The show starts with the two performing several songs together on facing grand pianos. It was a little bizarre to hear Billy Joel singing a verse of ‘Your Song’ and Elton John singing a verse of ‘Just the Way You Are’, but it works somehow.

On the third or fourth song, Elton John stopped abruptly during the instrumental introduction because his sustain pedal was stuck, making all his notes run together. Some roadies come out and messed with it but couldn’t fix it, then Billy Joel came over and started messing with it too, but also couldn’t fix it. After a few minutes Elton left the stage (looking a bit upset). Billy goofed off for a minute or two playing snippets of random songs, and then after a few minutes launched into his solo set. Elton’s piano dropped back beneath the stage, presumably to be repaired or swapped.

In typical Billy Joel style, he called it a ‘true rock and roll f***-up.’

Billy’s set included about an hour of his songs, mostly the hit singles but with one or two less-popular tracks thrown in. As with the two previous Billy Joel concerts I’ve been to, he did an excellent job. There were no real surprises for me; it was like an abridged version of the other Billy Joel concert’s I’ve been to. Then he left (around the time that most concerts have an intermission) and his piano dropped into the stage, and Elton’s piano rose back up. There was no intermission; the transition between the solo sets took maybe 2 or 3 minutes.

Elton returned to the stage with a rocking rendition of ‘Funeral For A Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)’, which is one of my favorites, and embarked upon a roughly hour-long set of his songs, apologizing after the first for the technical difficulties from earlier. Elton put on a very good show and, like Billy, performed mostly hit songs with a couple of lesser-known tracks thrown in. He did an absolutely amazing extended version of ‘Rocket Man’ that I really enjoyed. I was surprised that he didn’t do any of his later songs (like the tracks from ‘The Lion King’). ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ from 1975 was the newest song he did in his solo set, and ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’ from 1983 was the newest performed as a duet with Billy.

After Elton’s solo set, Billy returned to the stage and they picked up where they had left off at the beginning. I’m not sure how long the beginning and end duet sets are supposed to be, but they made sure we didn’t miss anything and (presumably) did the 1 or 2 songs they were supposed to do at the beginning at the end instead. The two final songs were ‘Candle in the Wind’ by Elton and ‘Piano Man’ by Billy, both performed as duets, and then they left the stage. There was no encore (there were no big hits left to do as an encore anyway), but that’s okay since the whole encore thing is pretty stupid and the concert went on for well over three hours—solid hours without any real breaks in the music.

Overall, it was an excellent show.

It was my first time at Nationals Park. This was the first concert held at the venue, which is the home field of the Washington Nationals baseball team (or, as I like to call it, the Montreal Expos Redux). I haven’t gone to any Nationals games because a) they’re just the Expos, and they’re just as good as the Expos were; b) I don’t particularly like baseball; c) I object to the use of taxpayer funds and eminent domain to build stadiums; and d) I really think they should have named the them the Washington Senators (after our old baseball teams) or Washington Wombats (because it’s a cool name). Regardless, it was a very nice park with good vendors, cupholders on the seats, and a big enough entrance to handle the full crowd. Not bad.

My complaint is a side effect of the fact that Nationals Park is a baseball park that got temporarily refitted into a concert venue…the acoustics were horrible. These kinds of venues were simply not designed to transmit music into the stands clearly. The sound quality in our seats was mediocre at-best, and marred by noticeable echoes and other distortions. There was some of this in the shows we’ve seen at the Verizon Center (former MCI Center) in DC, but I don’t remember it being nearly this bad.

I also was quite dissatisfied with the transportation options. For baseball games, you basically have three options for getting to the Park: take Metro, pay for expensive close-in parking, or park for free at RFK and take the free shuttle bus. This suite of options, by all accounts, works very well.

For last night’s concert, each of these three options had serious problems. Metro, in their infinite wisdom, chose the weekend of probably the biggest concert of the year to perform widespread track maintenance. While they claimed they were running extra trains for the concert, I certainly saw no evidence that they were doing anything other than the standard, low-volume weekend procedure with a lot of delays and single-tracking thrown in because of the maintenance. The expensive close-in parking was…expensive. $40 and up, as compared to the <$20 average price of all-day parking in DC. Nationals Park, in their infinite wisdom, simply did not offer the free RFK shuttle for the concert.

We opted for Metro, since it was (for the first time in memory) cheaper than the alternatives. Normally we would go to the Vienna station on the west end of the Orange Line, but the track maintenance was happening out at that end so we headed in a few stations to West Falls Church. Once we got into the station, we waited for well over 20 minutes for a train. They have overhead electronic signs that are supposed to tell you when trains are coming, and it helpfully informed us that a ‘–’ line train with ‘-’ cars and a destination of ‘Train’ was arriving in (blank) minutes. Nice. (You can see a picture of this in the gallery below).

Well, we did eventually get there…early in fact, but only because we left really, really early.

The trip home was no better. The line into the Navy Yard station (closest to the Park) was really just a giant throng of people who weren’t moving at all. Melissa and I had a secret plan to walk a mile to the Capitol South station, which would put us on the correct line (Orange) further out than people transferring to the line from the Green Line (from the giant line at Navy Yard). It actually worked very well (although a lot of other people had the same idea, but it was still a lot less than the Navy Yard people). Of course, Metro’s ‘extra trains’ were still running at 15-minute intervals just like the normally do on weekends…and, while the overhead signs did inform us about upcoming Blue and Orange Line trains, it also had another phantom ‘blank’ train on the list.

Anyway, we got on the train, got seats, got crushed by an incredible throng of people transferring on from the Green Line after a few stations. Some poor person grabbed on to the overhead grab handle and it snapped off in her hand. Then, when we finally got to our station, as we were riding the escalator up from the platform it just shut off and came very close to knocking us all over like bowling pins. All I want is quality, safety, planning, and efficiency. Please?

We finally got home around 1am, and went to sleep. It was a long day, but we overall had a great time.

I have some pictures, mostly from the before and after, but with a couple from the concert mixed in. Of course, they’re just camera-phone pictures and many of them were at night so don’t judge my photo quality too harshly!

The first single from Something to Be, latin-pop track Lonely No More, was both entirely different than Thomas’s work with Matchbox Twenty and independently excellent (and the music video is worth a look, check it out in the iTunes Music Videos section). The rest of the album largely follows suit—it’s not what you expect, but you like it anyway.

Thomas enlists the help of a diverse cast of backing musicians—Eminem’s bass guitarist, Beyoncé’s drummer, guitarists who have worked with Tom Petty and Sheryl Crow, a gospel choir, and a guest appearance by John Mayer. The result is an album that manages to sound, in places, like a pop/R&B but maintains a rock-and-roll core. To say the least, no other album I’ve ever heard sounds like Something to Be.

If you appreciate the lyrical stylings of Rob Thomas as you’ve experienced them in Matchbox Twenty, but are interested in hearing his words in a new musical context, give this album a try. It’s a great start for Rob Thomas as a soloist, and despite a few weak points Something to Be is worth having in your collection.

4 out of 5 stars.

Many of Jet’s songs are reminiscent of rock-and-roll greats like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan, and others, yet they are not mere rehashings of the same old things. Get Born‘s thirteen tracks leave no doubt that this is a new band making new music, and likewise they leave no doubt that the band longs for the days when music was…well…good.

The lead single, Are You Gonna Be My Girl?, has been featured in an Apple iPod/iTunes silhouette advertisment and is played ad nauseum in radio advertising, but it is other tracks that really show Jet’s talent. Songs like Cold Hard Bitch—a rollicking song that proves rock-and-roll hasn’t died yet—and Look What You’ve Done—a mellow, Beatlesque song reminiscent of Hey Jude or Let It Be—get in your head and stay for days.

Since I purchased Get Born, I’ve played the entire album over and over again. That says a lot, since my typical style of-late has been to add new albums into my sprawling iTunes randomizer without hardly a second thought. It is not a perfect disk (Lazy Gun, in particular, grates on me), but it is close.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Bare Trees is not the Fleetwood Mac that most Americans are familiar with. This 1972 album comes three years before Americans Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the group, and thus has a very different sound from their hit Fleetwood Mac and Rumours albums.

I confess to loving the latter-day incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, and I’m a huge fan of Stevie Nicks’s work both with the group and as a soloist. But despite my bias, I was in love with Bare Trees from the first song. This is a strong album that is worth listening to over and over again.

Danny Kirwin and Bob Welch—two people are aren’t even in the Fleetwood Mac I’m more familiar with—sing many of the vocals, with the more familiar voice of Christine McVie coming forward in a few of the songs. The tunes are catchy, inventive, emotional, and have a rock-and-roll earnestness that is lacking from some of Fleetwood Mac’s later work. That earnestness managed to make up for the lack of Stevie Nicks’s patented angst.

You won’t hear these songs on the radio—even the best classic rock stations have gotten enamored with the Fleetwood Mac and Rumours albums—but Bare Trees is definitely not to be overlooked.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

I’m not going to pretend that this album is anything that it isn’t (although Avril seems to want us to believe she is something she isn’t). This is a pop album. Thankfully, it does have a bit of an edge which makes it tolerable, and—at points—quite good.

“Sk8er Boi,” despite the unfortunate name, rocks. It’s a great song. The familiar radio staple “Complicated” is pretty good too. “I’m With You” is one of the better recent pop ballads. Beside these three radio hits, there is a pretty even mix of good songs and mediocre ones on this album.

Lavigne has potential—she’s cute, unique, and talented—but the pop-style production of Let Go really hurts it. It’s still listenable, but it’s nothing special.

Avril, here’s a bit of advice for you: Rather than working with “The Matrix,” write the songs yourself (we know you can!) and make an album with a rock producer. Strip out the pop effects and lyrical tripe and do something personal. I really want to like you, hopefully your next album will give me a better reason to.

3 out of 5 stars.

That’s not what I got.

There is no denying that Clay Aiken’s debut album, Measure of a Man, is a pop album, but it’s not much like other pop albums today. It has tunes. The tracks can be accurately called songs. There are no electronica effects, obviously adjusted vocals, or rap-style dance beats. It’s clearly put together with pop production values, but it’s put together cleanly and in a listenable form.

Measure of a Man hearkens back to the 1970s, when pop was actually music and you could enjoy listening to an entire album’s worth of it. Not every song is flawless, but I listened to all 12 without cringing once. That’s more than I can say for most albums produced in the last three or four years.

This is not high-class, brain twisting, deep music—but Measure of a Man is a strong debut for the talented Clay Aiken and a good collection of songs that you can just put on and enjoy. Compared to the vacuous, sexual, artificial tripe that has been put out by pop artists lately, I can say that this album is a breath of fresh air in the genre.

4 out of 5 stars.

The older Bee Gees songs were soft, catchy, heartfelt, acoustic oldies songs. Their disco era was marked by high production standards and a more artificial sound, as well as the trademark falsetto singing. Mr. Natural, produced in 1974, finds itself precariously perched between these two styles—and came out among my favorite Bee Gees albums as a result.

Each one of the eleven songs on this album is strongly produced and clean like the later Bee Gees work, yet Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb sing in their ‘normal’ non-falsetto voices. The lyrics have the same heartfelt tone as the older Bee Gees songs, although they show an added edge that became the hallmark of their later material.

Hardly any two songs are alike on this eclectic work. Some songs could almost be considered country, some are in an oldies style, some simply rock, others are emotional love songs, and a few are quintessential 70s pop songs. For the first time (to my knowledge), the Brothers Gibb included horn parts in some of the more upbeat songs, foreshadowing their horn-laden disco style.

What has always been amazing about the Bee Gees is that, no matter what style they decided to make a song in, it virtually always came out sounding great. That had never been more true than with Mr. Natural. If all you know about the Bee Gees is Stayin’ Alive and Night Fever, this is the perfect album to introduce you to everything else the group has to offer.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

There are two very important points that UMG and their brethren like BMG who joined in on this idea later were missing.

The first point is that music pirates aren’t idiots, in fact they’re usually really smart computer nerds. I can say from experience that smart computer nerds know how to make MP3′s from CD’s without playing the CD in a computer. All it takes is a non-computer CD player, a decent stereo cable, and any number of available freeware programs that take about 5 minutes to download.

The second point was the one closest to my heart. UMG forgot about people like me who use their computers as their stereo AND buy their CD’s legally. Let me tell you, I won’t buy a CD that won’t play on my PowerMac G4 since it serves as my stereo. So, news flash guys, since the pirates would still be sharing their illegal MP3′s and music purchasers like me would cut back on CD purchases, this ingenious move would hurt CD sales rather than help them.

Thankfully, even though UMG said they’d be doing this to all their CD’s within a year I think they really only did it to 3 or 4 and they were generally disliked by the music-buying public anyway. So no harm done, and maybe I was little quick to call for that boycott. But I was unhappy with the music industry for more reason than that expressed in my January, 2002 rant (and I was unhappy with more than just the music industry—read the end of that rant, I had nothing nice to say about music pirates). Part of why I was so mad had to do with the close-minded attitude of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its music industry membership, and more importantly the dearth of decent stuff to listen to.

I don’t know if you remember the music scene in 2001 and the first part of 2002, I keep trying to forget it, but through that year there wasn’t much to listen to other than 65 bands that sounded just like Nickelback, a bunch of rappers without talent, and the Britney Spears era pop-princesses.

On the attitudinal front at the time, there was no logical way to buy music digitally and legally online. Because of the draconian copyright protections put on online music by the RIAA and its members, the only way to get music online was to fight with stringent rules and limitations on the legal ones or to resort to illegal methods of getting your music. Furthermore, the prices of physical CD’s (which are less costly to produce than cassette tapes, by the way) hovered between $11.99 and $18.99. That’s a long shot better than a few years back when the obscure CD from an unknown band ran $16.99 and anything popular was closer to $20, but any economics major or music lover will tell you is still way over the supply/demand equilibrium.

If that wasn’t reason enough to account for slow album sales, they were all producing carbon-copy bands. If every band out there has one or two radio hits, but they’re all in exactly the same style, nobody has an emotional connection to any one band or any reason at all to buy their CD’s. That’s why Matchbox Twenty remains one of the best selling new bands—nobody sounds like them, people have an emotional connection to them. The same goes for Eminem (whether you like him or not).

But I’m not writing this rant to lambast and insult the music industry, although it wouldn’t be a fair rant without mentioning all of those things. The industry is in trouble, and nobody over at the RIAA (which is about a block away from my office in DC) seems to understand why. But for the first time in a while, I’m actually starting to feel good about the direction of music.

On the attitudinal side, Apple Computer did something crazy a little while back and came out with the iTunes Music Store. This store lets people—currently just Mac users, but a Windows version is promised by the end of the year—buy songs or entire albums online for cheap ($9.99 for most albums, $0.99 for most songs) and have them downloaded to their hard drive in a few minutes. But what differentiates this store from previous online efforts—aside from Apple’s ease of use—is the support of the RIAA and all the major record labels.

You see, lots and lots of songs are available—popular stuff, obscure stuff, random stuff, great stuff—and you can actually listen to them wherever you want. You can burn them to CD’s. You can authorize them to be played on up to three computers. You actually have some freedom and control over how the music you buy gets used. I have no doubt that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, had something to do with this, but I commend the RIAA and its members for going along with it. This kind of system (once it makes it to the wider Windows audience) will be an important part of your industry being spared the doom it was on the road toward.

But perhaps the most pleasant change in the music industry over the last year and a half is the improvement in the music. Hit songs have been from bands and individuals who are actually musicians, or at least have something original to put forth. Turn on the radio right now, there’s a decent chance that Matchbox Twenty, Norah Jones, Santana, Eminem, Maroon 5, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, Avril Lavigne, or No Doubt is playing. You know, people who write their music, put their heart into it, and come up with something new and interesting. This is a step in the right direction.

The RIAA still acts sometimes like it has an agitated monkey up its butt. They’ve been prominently mentioned in the news recently for filing over 870 subpoenas to obtain the names of people suspected of sharing music illegally and are planning to press charges against anybody they catch sharing copyrighted music. Apparently nobody at the RIAA has read the number of studies indicating that music-sharers are statistically more likely to buy CD’s than people who don’t share music at all. That’s right guys, piss of your most devout fans.

Physical CD’s are still more expensive than most of them are worth, and there is still too strong a tendency to cookie-cutter any sound that gets popular (and thereby undercut the sales of the band that came up with that sound). But I can’t help thinking optimistically about the future of music when I turn on the radio and hear a song with a tune again. I can’t help but think that things are going in the right direction when I can buy an album through iTunes, and five minutes later be listening to it and burning it to CD. These are good things, and if they’re both allowed to continue and grow, maybe the music industry will be able to save itself.

For a while, I had budgeted money to buy two or three CD’s every month. But when I realized how idiotic the industry was behaving— how little I was getting for the money, how the RIAA was always trying to make its customers feel like criminals, how they were threatening to make it so I couldn’t even play my own CD’s on my own computer/stereo—I cut back. In fact, for some time I didn’t buy hardly any music at all. I’m getting back into the habit now because I love the feeling I get listening to a new album, hearing good songs that I’ve never heard before, and because I don’t feel so bad giving the industry money any more now that they’re supporting decent musicians and decent, inexpensive distribution methods.

I find myself wondering though, how much of the music sales drop was because of MP3 sharing and how much was because people like me starting feeling dirty giving the recording industry money? I think that the results of a poll like that might surprise the RIAA.

Pink Floyd, which is my favorite band by far, does maintain a significant young following today despite this MTV oriented era (and despite the fact that VH1 doesn’t play much of their material either). After all, they hold the best and 2nd-best selling album of all time slots last I checked, and their smash-hit “The Dark Side of the Moon” holds the world record for longest-run on the Billboard Top 200 Albums list (over 13 YEARS consecutively). Most everybody owns or knows many people who own at least one Pink Floyd album/cd, and that’s sure to increase with the upcoming release of “Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd”.

Needless to say, my second favorite band did not fare so well. The Bee Gees were victim-number-one of the so called Disco Backlash, where all of a sudden dancing wasn’t cool anymore and tons of bands that once rode on top of the wave of popularity in the late-seventies were ridiculed and bad-mouthed left and right for decades to come. Now, I like disco music myself, in fact it was their disco-era hits “Staying Alive” and “Night Fever” and “You Should Be Dancing” that initially got me into the works of Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb.

But what began as an appreciation of the goofy pointlessness of The Bee Gees’ disco work (which actually is more meaningful upon a serious listen than many would think) soon grew into an entirely serious appreciation of the groups entire work. Little do people know that they were actually an accomplished oldies band in the 60′s, with their first album in the late-mid 60′s coming on the heels of later Beatles work. In the 70′s the Bee Gees experimented in psychedelic music, hard rock, country, funk, and of course their famed disco. After the disco era they went on be typical 80′s artists with a somewhat typical 80′s sound, but emerged in the 90′s as a semi-prominent soft-rock band. In 2001 (that’s THIS YEAR kiddies!) they released their newest album, “This is Where I Came In”, which provides a quality mix of acoustic guitar rock, synthesizers dance, soft-rock, and even alternative rock.

So understand this people, the Bee Gees are not a disco band. They are a band that did two disco albums in the late 70′s, and over 13 OTHER albums in the years before and since of varying styles. You might give them a listen, download some songs, and try to open your minds—I know it’s hard. Feel free to ask me for some recommendations ;-)

Oh, and as an added bonus I think it’s worth mentioning—”Ghetto Superstar” is a remake of the Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers song “Islands in the Stream”, which was written by the Bee Gees. The “Grease Theme Song” was written by the Bee Gees. If you remember when Oscar De La Hoya released an album about a year ago and his single “Run To Me” was on the radio briefly, well that was a cover of a song by the Bee Gees. LFO did a cover of Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You”, which was written by the Bee Gees. I’m sure you’ve heard the love song “To Love Somebody”…no? Here let me sing it…”You don’t know what it’s like / Baby, you don’t know what it’s like / To love somebody / To love somebody / The way I love you”…yeah! That one! That’s a remake of a Bee Gees song.

Oh believe me I could go on, but I’ll just let you keep believing your rap and pop people wrote all those songs you hear on the radio ;-) After all, the Bee Gees are just some disco band.