Hi, friends! Sorry for not responding to this thread sooner. My family and I have been down since Meat's B-day party, with a strange flu bug going around here. Hope you all manage to avoid it! It's pretty nasty.
First, thank you to Michael for noticing this concert was going to be on in October!!! I just got through watching the first showing of it and it's an absolutely amazing concert!! (If anyone needs to, PM me. And that's all I'd better say on this rather delicate subject.
)
The concert lasted about an hour and 18 minutes. Here is the set list for the televised show (haven't looked up the original set for this concert in Mexico, so I'm not sure what has been left out):
Do it!
Life is a Lemon
Tear Me Down
Testify
Anything for Love
CHSIB
Paradise
Bat Out of Hell
No band intros and no Two Out of Three, which usually goes with that. So I'm not sure if they did it that particular night or not.
I don't know where to start. I want to compliment the people who put this together. It was beautifully shot, I thought. Lots of wonderful close-ups. And the sound was great (thank you, Kasim, for an excellent job, as always, on the mixing!!). You get a real feel for the excitement both onstage and off. It was a really receptive audience!!
Meat and the band were in great form. This is truly an amazing band!! I know you've all heard this again and again. But you really get to see it here. Everyone has a 'place' in this show. Everyone shines!!
Do it! was done with the glow-in-the-dark masks! Wonderfully strong version of Testify and CHSIB. Sometimes, Meat has Paradise taken out of the live shows he allows to be recorded, so I was SO happy to see that song in here--Meat's white sparkly jacket and Patti's blonde wig and all!
Right before the song began, Meat did something that he hadn't been doing in this tour, but it was a part of the Friends tour: He played with the audience--you know--the louder, softer...then competing with the band routine. It was nice to see this bit of interaction with the crowd. I had enjoyed it last year and sort of missed it this time around.
As many of you know, I was one of those who had the two concerts right before this one, cancelled--those in Lancaster and Anaheim! And of course, I have been grieving those losses, as well as the first two from the tour, as I know everyone has in this leg, who had shows either outright cancelled or postponed. But you know, friends, now I understand in my heart, why, at least these last two HAD to be lost.
Meat's voice is terrific here! With the damage his throat had suffered, he NEEDED to rest it on these days between Kelseyville and Mexico so that the recorded concert, something that all of us could treasure forever, would be as good as it turned out.
As sad as I am to have missed live shows, I am SO grateful and thankful for having this concert recorded!!! Forgive me. I can't find the words this morning to fully tell you what I feel and what's in my heart. But I know that every time I will watch this, it will bring back so many memories...
I had the good fortune just a day or two ago to see some of the other Mexican concert--the one held the very next night. And Meat's voice was fairly hoarse. He truly gave it all in the first one!!!
He had written me a while ago that he felt these concerts were not up to his standards. And I can see that now, perhaps, in the second show. But NOT this one!! It is glorious. What an incredible gift both he and the members of the band have given us, as a permanent remembrance of the Final World Tour!
And Meat, if you're out there and reading this, PLEASE consider doing the same sort of thing at one of the Australian concerts with the MSO!!! Please turn one of the shows into a DVD for all of us!!! We know that your concerts evolve within a tour. And after the next leg in Europe and the UK, this will surely be the case. PLEASE allow one of the shows in February to be filmed so that all of us can enjoy the next phase of the tour, as well as the uniqueness of having you and the band perform with a live symphony orchestra!!!!
Anyway, this is a quickie review of the DirecTV concert!! I hope that it makes its way to other Pay-Per-View venues throughout the world, so that everyone can see it!!
What a terrific way to let people know about the new album. DirecTV even pushed it in the promos they were showing right before the concert began!! So that should go a long way, I hope, in helping the sales for CHSIB here in the States!!!
I'll be back in a little bit with a few short "goodies" for y'all. But I wanted to let you know about the show as soon as I could. Hope I'm making sense. I'm still rather weak from this stupid flu and my brain just doesn't feel like it's working as well as I'd like it to!!
That's all I can think of for now. I'm still reeling from just how great this show was/is and feeling so very proud of Meat and every single member of the Neverland Express!!!
Thank you for giving us such an incredible gift--something we can enjoy in the years to come, again and again and again!!!
If any of you reading this at the forum are able to subscribe to DirecTV, then go for it!! This concert, alone, is worth the 'price of admission!!
Love to all of you and STAY WELL!!!
MB
xxx