tonyballinger.com

Seeing Tom Waits is a lot like catching a rainbow after the rain, or having them get your order right on the first try when ordering in a drive-thru. So I feel very fortunate to have seen him twice now. I debated going to this show for weeks. I had tried to get a ticket online when the show first went on sale, only to be defeated. It was a real hassle too – Faith and I were on vacation in Vegas at the time, and I was operating on only about 3 hours of sleep the morning of the sale. Because of random computer difficulties at the Golden Nugget, I had some trouble successfully getting wireless enabled in my room, and got the service working about an hour before tickets went on sale. Not that any of that mattered, once the Ticketmaster page showed tickets were on sale, they were gone just as quickly.

So when a ticket showed up on eBay’s listings at the right price, I gave in and bought one. And I’m glad I did, the show was totally worth it. By the way, the seat I got for this show was night and day compared to the low-earth-orbit I was in for the Radiohead show over month ago. For Radiohead, I sat in the gallery – which means “ceiling”. For Waits, I sat in the first balcony, which isn’t too shabby for this venue.

The setlist was comprised mostly of songs from his last two albums “Blood Money” and “Real Gone”. It was an usual show for me because while I’m a big fan of Waits’ work, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to his albums after “Mule Variations”. So for me, this show was a bit of an introduction to his new work.

From “Blood Money” I enjoyed “All the World is Green” and “God’s Away on Business”. From “Real Gone” I enjoyed “Don’t Go Into That Barn” and “Make It Rain”. He also played old favorites such as “Singapore”, “Tango Till They’re Sore” and “Time”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Concerts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.