Live And In The Flesh
Queens of the Stone Age - September 10, 2013
Queens of the Stone Age have certainly been one of my top favourite acts to see live over the years. I've had a hard time resisting seeing them live since my first experience with them back in 2005 at the Kool Haus in Toronto. Eight years and three albums later, this would be my eighth time seeing them. Like I said, they've been hard to resist! Josh Homme had recruited Troy Van Leeuwen for guitar, Mikey Shoes for bass duties, Dean Fertita on the keys, and the most recent addition to the live Queens lineup on drums, Jon Theodore of The Mars Volta/One Day as a Lion. I was pretty stoked to hear that Theodore had joined forces with Homme for the tour. He seemed like he would be the perfect fit!
Queens of the Stone Age had just released ...Like Clockwork that June and it was still pounding away in my car stereo. I couldn't get enough of their latest album. Every single track sounded like it would be a perfect jam to hear live. Josh Homme had stepped up his game yet again, and we weren't going to miss our first chance to see his latest creation out on the road. We did all we could to make sure we had some sort of presale password to ensure our tickets to the show. The Toronto market had seen an increase in scalping through the likes of StubHub, which made it that much more difficult to obtain tickets at face value. Luckily our dedication paid off and we were able to score some general admission tickets through one of the radio presales that had been going on. With tickets hitting $75 directly from Ticketmaster themselves, I couldn't imagine what how much they were charging through their black market cousin.
That Tuesday in September had finally come and at last we were settling into the general admission area of the Air Canada Centre, waiting for the show to begin. We situated ourselves just right of center stage so we would have a perfect view of everything the entire night, without feeling the pressure of the hundreds of other screaming fans trying to make their way to front and center. Guards were the opening act for the evening. A three piece indie rock band from New York that had just released their debut album earlier that year as well. They were out to recruit some new fans and they seemed like they were giving it their all. It was a bit difficult to concentrate on their music though, as all I was thinking about was, when will Queens finally hit the stage?! Guards had finished up their seven song set and we were stuck waiting impatiently throughout intermission wondering if the wait would ever end.
The lights blacked out and you could hear the sound of someone scraping glass with their fingernail. The video screens came to life and you could see the fingernail cracking it along its way across. The glass shattered and My God Is the Sun, one Queens of the Stone Age's latest tracks fired right up. This was only the beginning of the phenomenon known as a Queens show. We couldn't wait to hear what they possibly had up their sleeves for a setlist. Without any hesitation at all they jumped right into You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire from their 2002 Songs for the Deaf release. Kicking it into high gear already and we were only two songs deep! No One Knows followed up with Burn the Witch, which had the entire crowd singing along and loving every minute of it. This had to have been one of the better Toronto crowds that I have experienced at a show. Everyone was enjoying themselves with plenty of fans screaming along to their lyrics. Having the crowd so involved in a show simply takes it to another level, especially in such a large scale venue.
Josh Homme and the rest of Queens of the Stone Age melted our faces off by the end of their unbelievable twenty song set. They practically played every single track off of their latest album ...Like Clockwork, the only exception being Fairweather Friends. The fact that we had been lucky enough to see everything else, along with plenty of other back catalogue jams, I would have paid twice the cost of admission! Hearing a couple of Rated R tracks, In the Fade and Better Living Through Chemistry really made the night as well. The new album's artwork looked amazing during the videos throughout the songs. Definitely one of the more impressive visual shows I had ever seen by them. Wrapping their three song encore up with The Vampire of Time and Memory, I Appear Missing, and their infamous finale jam, A Song for the Dead, left us all to pick up the pieces of what was left of our minds. Will I make sure to catch them whenever they come through again? You bet I already have.