Wow! Last week sure was a banner music listening week –even for me. It started with George Bedard on Sunday (already reviewed), and then continued on Tuesday with “Weird Al” Yankovic at Meadow Brook Music Festival.
It was another incredibly comfortable warm summer evening in Rochester Hills. About seven thousand of Al’s faithful followers made the trek to the show and they were not disappointed. For some reason, every time he has come to town over the past several years, I have been tied up doing something else, so this was my first time seeing him. Touring in support of his recent release “Alpocalypse,” the concert was a multimedia event that was interspersed with an incredible amount of video snippets from his old TV show and music videos, as well as any reference made to him on any other program from the past thirty years. Some of these were flat out hilarious and if you didn’t laugh at least several times, I have absolutely no idea why you were there in the first place. The crowd knew many of the clips word for word as well as the words to the parody songs –which is astounding to me because it’s sometimes hard enough to know the words to the original versions.
Anyway, the clips were pretty much a misdirection so that Al and the band could change their costumes without bringing the show to a complete halt. (I honestly think that he changes his outfit more than Katy Perry does in her show.) There was a long medley that featured most of his major parodies (He really did try to fit them all in.), and a couple of the highlights were from the new album: “Perform This Way” (a parody of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”) and “Party in the CIA” (a parody of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.”). My favorite of the show was “Canadian Idiot,” (a parody of Green Day’s “American Idiot”) complete with exploding red and white streamers!
Just like his albums, the show also featured several original numbers written by Al. I like a lot of these and I think he is a better than average writer on his own. Lots of them are hilarious, and without the guide of a “known song,” that makes them even harder to be funny. I think that playing music is difficult enough without having to make people laugh. For this alone, I think that Al is way above most musicians trying to play normal songs. I don’t think he gets enough respect for his own craft.
If I have any complaint about the show, it would be that the starting time was too early because the light interfered with the viewing of the video clips. There were stretches of the show where the video screen was not used. I would have altered the lineup to allow for those songs to be done earlier and push more of the clips to be shown later in the show under optimum viewing conditions. With the daylight around for at least a good hour plus at the beginning, it gave the impression of going to a bad drive-in where the owner was too stupid to show the movies at the right time.
But the hypnotized faithful probably never noticed.
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Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of each other!
Peace!
Q
