It was pretty impressive to walk into on Sunday night and see 3,000 people sitting down in lawn chairs awaiting a set from an artist who hasn’t really had a hit in more than 15 years. Yet , now 61 and sporting a bright red color for her signature shortish pixie doo, can still rock with the best of them, and the audience adored her for it, frequently singing along and dancing.
There were highlights and lowlights aplenty in Sunday’s set. Neil Giraldo’s guitar playing ranged from crunchy rhythm to singing solos, and he, bassist Mick Mahan and drummer Chris Ralles proved adept at quickly switching gears in a song, such as on the “Heartbreaker” encore, when they abruptly dropped into “Ring of Fire” and ended with a riff on Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker.”
Benatar herself can still belt with ferocity — for the most part. Occasionally she would drop a note, such as during the bridge of brilliant “Promises in the Dark.” She quickly recovered on the anthemic “We Belong,” and dominated on the edgy “Hell is for Children,” which she introduced by saying that after they had written it, they had promised to play it at every show until every child is safe. The song’s title caused some controversy when it debuted in 1981, when some humorless Christian fundamentalists with a serious lack of reading comprehension skills thought Benatar was saying kids should go to hell when she was actually describing how abused children feel. (Yes, the ’80s had a very weird undertone to them where rock music and religion is concerned.)
The bad? After the show, I . Apparently, she is still telling many of the same stories four years ago, though she did acknowledge that before introducing “You Better Run” by talking about being at Rocklahoma in 1980 and finding out the song was going to be played on MTV, the second video the channel played, and the first to feature a guitarist.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the length. The entire show, including encore, barely clocked 75 minutes, and Benatar also left out several of her biggest songs, including “Fire and Ice,” “Shadows of the Night,” “Treat Me Right” and “Precious Time.” Considering also that the show was structured with several long instrumental intros and that Benatar and Giraldo spent perhaps 10 minutes total telling old stories along the lines of “Behind the Music,” you get barely an hour of actual songs. I’ve been to Phish and Widepread Panic shows where the first set alone was 50 percent longer than Benatar’s entire performance. Maybe it was a combination of age and altitude, but considering what was left out of the show, it seems that Benatar could have given the fans more.
Setlist
All Fired Up, Invincible, So Sincere, Go, Promises in the Dark, We Belong, Hell is for Children, You Better Run, Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Love is a Battlefield, E: Everybody Lay Down, Let’s Stay Together, Heartbreaker -> Ring of Fire -> Heartbreaker (with Zeppelin tease)
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is a Denver freelance writer/photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. When not writing and shooting, she plays guitar and violin in Denver band .
