The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper posted a review of Tori's August 16, 2003 concert in Cleveland, OH in their August 18, 2003 edition.
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Many thanks to Woj for bringing this to my attention. You can read this press concert review online at Cleveland.com or below:
Blackout is partners' inspiration for song
Robert Cherry
Special to The Plain Dealer
The big blackout was still on everyone's lips Saturday as Tori Amos fans filed into Tower City Amphitheater in downtown Cleveland's Flats.
One crafty young woman even sported a homemade "BLAME CANADA" T-shirt, cheekily volleying suspicion away from Ohio and that mysterious nine-second surge that plunged us into human contact. (Note from Mikewhy: The young woman mentioned here is Molly, who runs MollyKnight.com.)
Amos shared her story as well, and in her own inimitable fashion.
Early in her set, the ivory-tickling chanteuse revealed that she had waited out the crisis in a Birmingham, Mich., hotel. She then detailed her adventure in song.
Apparently Amos and her 3-year-old daughter, Natashya, shared a candlelit lobby with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and KISS' Gene Simmons, both of whom were also scheduled to rock Detroit the following evening.
According to the brief, jaunty number, Amos' daughter liked Tyler because "he sings in nursery rhymes." But Tyler's avowed serial-womanizing co-headliner fared less well: "That man is scarier to the little girls than a blackout," sang Amos, smiling.
It was no "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia," but the song established the evening's intimate, impromptu mood, and received generous applause from an audience that most likely had passed on the God Of Thunder's latest farewell tour.
Dressed in a flowing powder-blue tunic, faded blue jeans and burgundy Manolo Blahniks, Amos conjured the spirit of performers like the perpetually wind-blown Stevie Nicks, Led Zeppelin's Rhodes-tinkling John Paul Jones and ELP's twin-keyboard-straddling Keith Emerson.
Backed by ace session cats Matt Chamberlain and Jon Evans on drums and bass, respectively, Amos toured her deep catalog, mixing early abstract confessionals like "Silent All These Years" with material from her excellent year-old concept album, "Scarlet's Walk."
On the new disc's Led Zeppelin-channeling "Pancake," she even slipped in verse from Neil Young's "Ohio," offering a still timely reminder of another dark event from our past.
Opener Ben Folds, fully shed of his backing "Five," provided the perfect foil for Amos, blending genuinely funny social satire with poignant ballads like his 1997 hit, "Brick."
Especially winning was the recently recorded "They Give No [Expletive Deleted]," in which Folds hilariously vented on America's expanding waistline, terminal self-absorption and imperial over-reach.
Cherry is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.
To reach Robert Cherry:
entertainment@plaind.com
