The night was Saturday, May 21st. The occasion? To see a band that I have grown to love - Collective Soul. They played at Red's for their second concert in Edmonton in less than 6 months. I missed their first arrival here in December and was kind of annoyed because I had really wanted to see them, so I was really glad when they announced another date in May! The group I went with included Mike, Nolan, and my girlfriend Diane. We had supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory beforehand and then wandered down to Red's where we proceeded to wait for the show. The doors opened at 7:00, but oddly enough the show didn't start until 9:30. So we wandered around for awhile. Mike got some game tokens to play in the arcade with. We played some air hockey, foosball, and table hockey. T'was good fun.

When it got closer to show time, we went to try and find a spot to stand an watch the show. We got lucky and found a spot that we got an excellent view of the band at. The house was packed - the concert had been sold out for a couple of weeks. As usual, the show started late, but finally the opening band The Waking Eyes took the stage and I was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. Aside from their known garage-rock style, they brought out a few surprises including a piece where they ditched their conventional guitars and the bassist picked up a stand up bass, the lead guitar sat down at a keyboard and the singer/rhythm guitar took up a trumpet! They proceeded to play a jazzy sounded track with a quite catchy bass-line. Very cool!

Finally though, Collective Soul took the stage. Its been awhile since I was last at a rock concert, but it was probably the most intimate rock show I've been at. All my other concert experiences were at the Shaw conference center or Rexall place - both of which are very large venues. Red's is quite a bit smaller than either of those and as a result created a very nice atmosphere for being up close to the band.

The thing with Collective Soul is that they have a *huge* number of hit songs, and for them to just play all of these songs would take them quite a long time. They played all these songs plus a couple of songs off their new album. It was pretty incredible - hearing the hits like Precious Declaration, Why pt2, Gel, Where the river flows, Heavy, and Shine. The years in the business of touring has obviously made them very good at what they do. The show was very very well put together with a proper buildup to a rocking and loud conclusion to the concert. The encore was three songs long finishing with the song Shine - where everyone in the audience was singing "Oh oh oh oh - heaven let your light shine down". I always like it when bands give the audience a chance to sing :)

All in all, it was an amazing evening. There are many unpleasant aspects to the concert experience ... but the part that matters was amazing. For the others, here's hoping that the no-smoking bylaw gets passed this year like planned!

Heraldk