The biggest concert in the known world was occurring just a couple of miles away, but I stayed home to watch it on TV anyway.
The trouble with big, genre-jumping concerts is that you have to sit through the acts that you’re so-so about to get to the one or two you’d like to see. And beyond that, you’d have to invest in an entire day of standing in a crowd to wait for it to start.
I’m sure I could have trotted over closer to the 7 p.m. start time and seen the show — from a JumboTron near the Washington Memorial, where I “saw” the last inauguration. In truth, I was among a lot of people who were also very near, but not quite at, the event (and then the JumboTron started jumping its signal).
Anyway, it was coming through loud and clear at home and was OK without being transcendent. The filmed bits about individual soldiers were very well produced, the stars that appeared between musical acts were succinct and the performances themselves were reasonable — three songs and out.
Springsteen would seem to be the biggest draw, from his years of filling stadia worldwide. But here, he played a set with acoustic guitar, as if he were at one of those Obama campaign acoustic stops. That meant that “The Promised Land,” as great of a song as that is, honestly didn’t sound quite as good on acoustic guitar; the reworked swampy “Born in the USA,” minus a chorus people would only sing along to (and misinterpret) fitting but strictly nonmusical, and “Dancing in the Dark” just weird in a folk version.
Better when he strapped on an electric guitar and joined in a Zac Brown Band version of “Fortunate Son” with fellow acoustic act Dave Grohl. Though it looked like Brown wasn’t that familiar with the song, it was so fitting for the occasion that its author John Fogerty sang it himself on a PBS Veterans Day concert in front of the White House last Thursday.
Songs generally didn’t fit the occasion — maybe people wanted just to be entertained (a worthy idea, and if the idea was to ease the life of the servicemen and women, why not bring it to them in the field, abroad, USO style?).
That’s because the big names were there to entice a crowd in for the message, the way of concert cause events of the past. Nobody called it a telethon, but first host Jamie Foxx slipped and called the TelePrompTer a telethon. Everybody was encouraging viewers to log on to theconcertforvalor.com to find out more, help out in specified and unspecified ways (money was not mentioned).
Even so, the event was an interesting survey of music, designed to appeal to the military people it was supposed to entertain, with a little bit of country (Brown, as well as Carrie Underwood, who is still doing that annoying hand thing on her microphone as she sings); R&B and hip hop — Rihanna moving on to Eminem, who was the closer; some Jessie J to have dance pop in the beginning, and the perfectly fitting grooves of The Black Keys, about as good a big rock band out there these days.
I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the band that really connected was Metallica, all swagger and thudding riffs. This is the music that drone pilots keep in their earbuds and the crowd naturally responded. Peace and love music wasn’t working with this crowd.