Dallas Alice
This was the spring-tour closer. The previous Panic show I’d seen, two days earlier at Jazz Fest,
played for a big festival audience—a completely different kind of
crowd—had a weird flow. This show didn’t. It was blastoff from the
first note. The Nokia Theatre in Dallas is, I suppose, cooler than not cool, but kind of corporate and stale. The sound, however, was superb.
The first set started hot right out of the gate with a strong ARLEEN
opener. I was on Schools’ side in the first row off the floor, maybe 50
feet back and six feet up. So I was watching him as the show started
and, immediately, I thought, “That’s strange. This sounds like ARLEEN.
There’s no way they’d open with that.” Fortunately, I was wrong. And
thanks to a playful lead-in, Panic then smoothly segued into Bloodkin’s
WHO DO YOU BELONG TO? It was like we’d somehow been dropped into the
middle of a second set. Only two songs in and I was already surrounded
by grinning fools doing the Rerun Dance. The third song, another upbeat one, UP ALL NIGHT, certainly resonated with me as I’d just seen Gov’t Mule > New Mastersounds > Galactic in New Orleans before catching a flight to Dallas, a journey sponsored by Gold Bond and Jameson.
Musically, things then shifted from the light of the first three
songs to the moodier PAPA’S HOME > LITTLE LILLY > PAPA’S HOME
> FISHWATER. The FISHWATER, in particular, was dark and dirty. And
the RIBS AND WHISKEY that followed was so spirited, I figured it was
the end of the long, loud first set. But then Sunny’s percussion kicked
in. The set wasn’t finished. For a song Panic doesn’t play that often, the crowd, surprisingly, seemed to know from the beginning that it was SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. The band tore it up. That is how you end a set. Even now, five months later, when I close my eyes, I can still hear all the woo hoos.
ALL TIME LOW was a high-intensity start to the second set.
And the PROVING GROUND > BOOM BOOM BOOM > PROVING GROUND
continued the boisterous groove. A well-played PIGEONS and DARK DAY
PROGRAM were next, and then NRBQ’s
FLAT FOOT FLEWZY (fittingly “singing flewzy woozy boogie on a Saturday
night”) before heading into a 20-minute DRUMS. As DRUMS grew longer,
and other band members joined in, JoJo channeled a little James Brown.
When everybody was finally back onstage, they launched into a
hard-charging DINER > TALL BOY to end the set. While a CHILLY
closer, which the band’s set list indicated, would’ve been a fantastic
finish, the set still closed on a high.
As this was the end of the tour, the band thanked the crew during
the encore break. “Because we love ’em so much,” said Schools, “we’re
gonna make ’em stay up late, and play another set.” And while it wasn’t
actually a third set, the stellar encore lasted nearly 30 minutes:
THREE CANDLES, a perfectly placed ROCK between two thick slices of
SURPRISE VALLEY and a sing-along version of END OF THE SHOW to, well,
end the show.