into their set. In fact, they delayed the start time by over 20 minutes, which may have explained Natalie Maines' initially subdued mood. Apparently there was some anxiety in the dressing room. "I blame you for my hair," Maines told the audience a few songs in, referring to her unusually elevated, almost beehive-ish 'do. "The later you were, the higher it got. I call it my sober Amy Winehouse." (Well, now that she mentioned it...) "Only in L.A. would people spend $300 a ticket and be half an hour late," she added. The first two-thirds of their hour-long set was comprised of oldies (except for a newly minted cover of Patty Griffin's "Mary"), before they wrapped things up with four songs from last year's Grammy-hoarding Taking the Long Way. "It was fun," Maines said at the end, nearly seeming to shrug her shoulders, as if she wasn't quite sure they'd completely regained their footing after the layoff. "We haven't played since the Grammys... I just like reminding everybody about the Grammys." You could sense some audience uncertainty during their set, just pertaining to the vibe of the room: Is this the kind of rock 'n' roll concert hall where we're allowed to stand up, or a classier joint where we're supposed to sit on our well-manicured hands? What finally got folks on their feet wasn' a rocker but a thoroughly impassioned reading of "Not Ready to Make Nice," Maines' "I refuse to have makeup sex with my conservative detractors" anthem, which went down in history as the hall's first standing-O.

    There was a kind of symmetry to the way the Chicks ended their set with four songs from their latest album and how the Eagles started their two-hour set with four songs from Long Road Out of Eden, which comes out Oct. 30. I've had the chance to preview that new release (a 20-song, two-CD affair that will be sold only in Wal-Mart and on the group's website) a couple of times, but I haven't logged enough miles with it to let it sit and figure how it might settle in with the rest of the band's oeuvre. So I figured that, in concert, the band might make a convincing case for the best new songs fitting in among their classics. But that wasn't to be, as the group simply stopped playing any new material after that initial four-song teaser and instead went straight into a greatest-hits set for the remainder of the two hours. Of the four fresh songs they did play, three were among the new album's most lightweight: the J.D. Souther cover "How Long"; a Paul Carrack cover that gives Timothy B. Schmit a chance to sing something as close to "I Can't Tell You Why" as humanly possible; an enjoyably throwaway Joe Walsh number. Only "Busy Being Fabulous," a characteristically caustic Don Henley kiss-off ballad, gave any hint that there might be any ambition to the album at all (which there actually is, as you might guess from that title).

    In lieu of being a showcase for the new album, then, the band was content to party like it's 1999 — that is, to play much the same show that they did next door at Staples at the turn of the millennium. This was another Eagles show that — for better and worse — bordered on being "The Joe Walsh Show, Featuring the Eagles," with an inordinate amount of the crowd-pleasing spotlight positions given over to non-Eagles Walsh songs like "Rocky Mountain Way," "Life's Been Good," and "Funk 49." This is in marked contrast to the new album, where Walsh sings and writes just one number out of 20. The loquacious Henley spoke not a word all night, as if to indicate that he is just a contented cog in this extremely well-oiled oldies machine, while Glenn Frey did the emcee duties and Walsh cracked the occasional joke. Fans hardly seemed to mind the classic-rock orientation of the show — the band does have one of the great pop song canons of the 20th century — but anyone wanting to know what the Eagles have to say in or about 2007 will have to wait and hit Wal-Mart in a week and a half.


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  9. #19
    Stuck on the Border DonFan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Freypower
    When is Don Henley going to play drums on a recent song? The only time he ever did it was on The Girl From Yesterday. I know people want to see him down the front but...
    You answered your own question. People (yes, me included) want to see him down front. ALso I read a quote from Don not long ago that said he had reached the age where he liked singing down front better than "sitting in the back banging on the tubs."

  10. #20
    Stuck on the Border
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    That's fine for solo shows. However, nominally Don is still the Eagles' drummer. We know he played drums on the new album (I read the credits elsewhere) and you would think he would want to prove that he can still cut it. I honestly don't think it would hurt him to play drums on the new songs that he doesn't sing, even if he doesn't want to play drums and sing lead.

    That review sums up how I felt about the setlist. The second half of the show with all the Don and Joe solo songs has become very stale.

    DF, I am not criticising Don's solo songs here. I would like to hear his new songs (drums or no drums).

    I hope this setlist was an aberration and it will be worked on. Because quite frankly if this is what they will be offering when they come to Australia I doubt I will be paying $550 to see it.

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