I had been looking forward enthusiastically to the Train concert at Red Rocks for months prior to their July 28 scheduled appearance in mid-summer at the famed outdoor amphitheatre, playing two of their CD albums, My Private Nation and Save Me, San Francisco almost endlessly. The very wordy lyrics of the songs were actually getting embedded into my brain. The songs clicked with me.
The band that opened the show, Maroon 5, on familiar ground with a lot of fans from Denver and other areas in Colorado, did a great show, from dusk on into the nighttime, when the lighting effects and video screen for close-up viewing lended enhancement to their already captivating and energizing performance. They were flawless, very professional and exciting, and I'm sure they gained new fans from anyone who went there to see Train but perhaps had only heard of Maroon 5 without really knowing them.
Train had everyone on board when they began their show. It seems I wasn't the only one there who knew the lyrics to their songs; people were willingly joining in with Train, showing off their cred as fans as well. Train did one of their early songs, She's On Fire, from their first eponymously titled album. They had some fun with it, by bringing a bevy of girls and women of different ages and types onto the stage, and gave them all Train t-shirts to put on, and then had them group dance to the song, being cajoled all the while by Train's conductor, composer and all-around main man. It was fun, and the audience seemed to enjoy it as an added diversion.
The problem was that there more more staged and concert indulgences taken as time wore on, and this began to detract from their show instead of augmenting it. For instance, for some unknown reason, Train decided to show off their personal music preferences with a couple of cover songs. They first did, unexpectedly and unexplicably, U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. They did it reasonably well, no problem with it, and the audience went with it, supposing that it was just changing things up a bit. But then, not long after, we got treated to another cover song, this time Led Zeppelin's Living Loving Maid. Alright, we were shown that Train could do a pretty good cover of Robert Plant and company's vocalizing the lyrics "waaaaay down insiiide... woman.. you... need me."
Fantastic. I'm sure that went over well when Train was still playing bars in Boulder. But now here they are, Grammy winners, national name recognition, with tons of great songs of their own, playing before a sold out audience at Red Rocks, and what do they do? Instead of being a band with a tight show, maximizing their stage time and presenting as many songs as possible to satiate so many fans who probably had not seen them live before and had so many of their own favorites, they got caught up in wasting time with cover tunes and overly indulgent stage additions, including another overly long showcasing of their song Save Me San Francisco, or going deep into the audience and roaming around while singing Marry Me, which just cut down on the amount of songs performed and also made it a very loose show, more suited to an off-night at the bar than rocking the sold-out seats high up in the Colorado rockies.
Train also had sound problems throughout the night, though the group didn't acknowledge them or even seem to be aware of them. For some reason, the sound through the concert speakers seemed to keep fluctuating from being tinny to muddy, and it was also often not loud enough to really envelop the audience in the way that the sound at Red Rocks should, and which, incidentally, it did do while Maroon 5 occupied the stage. The audience seemed willing to forgive the sound problems at first, because they so much wanted to have a great night with this group. But after it just kept going on and on like this, coupled with the unstructured, inefficient presentation, it left the audience less than focused and, I would guess, less than thrilled.
I'm glad that Train is not pretentious and doesn't take itself too seriously. This will probably be an asset in preserving its creativity and ongoing captivating development, with prolific lyric-writing supported by strong vocals and instrumentation. However, they yet need to clean up their stage act. While Train did do a good sampling from their many albums, and made sure to do the more well-known and popular songs from each, there's just too many others that are probably also favorites of fans that were left untouched. If they dropped the cover songs, along with the unncessary stage additions, and, if the cause, found a no-nonsense sound engineer who would not settle for less than stellar sound, then we could all get on board the Train. But for now, it seems the studio albums are much more satisfying.
At least it didn't rain on Train. There was some possibility of isolated thunderstorms, which we've had quite a lot of in Denver and the surrounding area for what must be weeks now.
