Mark E. Ortega
Freelance
July 21, 2013
Saturday night in downtown Las Vegas, the Rock of Vegas free concert series continued as '90s acts Sister Hazel and Tonic played, while also enduring what was at times a torrential downpour.
Both bands formed twenty years ago this year, and being a 25-year old had me slightly out of place. The crowd was mostly people in their 30s and 40s.
"This band was popular during my first divorce," an attractive 40-year old woman told me during the end of Tonic's set. "I've only been divorced once."
"So, you're planning on increasing that number then?" I asked.
As the band tried closing their set, the rain began. First it was single, large raindrops before it started coming down hard. This made it easy to tell who were the Las Vegas locals and who were the tourists.
The tourists immediately ran for cover, standing underneath the overheads of nearby casinos, mostly in front of the Fremont Casino. The locals embraced the July rainfall, staying to watch Tonic play their final few songs.
The rain made me feel bad for those trying to hustle a few dollars. The guys that own just that one suit, trying to get you into the club they promote for. The homeless person playing their acoustic guitar.
Tonic closed their set with their 1997 hit "If You Could Only See", which was the one track everyone knew. There was a reason it was the most played song on the radio that year.
Sister Hazel was about to make their entrance at 11 PM when the rain came again in heaps. It was unclear whether the band would play at all--this was a free show after all, what kind of displeasure did the crowd really have a right to?
Eventually, the band did make it on stage, but not until after help cleared the area of massive puddles that had formed over the 15-minute rainfall.
Though the band could have played a shortened set, they elected to play fifteen songs in total, which included all of their memorable hits and a few new tracks.
One local girl with bleached blonde hair may have been the first in history to try and mosh at a Sister Hazel concert. Luckily, her boyfriend was much more sober and kept her controlled for most of it.
"Your Winter" was mashed nicely into The Beatles' "Hey Jude", as the crowd happily sung along to the chorus of the cover.
The standout song from the performance was "Champagne High", a song that singer Ryan Newell told the crowd was written about attending his ex-girlfriend's wedding. Though he admitted his voice was a bit hoarse, it didn't hurt the performance at all.
A piano ballad "This Kind of Love" was cut short when the keyboard malfunctioned, presumably due to the heavy rain that had attacked the stage earlier. Though the band covered their equipment when it happened, it was no surprise that something was affected.
That basically summed up the night. The concert was perfect in its imperfection.
Newell later explained a situation where on a day off, he and bandmates hungout in a cocktail bar. There was karaoke going on, and all of a sudden, it was announced that it was Ryan's turn, who would be singing "All For You", the band's biggest hit. That spawned the idea for a new song that they played, "Go To Karaoke Song", which was catchy in both its melody and hook. The band had little video cameras attached to their guitars in order to capture video for some project they are currently working on.
The song obviously led into "All For You", which a large portion of the crowd knew each word to. The group played a one-song encore, "Swan Dive", one of their other standout songs. By the time things wrapped up, it was 1 AM. Most Rock of Vegas shows wrapped up around midnight, but the rain delay and the bands' willingness to play full sets made the night go a little longer.
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