At a Jack Johnson Concert

I heard a story on NPR the other day that outlined the lag in the concert business this summer. Ticket sales are down and some shows and even some tours have been cancelled.

Ironically, this year has been my family's busiest concert year in some time.

Karen, the girls, and I cruised down to Virginia Beach on Friday for a Jack Johnson concert. The opening acts were ALO and G Love. It was a great show.

We were all four of us already Jack Johnson fans. The concert cemented that for us and gave us a good introduction to ALO and G Love. 

Jack Johnson uses his tour to connect people with his All At Once social action network, and with local non-profits who are invited to take part in the "village green" that he establishes outside each show. We chatted with folks from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Food & Water Watch before the show.

By the way, we read that Johnson has dedicated all of his profit from this tour to charity. I think that's pretty cool.

Gordon Sumner and the Royal Philharmonic!

Karen and I had the great pleasure of seeing Mr. Sumner, known professionally as Sting, perform with an orchestra last night in Camden, New Jersey. He was quite good.

We had traveled up to Radnor, Pennsylvania, yesterday morning to collect Christina from Cabrini College. She has just finished two weeks of ballet classes at Philadelphia's The Rock School, which houses its summer students at Cabrini. We packed her out and Colleen drove her home, while Karen and I checked-in to a hotel and got ready for the show.

We parked at Penn's Landing and took the RiverLink ferry across the Delaware River to the Camden waterfront and the Susquehanna Bank Center. That's a nice way to get to the show, though there was a loud, annoying, preppy dude yelling that we all had to sing a Sting song on the way across the Delaware River.

"It's a tradition," he yelled.

I always thought traditions were things that happened without someone yelling that you have to do it. But, in any case, he gave the rest of us something to bond around: "That guy is a boob." "Yeah, he is..."

Sting performed with a 45-piece orchestra, members of the Royal Philharmonic. He had his own percussionists, a bass player, a guitarist and a back-up singer. His music lends itself well to orchestration; it sounded wonderful.