Last night I saw Peter Gabriel in concert at DTE Energy Center Pine Knob. Pete puts on a hell of a show.
The set was an exercise in minimalism; just the band and equipment with a half-dozen screen behind, on which was projected different colored light. Overhead was a large circular screen. Everyone was dressed in black.
The concert covered pretty much all of Gabriel’s career from So to Up , with everything in between. My favorite bit was when Gabriel and his daughter wheeled themselves around the stage on Segways to Games Without Frontiers . I gotta get me one of those things!
Only microscopically less nifty was Growing Up , with PG inside a twelve-foot inflated sphere, bouncing in synch with the music. Actually, that might have been slightly cooler than the Segways. Other songs: The Tower (from Ovo ), Steam, Shock the Monkey, Digging in the Dirt – PG wearing a head-mounted camera focused in extreme close-up on different parts of his face, Sledgehammer – PG wearing the spotlight shirt, Salsbury Hill – in which PG and the band did a walkabout through the crowd, and a wondrous nifty encore of In Your Eyes , accompanied by opening singer Sevara Nazarkhan from Uzbeckistan, whose voice is without compare.
I apologize: My usually poetic tongue is dulled with fatigue and awe.
After listening to Peter Gabriel for over fifteen years, seeing him in concert was…extraordinary.
In other news…
A week ago I bought This is Spinal Tap . Great movie. During my post-movie shower I realized something: In Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, as Nigel, has an amp that “goes to eleven” (watch the movie). In The Princess Bride , Christopher Guest plays Count Rugen, a.k.a. the Six Fingered Man. Six fingers plus five fingers equals (you guessed it!) ELEVEN! Coincidence? I don’t think so !
I’m on to something. I can feel it in my spleen.