Concert Review: Nintendo Fusion Tour

With ears still ringing from the Def Leppard half of last night's concert, my son and I headed for Dallas (well, technically Grand Prairie, which is on the back side of Dallas from where we are) at about noon for the Nintendo Fusion Tour 2006 at the Nokia Theatre. This tour has been a going thing since 2003 or so and in the past has featured bands such as My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, which I mention only because they're the only ones I know anything about.

The best part of the trip was the drive down 'cause my son and I actually talked for hours and hours and hours. Mostly about music, of course, but just to talk to him was wonderful. I so want a relationship with him and I'll do just about anything to get it. And it took hours and hours and hours, too, as I'm not much of a speedster and we did have to crawl through Big D during rush hour. But we arrived with plenty of time to spare.

The Nokia Theatre is a pretty nice venue, with plenty of outlets for food and drink and a nice big lobby. And since this was the Nintendo Fusion Tour, that lobby was just packed with live Wii demos with long, long lines of scary looking emo kids waiting to play them. The controller is also a pointing device and three-dimensional motion sensor, which makes for some pretty awesome gaming. I'm not much of a console gamer (I prefer PCs) but with Legend of Zelda as a launch title it is quite tempting to get one just for that. Don't laugh; I've built many PCs specifically to play single titles. TIE Fighter and Halo in particular come to mind.

But we were there for the bands, which were (in order of appearance):

• The Sleeping (post hardcore / alternative)
• Plain White T's (kind of power pop-rock)
• Emery (Christian post-hardcore / screamo)
• Relient K (Christian rock)
• Hawthorne Heights (emo / screamo; my son's favorite band of all time)

Much to my son's delight I had procured pit tickets for us, so we got our pit admission armbands and headed down to the front of the venue where we met all sorts of strange (and strangely dressed and pierced and coiffured) and fascinating people. But as the time came for the first band to appear I retreated back to the mid-level deck. There were several small clusters of seats up there and I asked a security guard if I could sit in one. He laughed and said "Got kids in the pit, do you?" I staked out a good seat and spent most of the evening right there, with a great view of the action on stage and in the pit and with easy access to the lobby and food and drink. My son would stay in the pit for pretty much the entire five hours.

I'm not going to try to review the entire show. I didn't care much at all for The Sleeping; Plain White T's and Emery were both good, and I really liked Relient K. The Emery lead singer did some pretty decent crowd surfing, which was fun to watch. My son will scold me for this but I'm not much of a Hawthorne Heights fan. I did watch most of their set though. He's played enough of it around me that I actually knew about half the songs they did.

Afterwards he wanted to hang around and try to catch the band as they came out (he and the Hawthorne Heights screamer, Casey Calvert, have the same birthday) but they didn't appear. He did get his picture taken with some of the other bands, though. I hope they come out.

Coming back home was tough. I hate to make long drives without someone to talk to (or hold my hand or rub my neck and massage my shoulders...oh well...) My son had already been up all night at a church lock-in and had managed to stay awake on the way down to talk to me only with the aid of some serious chemical stimulus (three cans of Rock Star and a two-liter of Coke) so he was pretty much crashed before we left the parking lot. I had kicked my caffeine habit years ago but was able to stay awake (mostly) with the aid of some good old fashioned rock and frequent stops for snacks and hot chocolate. I got him home at about two-thirty and was asleep myself about ten seconds after my head hit the pillow. For about three hours. The tax class final exam is tomorrow...