Like my clever liberal media trick there in the title. Thanks to my use of the loaded word “Nightmare” you were probably sucked in thinking I had some bad experience on my Anniversary and was going to spill the beans on my blog. I liken this to when a biased journalist uses the word “Slams” in an article header since it tends to elicit more emotion than say the literal truth of it being more of a “Beats” or “Betters” another. For the record, a hard fast rule of mine is to NEVER read an article with that word in the title – or any equally purposefully charged word like “Lambaste”. In contrast to what the title might indicate, I had a wonderful Anniversary with Linda … which just happened to take place here:
That’s right, we went to see the Alice Cooper concert in downtown Peoria. What better way can you think of to celebrate a wonderful 21 years of marriage? Okay, okay, a trip to Hawaii or maybe some romantic getaway might be a little better but we need to save something special for the 10’s. This is our third Alice Cooper concert – twice now in Peoria and another one at the Mississippi Valley State Fair a few years back. Some of you may not be aware of this band – actually, let’s pause a minute – AC used to be a band fronted by Vincent Furnier. Over time, the band kind of disbanded per se, and Vincent eventually took on the moniker for himself. Now when you see Alice Cooper people think of just Vincent and whatever band members he happens to be touring with at the moment. Now corrected, I’ll restart with saying many of you may not be familiar with the band or the re-incarnated Vincent. Let’s just say he tends to delve into the dark underbelly of society to deliver his brand of entertainment. With ghoulish painted eyes and a wardrobe straight from 60’s horror movies, Alice (I’ll use this for the rest of the post) brings to life a Macabre theater based on a tortured soul. Think of it as a masterful combination of solid rock music infused with shock imagery. Take for example his opening act when he dons his spider outfit and commands the crowd for high atop his pulpit.
As you can tell we were actually sitting in first balcony of the theater. These seats shielded us from the floor standers (as desired), but it next time we’ll try for a box a couple back. The angle we had caused some slight stage clipping which wasn’t that big of an issue other than I couldn’t see the drummer as well as I wanted to – their songs have very difficult percussion arrangements and I was hoping to get some insights on how it’s done . The other drawback from that is the stack of speakers on the right (yeah, that whole stack) was essentially blasting right at me. By the end of the concert my ears were in full on concert ring.
Read more about our Anniversary Night Out after the jump
