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American Idols LIVE! Tour Report

For those who didn't hear, Carrie won tickets to the American Idol concert on Friday. Floor seats, about 8 rows back. The evening included a 'Meet & Greet' with the performers. There’s way too much information to get into real detail about any one thing, so I’m just going to list a bunch of random thoughts and impressions I got, starting with the ‘Meet & Greet’ portion of the evening.

-A representative from the tour met a large group of us at the Will Call of the arena. I was expecting for the meet & greet to happen pretty quickly, but we were all kept waiting just inside Will Call for 30-45 minutes or so. I’m guessing they had problems rounding the performers up and getting them to the meet.

-Now, I’ve never been to a concert meet & greet. Maybe I’m naïve, but I figured we’d get a chance to talk and mingle with the Idols. No such luck. We were ushered downstairs into a large room where the Idols were seated behind a long table with a box of Pop Tarts in front of every other person, signing autographs like an assembly line. If we didn’t have anything to sign, we were given picture of all the Idols.

-We were expected and instructed to keep the line moving. We were not to touch the Idols. We were not to ask to have our picture taken with the Idols. We were to not ask the Idols to say hello to our grandma (which is what I was hoping Elliott would do for a friend of mine).

-Even with the short time we spent at the meet & greet, the Idols behavior was consistent with what we had seen on TV. Taylor seemed to be humming along to a tune only he could hear. Ace made sure to make contact with every person in line and thank him or her for coming.

-I asked Katherine if she was getting tired of doing all this publicity. She smiled and said no, but she actually mouthed it. So, for what it’s worth, it did appear that her voice problems are genuine.

-Almost all the Idols seemed very pleasant. There was only one who seemed annoyed or bothered to be there. And, no, I won’t say who it was, other than to say it wasn’t anyone I’ve mentioned so far.

-I was hoping to get a bag of loot from the concert. A free hat or program, maybe a meal. Other than the cast photo, we got diddly.

-This is an indicator of the audience. Between the meet & greet and the concert, Carrie and I had supper at a pizzeria near the arena. Out of maybe 150 people in the dining room, maybe a dozen were men. The number of people under 16 was about equal to those above 16.

Now, the concert:

-I’d like to apologize to all the Idols on behalf of the audience. Mandisa started a trend of all the Idols of asking the audience to get on their feet. This is Columbus. Unless you’re singing the OSU fight song, we don’t do ‘get on your feet.’

-Mandisa mistakenly called Columbus ‘Columbia.’ Understandable mistake when you’ve been touring for a month and don’t know which state you’re in, much less what city. Still the audience let her know of her mistake.

-She dedicated one of her songs to the bass player in the band. He didn’t seem to be expecting it, so it makes you wonder what’s going on back stage.

-I would say the note of the collective scream the audience hit when Ace appeared on stage would be a B-Sharp.

-By the time Ace finished singning ‘Father Figure,’ every girl under 12 had achieved puberty.

-His version of ‘Harder to Breathe’ is a lot better than I expected it to be. I could see him doing well with that kind of music.

-Even though he did this weird thing with his chest that simulated a heartbeat. The girls seemed to love it, but I thought it was a little creepy, and Carrie couldn’t stop laughing.

-He’s awfully fond of the arms-outstretched-Messiah pose on stage.

-This is just my opinion, but Lisa got voted out a lot sooner than she deserved. She’s got a professionalism that’s beyond her age. I think if she had waited to audition until she was 21, she could have taken the entire thing.

-And she plays keyboards.

-On the flip side, she like mellow 70s hits of Elton John.

-Lisa called Paris her best friend.

-During ‘Waterfalls,’ they had fairly complex choreography.

-It’s something about Lisa’s smile. More than any other Idol—including Taylor—she looked like she was having the absolute time of her life the entire evening.

-On her own, Paris danced like she was getting her freak on.

-That reminds me, I just wanted to say that all the performers seemed much more comfortable on the tour stage than they ever did on the show. But Paris was the most noticeable.

-Not much to say about Bucky.

-Bucky and Kellie, on the other hand… During their duet of ‘You’re the One that I Want,’ neither one of them seemed like they wanted to be there, like they were more concerned with their choreography than with the song. In comparison to Paris and Lisa, Kellie and Bucky could barely do the box step.

-No offense to Kellie, but I have a jar of pennies on my desk that has more stage presence than she did. She moved gracefully but stiff, like she had adopted her training as a high school beauty queen as a way of life.

-To her benefit, when she took off her leather jacket to reveal a corset underneath, I totally forgot about her stage presence.

-She ended the first half of the show before the intermission, saying she couldn’t wait to get out of her corset so she could breathe again. But when she reappeared in the encore, she was wearing another corset.

-Before the concert started and during the intermission, people were encouraged to send text messages to a number and have their messages projected on the video screens. There were plenty of messages of people proclaiming their undying love for Ace and Chris. ‘ace I love u marry me,’ ‘chris have my baby,’ stuff like that. But I think my favorite was ‘Marry me PopTarts.’

-Oh, and evidently someone actually proposed via text message before the concert started. And she said yes, so that was kind of cool.

-At the beginning of the concert and at the end of intermission, they played the title sequence of this last season, followed by a fast-cut montage of moments from the season. Maybe it’s just me, but I was bugged by the fact that they didn’t actually put Taylor in the title sequence. How hard could it have been, and it would have been a way to acknowledge his place among the Idol winners.

-If the note for Ace was a B-sharp, the one as Chris took the stage was High C. And if the girls went nuts for Ace, all their mothers went straight into heat for Chris.

-Chris had more solo songs than any performer other than Taylor.

-Since smoking has been banned indoors in Columbus, and is generally frowned upon by society, most people don’t have lighters to wave anymore. But what do we have? Cell phones.

-Note to Elliott Yamin: Next time you duet with Chris, YOU pick the song. Nickelback just isn’t your gig, man.

-By the end of the series, Elliott had cleaned himself and looked really snazzy with his ‘Rat Pack Nouveau’ look. For the concert he looked rumpled in black jeans, a black button-down and backwards baseball cap. Totally the wrong look for the kind of music he soloed with.

-I was surprised by the fact that there were no back-up singers on stage with the Idols. Were they backstage, or were they on a backing track?

-Best Song of the Night goes to the quartet of Elliott, Chris, Ace & Bucky on ‘Patience.’ It deserved to be the bonus track on the CD, as it showcased the best skills of all four performers.

-Number of men who played musical instruments: 3 (Taylor on guitar, harmonica and tambourine; Chris and Bucky on guitar).

-Number of women who played musical instruments: 1 (Lisa on keyboard)

-Katherine is still under restriction and could only do two songs, ‘Black Horse and a Cherry Tree’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

-She was in a cast from breaking her leg. How did I miss that in earlier posts?

-While almost everybody else either dressed casually or ‘stage casual,’ Katherine stood out by wearing a long, flowing black gown reminiscent of her infamous yellow gown.

-Another notable song missing from the line-up: the girls’ ‘Man! I feel Like A Woman.’ Which is too bad, because I was really looking forward to it. I wonder why it was cut.

-Taylor just rocks. He may not be the best singer of the bunch, but he is easily the best performer.

-He came charging through the audience from the back of the auditorium to the stage, passing right past my aisle seat. Yay me!

-I was close enough to touch him as he passed if arena security hadn’t jock-blocked me. Boo security guy!

-However, I was close enough to get a good look at the seat cover with lapels he calls a jacket.

-Here’s the reason Taylor deserved to win American Idol: he makes every song his own. All the other contestants were singing covers of a famous song. With Taylor, you forget he’s singing a Stevie Wonder tune about racism.

-And I finally figured out what his dancing style reminds me of: Elaine from Seinfeld.

-My number one pet peeve about any concert: Forced encores. Why do performers continue to insist on trying to fake out the audience? Taylor says good night and leaves the stage. The rest of the band leaves the stage, but nobody turns up the lights. Are we really supposed to believe that they’re NOT coming back? Encores should be spontaneous, when the audience just will NOT let the performers go without one more song. When they’re pre-planned, it makes the whole thing feel disingenuous.

-But even I have to admit this: I actually got chills watching everyone on stage doing ‘We Are the Champions.’

-On the other hand, I got the distinct impression that Taylor had totally forgotten the words to ‘Living in America.’

-Oh, one last thing—what I said at the beginning about Columbus not getting on our feet for anything short of a BCS Bowl… we got on our feet for Taylor and stayed on them.

You know, Brian, you could do this...

Who's the big winner?

I won two tickets to the American Idol concert coming to Columbus on 8/11, INCLUDING backstage passes for meet-and-greet.

Guess what Wes and I will be doing next Friday?!?!?!?!?!?

Try not to turn too green!