Santana
Counting Crows
Toyota Center
August 17, 2024
It was a tale of two bands at Toyota Center Saturday night, with the more laidback and introspective Counting Crows opening up for the ferocious and energetic Santana, who first burst onto the American musical scene at the now mythical Woodstock festival in 1969.
Counting Crows lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz came out wearing some cool looking flared pants with purple and black stripes on them, no longer sporting his famous dreadlocks which he wore in the early ’90s when the band was new and hugely popular.
Duritz still has the pipes, and when the band launched into their biggest hit, “Mr. Jones” three songs in, the crowd erupted in cheers. Strangely though, the song sounded a bit off for some reason; I can’t quite explain why but it didn’t sound the same as I remember it from hearing the song on the radio and MTV thousands of times when it was huge. Amazingly, the original music video now has 333 million views on YouTube; the live version last night was a bit of a disappointment.
Perhaps Counting Crows is somewhat sick of the song and just wanted to play it early in their set to get it over and done with for the night? Like the way Jim Morrison reportedly got bored singing “Light My Fire” every night?
The band made up for it with two other songs from their now classic debut album, August and Everything After; both “Round Here” and “Rain King” sounded really good and got fantastic crowd reactions.
I was very surprised to learn that Duritz went to school at Elrod Elementary here in Houston when he was a kid, which is not all that far from Toyota Center; Duritz told a story of how he “fucking hated it,” though he didn’t elaborate as to why. He also let a lot more f-bombs fly and said shit a few times as he described how when he was a kid he snuck outside during a hurricane in Houston and leaned forward and let the wind pick him up and keep him from falling down.
Overall, Counting Crows went over really well for an opening act, and you could tell they had a lot of fans in the audience who came to see them alone, particularly of the female persuasion; the band was really tight overall.
There is no doubt however that the vast majority of people came out to see Santana, and the crowd exploded with applause when Carlos Santana came out onstage wearing a cool orange outfit and one of his famous fedora hats on, while chewing gum (or something else) which he continued doing for most of the night.
Before the band came onstage, a split screen video of Woodstock 1969 footage played, showing a bunch of hippies having a grand ol’ time sliding downhill on mudslides.
Santana was much louder than Counting Crows when they started playing; I could feel the sound vibrating through my chest and it continued all night long.
Someone in the crowd in front of me lit up a joint almost immediately when Santana started performing, and the smell of marijuana smoke was in the Toyota Center air all night long.
“Evil Ways” and “Black Magic Woman” got huge crowd reactions; a roar went through the arena and a sea of cellphones were pulled out to document the classic rock songs.
Carlos Santana sat down in a chair for much of the night, as the 77-year-old Latin-rock guitar hero suffers from chronic sciatic back pain. Luckily his hands and fingers still work great and his amazing guitar playing sounds even better in person than on the records, amazingly.
As great as Carlos is on the guitar, the band’s bass player, Benny Rietveld, played an amazing bass solo that would put Geddy Lee and Les Claypool to shame.
Cindy Blackman Santana, the band’s drummer who also happens to be Carlos’s wife, played an equally brilliant drum solo, and Carlos compared her to an Olympic athlete with her diet and exercise regime and said that if she didn’t stay in great shape she would “pass the fuck out” with the way she plays all night and every night on tour.
Santana’s setlist was pretty much a selection of his most loved and best songs in sequential order of release, with a good helping from his huge 1999 comeback album, Supernatural, which went 15 times platinum in the United States alone.
I love the early classic Santana jams from 1969 and the early 1970s the best; those songs are just epic the way a classical music piece is epic. Santana played “Put Your Lights On” from Supernatural and the whole crowd lit up the place with their cellphone lights.
Throughout the night Santana also sprinkled in some guitar medleys in the middle of songs, including “Deep In The Heart Of Texas” and Iron Butterfly’s 1968 hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” among others.
The music of Santana is both joyful and badass, and Santana, the man, made an appeal to the better angels of our nature when he optimistically said, “I see a collective graduation of humanity away from being like donkeys and monkeys to sentient angelic beings.”
I sure hope so, Carlos. You are showing us the way with your music and words.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
