Neil Diamond's 50th Anniversary Tour (2017)

This article is based on the St. Louis, Missouri stop of Neil's tour which occurred in April 2017. Any concert reviews/summaries are just one persons opinion.

A confession: Neil Diamond was way before my time. Neil Diamond was before my mothers time. Neil was before FM radio had really taken off. People were still listening to AM radios when he had the majority of his hits.

Another confession: I do like his music.

Yet another confession: I wasn't sure he would be a good concert. Yes, I was aware that one of his biggest successes was with a double concert album he recorded in the beginning of his career titled "Hot August Night" (my family owned this on 8-track tape). But concerts always make me happiest when the artist is in their prime or when they have visual elements that stay with you afterwards.

Neil's 2017 tour was just beginning the same week that he had his scheduled St. Louis stop but he is a stage veteran having performed concerts for six straight decades beginning in the late 1960's.

The St. Louis date featured a whopping 29 songs spanning a career of hits and no opening act. Whether you were there for "Cracklin Rosie", or "Sweet Caroline", or "America", you probably weren't disappointed as Neil performed them all pretty much like you would have remembered them. None of the versions seem to stray far from the original album tracks which is sometimes a positive.

I guess the one very notable exception to that was his infamous duet with actress/singer Barbra Streisand. The two teamed up in 1978 for the #1 slow ballad, "You Don't Bring Me Flowers". Obviously, Barbra just wasn't there. (The two did reteam back in 1994 to perform the song during a Grammy awards show.)

The version that Neil gave us on this tour instead featured his vocals, and replaced Barbra with an instrumental jazz infusion that seemed classy and fit the dark emotional theme of this song. It also served an irony because Neil's music has probably been remade as instrumental versions so often in doctors offices, and stores that play that kind of thing.

There were songs that didn't top the charts that were a little surprising to hear still being performed after all this time ("Forever In Blue Jeans" peaked at #20 in the US, "Soolaimon" at #30) but nothing seemed too much like filler here. Occasionally the night seemed to be going in too much of a slow direction ("Love On The Rocks", "Play Me", etc) but I don't see how these classics could have been left out of a 50th anniversary tour.

The tour attempted to tell the artists story not just with songs or words. There were home videos shown during "Brooklyn Roads" to present the personal side of the artist.

The encore included "Sweet Caroline", "Cracklin Rosie", "America", and 'Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show".

Vocally, Neil is totally on point. He may be 76 years old but I do think this tour is Neil Diamond at his prime. Tickets were not unreasonably priced. One could purchase really good floor seats in our market for about $150. In fact, our tickets directly behind the stage (a new one for us) were only $16 a piece before fees.

Catch this tour while you can if you are a fan. The tour continues throughout the year in cities across the US.

Welcome to bigconcertfan.com (aka What we're doing here)

I'd like to welcome you all to my first blog. I've never really had a subject that I would consider myself passionate enough to blog about until I sort of developed attending (and video recording/archiving) concerts a hobby.

At this point, in the past several years, I've been lucky enough to witness more than 150 live performers. It's a wide eclectic mix that includes everyone from Katy Perry, to Madonna, to Paul Simon, or Ke$ha, or Janet Jackson, or Daya, or Halsey. My personal likes probably hover somewhere around pop/rock hits from the 1970's to the present mostly but I'm always happy to attend concerts from any genre including country such as Luke Bryan's Farm Tour, or rap such as Ludicrous or Wiz Khalifa.

I love being connected to music. I've worked in the radio industry as both an employee and station owner and I don't feel that I've ever been as connected to the music industry as I have been since I've started this concert project. I've recorded each concert in it's entirety from the audience digitally.  I also collect these unique concert moments. I've traded with others for unique one of a kind recordings from the audience just as I've done myself. I've also recorded hundreds of performances from television and the Internet. As a result, I'd like to think that I probably have one of the largest concert archives in the world. There are definitely recordings in my collection that you just can't find anywhere else. Even if an artist performs the exact same songs at every stop in their tour, each night and performance can be a unique moment in music history.

I'm not just trying to horde these musical moments here. My interest in this hobby comes from my pure love of music. I'm going to try to share that in this concert review blog. Because I've been to so many shows, one of my goals is to hopefully assist people that don't go to concerts as often as I do to determine if it's worth spending their hard earned money on a night out. After all, I know it can get expensive.

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