Cyndi Lauper is just amazing. Her political speech was uplifting (think southern gospel preacher stumping for the get out and vote) and she touched the crowd through her music. The highlight was an impossibly gorgeous and spare version of I’m Gonna Be Strong and the classic Time After Time with an a capella intro of the track Lyfe from her new album Bring Ya to the Brink. While she was more talkative this year, she also seemed a little more tense overall, and several of her songs seemed to stop abruptly with a flick of her hand towards the band.

The new material fit in great with her classic tracks. Rocking Chair, despite being a weird cat-lady kind of song, actually came across as a solid live tune. She sang Set Your Heart, which she debuted last year on tour, from the middle of the audience as if she was determined to reach out to everyone. And Into the Nightlife was a pure disco tune. She pulled out an acoustic version of Erasure\”s Blue Savannah by way of leading into a rocking I Drove All Night. The entire ensemble came out at the end for Everyday People and the show closer True Colors.

Cyndi Lauper setlist
Change of Heart
Rocking Chair
Set Your Heart
When You Were Mine
Sisters of Avalon
She Bop
Into the Nightlife
Blue Savannah/I Drove All Night
I’m Gonna Be Strong
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Encore
Rain on Me
Lyfe (intro)/Time After Time
Money Changes Everything
2nd Encore
Everyday People (with ensemble)
True Colors (with ensemble)

Carson Kressley was tapped to host the True Colors Tour 2008. His early introductions were peppered with dirty but completely lame, predictable jokes. But as the crowd warmed up, so did his delivery. During the set change before Cyndi Lauper, Carson had a good 20 minutes to keep the crowd spirited, and it was then that his talents brought fore. He managed a number of good jokes on the gays, shot t-shirts into the crowd (including one pulled from his crotch) and interacted with people in the audience. He also found two older gentlemen in the crowd who were getting married after California legalized gay marriage. It was a touching moment crammed between Carson hitting on just about every man that caught his eye. Which tonight was pretty much all of them.

The B-52′s have been putting on the summer tours for years since their last studio album (in 1995) and greatest hits release (in 1998) but this is the first tour since recording a full album of new material. The foursome have the energy of twenty-year olds but let’s face it, the band is collectively pushing 60-years old and the average age of the crowd isn’t far behind.

It was a still a party. They revived all the old moves straight out of 1982 with Mesopotamia and rocked an amazing version of Private Idaho. Some of the new material fit seamlessly (Ultraviolet and Hot Corner) and some of it fell flat (new single Funplex and the bland Love in the Year 3000). The setlist was too heavy with new songs, most of which failed to energize the crowd. But they finished with the one-two punch of Love Shack (with a ripping extended guitar solo in the middle) and ever-buoyant Rock Lobster.

B-52′s setlist
Pump
Mesopotamia
Private Idaho
Ultraviolet
Juliet of the Spirits
Roam
Funplex
Hot Corner
Love in the Year 3000
Love Shack
Rock Lobster

Wanda Sykes was way funnier than my wildest expectations. Her set was riddled with swears as she covered the temperature in Phoenix, the TSA and gay cruises. If the material was a little generic, her delivery more than made up for it.

Whatever possessed Andy Bell to sign up for the True Colors Tour this year, show up in a track suit and sweat to the oldies (in this case, Erasure songs) is beyond me. Andy’s voice is usually heavenly but pitch problems and oddball set up gave the entire performance a work-out video feel from 1981. He looked out of shape and a bit winded as he danced, shimmied and jivved (including, lord save me, the Robot) in front of a generic True Colors back drop that covered the stage. For 30 minutes, it was just Andy doing the worst Erasure karaoke imaginable. The set included two tracks from his solo album Electric Blue and reworked Erasure hits heavy on the bpm.

Andy is reportedly working on a second solo album while Vince Clarke is touring for the Yazoo reunion. These were his first “solo” concerts (he did some dj-ing while promoting Electric Blue) but it ended up reminding me of when I sing Erasure songs in front of the mirror in my bathroom.

Cyndi Lauper came out and sang the duet Early Bird with him at the end of his set. The song was recorded last year before the 2007 True Colors Tour and was only released on two obscure albums, Storm Chaser (Erasure) and the True Colors 2007 Compilation cd. Cyndi’s voice was out of this world and she gamely shimmied up to Andy and pretended there was nothing strange about the whole thing.

Andy Bell setlist
Blue Savannah
Caught in a Spin
I Could Fall in Love with You
Chains of Love
Electric Blue
A Little Respect
O L’amour
Early Bird (with Cyndi Lauper)

Quicktime Clip of ‘Early Bird’ Andy Bell with Cyndi Lauper

Cover act cross between the Andrew Sisters and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Got a earful of Crazy in Love (Beyonce), Heart of Glass (Blondie) and their finale was Walk Like an Egyptian (Bangles). Also did Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Nice voices, 40′s style dresses but my attention wandered two songs in. The crowd was into it more than I.

really liked songs I downloaded from them – diverse vocals, MySpace song selections made me doubt but enjoyed their live show, young hippie thrashers, the last endless song was a fantastic wave of a song

lead singer was Lars\” buddy who is always at Beerland, they were a stripped down minimalist type post-punk, spoken vocals, would need to see them again to rate their interest level

We arrived at Jones Beach just in time for lightning to strike the building and shut down Modest Mouse’s set while they evacuated the audience. The rain began to pour forth from the sky and the lightning storm kept us at bay (literally in the tunnel underneath our seats) for ninety minutes. They waited for two waves of the storm to pass before we were allowed to our seats, by which point there were standing pools of water a couple inches deep in some rows. The crew kept themselves busy squeegeeing the stage and eventually, swapping out Modest Mouse for R.E.M. During the delay, Peter Buck spent the entire time on stage watching the storm and Michael Stipe made a brief appearance himself.

Some people brought umbrellas with them. Some jackets or slickers. A few ambitious souls (us) plucked down $5 for ponchos, an investment well spent because while the lightning eventually went north, the rain only got more fierce as the night went on. A few pour souls, teenagers by the looks of them, braved the weather in just the shirts on their backs. Well, what’s a little rain among friends?

R.E.M. put on a show, though, with little complaint (okay, Stipe had a few.) The band came on stage at 10:15, a little more than an hour after they were scheduled to start. Michael greeted us with the line “Welcome to R.E.M. Survivor 2008″ and he and Mike Mills launched into a cover of the Creedence song Have You Ever Seen the Rain. They were clearly toying with the idea of how many rain-themed songs they could fit in before they got down to their original set list, but gave up without playing I’ll Take the Rain because, as Michael said, “It’s 7 minutes long and nobody wants to sit through that.”

Maybe it was the storm, maybe it was just the late hour, but Michael’s usual chatter was minimal. As such, the politics were minimal too, though he did pass out 6 t-shirts with the word “Obama” printed on the front to audience members. The set still featured Ignoreland (hostage crisis) and Welcome to the Occupation (Oliver North) and Houston (Hurricane Katrina, with the line “If the storm doesn’t kill me the government will.”)

The triple threat of Living Well, What’s the Frequency and Man Sized Wreath set the tone for an electric hard rocking night that defied the rain delay and kept the audience jazzed. Most of the set alternated between artful balladry and their hard rocking numbers going at one point from the transcendent The One I Love with the audience howling FIRE at the top of their lungs to a stripped down, gorgeous rendition of Let Me In. Bad Day and Orange Crush were enormous songs, boosted by the open air acoustics, that pounded us just as the rain started to come down in waves.

Eschewing a traditional encore, the band stayed on the stage and just launched into Supernatural Superserious. The evening’s surprise was an unrehearsed, tacked on It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) which had the entire audience going apeshit. As such, Fall on Me and Man on the Moon, with Modest Mouse’s Johnny Marr, were almost anti-climatic. Just as the last notes of Man on the Moon drifted off over the water, the rain stopped. Hoods came down, jackets were peeled off, soaking wet and gloriously satisfied, we wandered off to find our cars and get the hell out of Long Island, unless you were taking the L.I.E. which was flooded and at a complete standstill for hours to come.

Set List
Have You Ever Seen the Rain
So. Central Rain
These Days
Living Well is the Best Revenge
What’s the Frequency Kenneth
Man Sized Wreath
1,000,000
Ignoreland
Hollow Man
Welcome to the Occupation
Houston
Electrolite
Horse to Water
The One I Love
Let Me In
Bad Day
Orange Crush
I’m Gonna DJ
Supernatural Superserious
Losing My Religion
It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
Fall on Me (with Johnny Marr)
Man on the Moon (with Johnny Marr)
additional credit for this review goes to D.L. who braved the lightning, the rain, and some fishy herring to get there

R.E.M. was brilliant. Michael Stipe was in a wholly playful mood tonight, and after burning through the first five songs without a pause, spent the next forty minutes introducing every song with a personal note about its meaning or some emotional attachment he has to it. It’s not just banter, either, because there would be no R.E.M. concert without some political commentary and tonight was no exception. He introduced Ignoreland by mentioning it was about the hostage crisis that, in his words, kicked off the Reagan-Bush years. The first two lines of Cuyahoga were meant for Barack Obama. Houston was a song about the aftermath of Katrina. He dedicated a song to each of his opening acts and talked about how his years in L.A. inspired Electrolite. He prefaced Maps and Legends by saying it was only the second performance of the song in over 3 years, and it was one of many that were being performed on the tour for the first time and without a lot rehearsal. Not that there was anything sloppy about their performance.

The visuals for this tour are unreal. Simply stunning use of lighting wrapping the shots of the band (mostly Stipe, and more than once, mostly Stipe’s crotch.) The back drop were five column screens that flipped through live images, some pre-packaged ones, and occasionally lyrics from the songs being played. At one point, they set up a fishbowl camera in front of Stipe and superimposed that over images of the audience which was an impressive trick. Another time, the screens showed just Stipe’s hands, clapping and making shadow puppets.

The set list borrowed from a lot of older material, much of it obscure (or in the case of something like Driver 8 and Fall on Me, hit then, obscure now.) But the audience embraced them whole-heartedly, from the New Adventures in Hi-Fi track Departure to Circus Envy, from Monster. Hits like Losing my Religion and The One I Love blended seamlessly with new material like Man Sized Wreath and Supernatural Superserious which is currently making the rounds on the radio. For the brief Let Me In, the band gathered around the keyboard and strummed their guitars while Stipe wailed. Mike Mills again took the lead vocals for Don’t Go Back to Rockville, which has become a staple in the band’s set. And back to back tracks Get Up and Orange Crush pushed the crowd into a fervor (clearly showing their age since they were hits off of the album Green almost twenty years ago.) Stipe was convinced by the audience to play an extra song in the encore and added the ancient Beach Boys-like track Pretty Persuasion before launching into Man on the Moon.

Having seen R.E.M. perform an “all the hits” set on other tours, it was nice to see a show that was almost all hidden gems over their long and amazing career. While the new album Accelerate is being hailed as something as a comeback for them, it seemed more than anything that Michael Stipe and co. were out to prove that they have always remained true to themselves in their music. Mission accomplished.

Set List
Living Well is the Best Revenge
Begin the Begin
What’s the Frequency Kenneth
Circus Envy
Man Sized Wreath
West of the Fields
Ignoreland
Departure
Cuyahoga
Hollow Man
Driver 8
Houston
Electrolite
Maps and Legends
Horse to Water
The One I Love
I’ve Been High
Let Me In
Bad Day
Get Up
Orange Crush
I’m Gonna DJ
Encore
Supernatural Superserious
Losing My Religion
Don’t go Back to Rockville
Fall on Me (with Johnny Marr)
Pretty Persuasion (with Johnny Marr)
Man on The Moon (with Johnny Marr)
co-credit for this review goes to D.L. who had to peer through the shoulders of some really tall guys in the row in front of us to see Michael Stipe

In contrast to The National, Modest Mouse grabbed your attention and did their part as a solid warm up for R.E.M. Yet another six man band with two drum kits and an energetic lead singer, Issac Brock, who didn’t so much sing as spew the words. He also played guitar with his teeth. The band sounds like the product of The Presidents of the United States of America and Stone Temple Pilots. In fact, can’t you hear STP doing a really dirty version of Peaches?

The highlight was a slow, rolling version of The Good Times Are Killing Me. The band famously includes Johnny Marr, he of Smiths fame (assuming you’re old enough to appreciate that in any discernible way.) I zoned out for long stretches of their set, which in my opinion, started to drag towards the end. But to their credit (or perhaps less so to mine) much of the crowd was enthusiastically into it.

I didn’t expect to make it inside for The National but there was no traffic on the highway and we flew down to Comcast Center, formerly Tweeter Center, in about 40 minutes. The band was lukewarm. Was it the piss poor audio? Was the two square feet of stage they were given to move around in? The National was six guys, supported by a horn section. We heard the last four songs and I didn’t hear anything to get excited about.

The leader singer kept crossing his arms as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. There were a couple diehards in the audience but nobody was that turned on.

I’ll try not to gush but this was one of my top shows ever along with the likes of The Slits and Cracker in a state of delight throughout, though it’s in part because this band and I are simpatico it’s also because they are so thoroughly authentic unlike Kanye West or Johnny Cash for example, they simply satisfy every hip-hop need I have and repeatedly, so The RZA was the mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan, he did some of his solo stuff and some but not enough Wu-Tang stuff, the latter drove the crowd into a frenzy but the former was not bad either, they have the straightline rapping and quick turnaround beats that make hip hop good but are gorgeous because of their orchestral backdrops, most songs have a booming underrun of dark drone which reminded me of Flatlinerz though the Wu-Tang is 1000 times better, the Kung Fu movie references are silly and endearing to me but not sure that’s the intention, some of it is so raw that it’s noticeably under-produced but that’s kind of the point for me, anyway back to the show, he was backed by a keyboard, DJ, bass guitarist, some female vocalists and a whole cadre of foolish up and comers and groupies from the audience – he even looked annoyed by one of his boys who had drank/done too much, it was like being at a cult meeting what with the upraised hands in W position but a cult I actually wanted to join which is atypical for me, there’s an eerie owl hoot that recurs in their songs and this fool white beanie-and-bizarre-glasses-wearing boy behind me kept screaming it to the point of hilarity for me

soul/R&B, think they were high quality but just not my thing, didn\”t fit the show either, nice little earnest singer

really not good, sounded canned, little guy with tons of energy was cute, were trying so hard to be hard but really only had one decent song

he was fine, sounds similar to The RZA, got angry with the DJ periodically

good white boy hip-hop DJ with a nervous lack of stage presence, supposedly the local opener for many hip-hop shows according to the fool young one who hit on me and then asked me to buy him a drink