Buffalo 10/14 Glen Sobel fills in for Tommy Lee

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Buffalo 10/14 Glen Sobel fills in for Tommy Lee

Post by rtbuck » Thu Oct 15, 2015 4:31 pm

Great show here in Buffalo & for the 2nd year in a row Alice blew away the crew. 3 songs into Crue's set Vince Neil introduced Tommy Lee who walked out to the front of the stage & announced he couldn't drum because of Tendonitus. Glen Sobel did a phenomenal job filling in for Lee!

It was cool because Ryan Roxie & Nita Strauss were signing autographs before the show & both were phenomenal with the fans.

here's the review from the Buffalo News this morning by Jeff Miers

"It took Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee some 30 minutes to come to the front of the stage to let his fans, who’d paid full price for his band’s “Final Tour” stop at First Niagara Center on Wednesday, know that he wouldn’t be playing during Wednesday’s show due to “tendonitis.”

By that time, we’d already pretty much figured it out, due to the fact that the Crue played three songs sans a spotlight on their drummer, normally one of the first people to show up on the big screen. You know why – Pamela Anderson, and all of that.

Really, Tommy? Tendonitis? So bad that you couldn’t fulfill your obligation to Buffalo?

OK. We have no choice but to accept your word for it.

Motley Crue, one of the also-ran pop-metal groups to have emerged from the hair-metal era, arrived at First Niagara Center on Wednesday to perform before a roughly half-filled house. I have no idea if the empty seats aggravated Lee’s tendonitis. Perhaps it did; perhaps it didn’t.

Regardless, the Crue’s already lame set of flaccid takes on the “greatest hits” most definitely suffered due to the fact that Lee was not playing drums.

It’s not that Glen Sobel, who had already killed it as the timekeeper for opener Alice Cooper, couldn’t cover the Crue parts. He could, and he did. It’s that the Crue folks never told the assembled that they’d be seeing a different drummer on Wednesday.

In Motley Crue, that means something.

Lee is by far the biggest draw for a Crue concert. He is, bless guitarist Mick Mars’ heart, the only real virtuoso in the band.

Lord knows singer Vince Neil isn’t up to the job he managed to fake his way through during the 1980s and early ’90s. He’s not. Neil sounded awful on Wednesday. Thin, weak and out of tune.

Throughout Wednesday’s show, Neil did his best to make the sort of tortured feline sound that, at one point, passed for a metal-ish vocal performance, but even during the Def Leppard-imitations that constituted Crue tunes like “Girls Girls Girls,” “Wild Side” and “Primal Scream,” he failed to nail that awful sound in tune.

The band would’ve been well-served to just give us the first two albums, in order. At least then, we would’ve perhaps embraced the notion that we’d been given a special show, in Lee’s absence.

One could make the argument that cheesy metal bands like Motley Crue have been ripping us all off for years, but perhaps that’s going too far. At least in Crue, we have Nikki Sixx, who has made clear his love for the pre-eminent power-pop bands of the ’70s, (Cheap Trick, Starz, Sweet) and has never been shy about stealing their riffs.

Sixx strutted around the impressive stage as if nothing was wrong during Wednesday’s set. But he knew there was something wrong. And he should’ve talked to us about it.

If this was really Motley Crue’s farewell to Buffalo, then we should all throw a “good riddance” their way.

Really, guys?

Alice Cooper and his band were already going to blow the Crue away, even if Lee had bothered to show up.

Cooper wrote the book on the sort of post-glam “shock-rock” that led to first Kiss and then ultimately Motley Crue. But Cooper, who emerged from Detroit after having already been influenced by the MC5 and the Stooges and even primal Bob Seger, grabbed the First Niagara Center crowd by the lapels, and proceeded to make that crowd feel uncomfortable, creeped out, and decidedly surprised by the prowess of the “opening act.”

Opening with a raunchy version of “The Black Widow,” moving rapidly through “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “Under my Wheels,” and hitting full-on metal/punk/industrial paydirt with a fiery “I’m Eighteen,” Cooper did what the Crue couldn’t – made old songs sound new, powerful, and meaningful.

CONCERT REVIEW

Motley Crue and Alice Cooper

Wednesday night in the First Niagara Center

email: jmiers@buffnews.com"



http://buffalo.com/2015/10/15/news/musi ... tley-crue/

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