The Broomfield Event Center cracked open its doors Thursday night for its inaugural event, a sold-out Bonnie Raitt concert and ribbon cutting with the city’s mayor.
The landscaping was barely finished around the multi-use sports and entertainment venue, which will play home to the Rocky Mountain Rage hockey and Colorado 14ers basketball teams. Parking was mayhem, with some people spending almost an hour searching for a spot. People swarmed the entrance trying to buy tickets.
In a feat of creative corporate integration, Red Bull, one of the venue’s sponsors with a club suite to its name, even stationed a vending machine in the sports teams’ workout room.
After the audience led a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” to Raitt, whose 57th birthday was Wednesday, her keyboard player Jon Cleary and his Absolute Monster Gentlemen took the stage. Muddy, echo- plagued and bass-heavy, it sounded like a cover band at an outdoor festival. In the rain. About 2 miles from the stage.
The set dragged on until Raitt mercifully took over, and the sound problems greatly improved with added treble and more volume. Such hits as “A Thing Called Love,” with its nimble slide leads and Raitt’s strong, soulful voice, reinvigorated the crowd and brought fans to their feet.
Still, the reverb-heavy venue is clearly more suited to sports events than music. Like the University of Denver’s Magness Arena, the Broomfield center’s oval shape and hard, sterile surfaces send sounds on a particle acceleration loop. It’s not bad, but it’s not great. And it didn’t get much better as the night progressed.
Raitt didn’t seem to notice. Talkative and upbeat throughout, she held the audience in rapt attention. It helps that she’s a gracious performer, thanking the crowd between songs as she switched guitars and noting that this is her third time this year through the friendly straits of Denver. She name-checked her political friends that benefited from the Democratic sweep Tuesday and dedicated songs to the Iraq war, which she said she hoped would end soon.
Anyone who truly loves Raitt must also like her politics, which have been the same since the beginning of her career. Alternating between hits and tracks from 2005’s “Souls Alike,” the nine-time Grammy winner gave the audience exactly what it wanted. One could argue, however, that the audience wasn’t the most demanding one in the world. Raitt is a distinctive and talented performer, but her clean, midtempo songs elicited a similar amount of energy.
Sure, no one was expecting explosive arena rock. What Raitt does is done very well. It’s just that the music seemed better suited for either a festival or more intimate venue, where the audience could either revel in the musicianship or feel refreshed by its difference from the previous act.
A soulful exception was “Nick of Time,” which found Raitt on keyboards and her rhythm section channeling an easy ’70s vibe. The melodies were appealing in their restraint, allowing Raitt and keyboardist Cleary to explore the nuances of their voices. Perhaps it was because Raitt wrote it about the fretful approach of her 40th birthday, an event on which she looks back with considerable amusement.
The energy ramped up near press time, when Raitt strutted out bluesy standards such as “Something to Talk About” and “Have a Heart,” which sounded just as good as they did when first released. Which is to say, heartfelt and well-intended but more or less featureless.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
