LOCATION: Emery Theatre, Cincinnati, OH
LINEUP: Brian, Jack, Linford, Karin, Terri, Mike
REVIEW BY: Dave Jones
The first Emery Christmas show of this season has come and gone - here are a few highlights for those of you who can't make it into town for the second... We had great seats this year (front row!), which sort of balanced things out from last year when we were WAAAYYY back in the last section. I decided to plan ahead this time... heh. Ran into duggie briefly (couldn't find you after the show dude!), and saw Shelly walking around, but no other familiar faces (where ya been Drew buddy?!). Anyway, Jane Sibery kicked off the evening. I had never heard any of her songs before, but my group was very impressed with the performance. Each of her songs is like a little story and it seemed that the audience was very interested in them. She was very gracious and left the stage to some good applause at the end of the set. I was expecting one of those killer (long) intermissions, but it was much shorter than before - we got back inside after a short walk/stretch. The band was out on stage pretty quickly. I love Karen's new haircut...everyone was dressed very nice. Karen was wearing red velvet-like pants with a nice overcoat. Terri had what looked almost like a little maternity dress on (did I miss something?) and Lindford was sporting the red-pattern bowtie. Jack had his typical look going, as did the other guys. I don't have the exact setlist, but they started with Latter Days (the norm recently) and continued from there. They tore through many of their own songs, then mixed a few X-mas numbers in later. I noticed new versions of some of the tunes. "June" allowed Mike to showcase his talent pretty well this time and Jack came in pretty strong towards the end of this one also. I noticed that a few of the songs seem to have been extended to allow the others in the band to have larger parts. Everyone wants to hear about Jack these days, so here's my take on his performance: I haven't really been a big fan of Jack's since his joining the band, and agree with many of the issues we've discussed. However, I think last night was his best performance yet. He had larger parts on several of the songs. There were still some times where he seemed to be doing his own thing back there, almost oblivious to the band, but not as frequently as before. On several occasions he came up and stood next to Terri during one of the more prominent guitar parts. He did make us cringe a couple times though. Maybe it was just our angle, but every time Jack did that quick spin around to go back to his position in the back on the stange it looked like he almost hit Terri with the guitar neck! This happened a few times...We were far off to the left of stage though, so maybe it wasn't as close as it looked...heh.. Anyway, they (of course) did Silent Night, which was great...any of you who heard Terri and Karen on this one last year can attest to that. I've seen many performances of "Jack's Valentine", but last night's was definitely one of the best...Lindford was very into the song and it seemed like things were expanded at the end to let Jack and some of the others really get into it...great version of that one! The band put their hearts into the music last night and gave the crowd more than their money's worth...the set and the encores were very long with a lot of great music. Each encore was SEVERAL songs, not just one or two. In fact, they played so many songs in the first encore that I didn't expect a second - we were waiting for the lights to come on, but they didn't. The crowd was giving a standing ovation at this point and the band returned for several more songs to close the night, including "Lucy". Karen said that the real-life "Lucy" was actually in the audience that night and tried to get her to stand up and wave. I think she was too shy for that though. Earlier in the evening Karen also dedicated a song to Shelly and wished her luck in her move to San Francisco (I didn't know about that ! ). I don't know if any record-label types were in attendance (or even where that stands), but anyone seeing the show would have had to be impressed.