When: 5/19/03
Tickets: $47 General Admission (Quick note - Being my first concert with general admission tickets, I don't think I'll ever be able to go back to normal seating.)
Venue: Continental Airlines Arena in E. Rutherford, NJ
Bands: Mars Volta, Queens of the Stone Age, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Mars Volta :: Listening to their opening music and never having heard of them, I figured the set wasn't going to be all that great. Making a guess, it seemed like I was in for twenty to twenty five minutes of less-than-impressive music. Boy was I ever wrong. Having them go on for FORTY minutes was like getting a lobotomy with a toothbrush and a rusty butterknife. There was little to no discernable difference between their songs; hell, you could barely tell they were PLAYING songs. It sounded like one huge chunk of straight guitar-and-drums banging with a bad lead singer (think Slash-on-a-bad-hair-day-meets-Mick-Jagger-wannabe) shouting inaudible lyrics. In other words: a heaping pile of suck. On a scale of 1 to 10, they get a negative 3.
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Queens of the Stone Age :: Truth be told, I was more excited about seeing them than the Peppers initially based on musical taste alone. I was thoroughly impressed by their recent album "Songs for the Deaf" and can appreciate some of their earlier stuff, even if it doesn't do much for me. Overall they played a good, solid set consisting of about ten songs at around 40 minutes total, which was just about the right length. Every song they played was fairly upbeat and from "Songs for the Deaf" (not that i'm complaining) and made for a stable, high-energy performance. However, they did lack a certain crispness which will perhaps come with time. (Also possibly explained by the fact that they weren't the headline band). Still, an enjoyable experience; 7 out of 10.
Red Hot Chili Peppers :: I've always thought the Peppers have made generally good music, with some songs being great, but I've never liked their music enough for them to make my "top tier" of bands, for lack of a better expression. While this concert didn't change my opinion of their music, it DID change my opinion of them as a band, for the better. For a relatively old and famous band (in the sense that they have nothing to prove), they put on an amazing performance for an hour and forty minutes, no less. Each member of the band seemed to be in his own particular elemental on stage, and they all come together beautifully to create an entrancing performance. Suck My Kiss, Parallel Universe, and Give It Away are all simply mind-blowing to see live. The only bad spot on the performance would be the ending. They finished with They're Red Hot instead of a more well-known or even higher energy song, which received a mostly luke-warm reaction from the audience. As formulaic as it may be, ending with an upbeat big hit works to end the concert on a good note. Otherwise, definitely worth the price of admission. 8.5 or 9 out of 10.
