The band sounded great, much tighter than Tramps last week. The show started a bit slow, but after the first few songs (around Long Live Rock), Thunderfingers was flyin' (Steve, Godfrey and Alan also deserve some credit). This was plainly an outstanding show. I cannot wait to see him Sat in Baltimore and wish I could make it to DC this Fri.

A couple quick notes, opening act Jodi's Butterfly was quite good. They opened with Made In Japan (which told us John wouldn't be doing it) and played original stuff the rest of the way. After John's set, Jodi's Butterfly was also a part of the roady crew...they are multi-talented.

I attended the JAE show last night in Lancaster, PA and was quite pleased with many things from the drink-service to the atmosphere the club created.

JAE came on about 10:30 or so to somebody whispering, "The Ox" without any amplification. John was in great spirits as was evidenced by his perpetual joking with fellow bandmates and by "effing" this and "effing" that. For me, the song selection started out great for at least the first half of the concert (you've seen the set-list already in other posts), and then tailed off with less familiar stuff. This set-up seemed to give John time to warm-up since everybody would theoretically be into the songs early on and then demand more from John as the concert went on with respect to theatrical bass-playing. The bass playing was excellent by any standard but he started himself off with less complicated bass-playing in the beginning and grew more complex as the set continued. Solos became abundant and simply amazing. "Had Enough" did not sound good on the synth but I cannot say that this was the fault of the keyboardist. When first hearing his Roland keyboard, I could have sworn I was listening to Van Halen based on some of the sounds emminating from his equipment. "Success Story" was a crowd favorite. The bass-playing was true to the sound from Who By Numbers. I agree with a previous review of the eight-string bass on "Trick of the Light" from the Danbury show; I could see it but I couldn't hear it. It suddenly dawned on me that when JAE said "Mr. Townshend wrote this next song (referring to "Real Me")", it seems John always refers to Pete as "Mr. Townshend" on-stage. Is this a subtle jibe at Pete for graduating to high-brow society and abandoning The Who? Great performance of that song, though. In contrast to previous note about John saying "You" being on Who Are You, John actually said something to the effect that this next song "You" was off of one of those shitty albums after Who Are You. Hearing exactly what he had to say was difficult at times though gravely unfortunate because he was joking quite a bit on-stage and hearing his black humor would have been the icing on the cake. Hearing the audience chant, "My life's in jeopardy" at the beginning of My Wife wqas great since the crowd knew all of the words to that song. The women in the audinece were dancing ferociously to this song off to the side and the unknown women around me were sporting huge smirks and grins as John sang the lyrics to this song. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Attendance certainly was in the 200 range and the opening band was quite good.

I stood approximately fifteen feet from John in front of the neck of his guitar and was seriously disappointed with two aspects of the sound. There was a center stack of speakers that could not handle all of the action beig forced through them. There were times when you were hearing nothing but noise. I am not an audiofile but sometimes the sound system was overmatched by what it was handling and seemingly threw its hands up in the air and quit processing the sound. Eventually, and rather quickly, it would correct itself. The other aspect of the sound I was disappointed with Johns bass sound. Too many times did I feel the band's sound (their instruments) were overshadowing the volume on Johns bass. I simply could not hear Johns bass as well as I wanted to on many songs. Maybe he was finger-windmilling and missing the strings ?

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