We went to the Aerosmith concert last night at the Oakland Arena and came away with mixed feelings. I had the additional bonus of coming away with impaired hearing, but more about that later. To begin with, I must have missed the ads for the show because I totally missed the on-sale date. When I got around to looking for tickets, the available seats weren’t that great. I did notice that the show wasn’t close to being sold out so I tried my hand on eBay for tickets. I somehow scored pretty decent seats on the aisle of the lower club area (Section 115, Row 9 for those keeping score) for less than the face value of the tickets from some guy in Canada…go figure. I immediately thought a scam was at hand, but the tickets worked just fine.

I was pretty surprised to see Lenny Kravitz as the opening act on the bill, but I’m not complaining. He sure puts on an entertaining show. Tam-ay decided to forget her earplugs at home and since I’m more suicidal than her, gave them up to her. I can assure you that Lenny’s 9 piece band was plenty loud to fill the Oakland Arena with rock-and-or-roll. It’s too bad the fools in front of us wouldn’t sit down. I mean, if you want to stand and dance all night, get some bloody floor seats already. If you’re going to be in the stands, sit your ass down. But apparently that’s too much to ask.

I noticed that Lenny went on a bit late, closer to 8:00pm than the published 7:30pm start time, but didn’t think much of it at the time. When he packed it in for the night, it must have been sometime after 9. Then came the painful wait. Unbeknownst to us, Aerosmith was actually in LA at the Grammys and were flying up to Oakland to play the concert. They didn’t go on until 10:15pm…ouchies. By that time, quite a few people had already left in disgust because they couldn’t stay out that late.

Even in their old age, Aerosmith still puts on a great show. Brad looked like he was dragging a bit, but was still wailing away without any problems. They opted to go away from the popular crowd-pleasing hits in the middle of the set and even tapped Joe to do some songs from his solo projects. That didn’t really do it for me, but they finished off with a bang. The enjoyment of illicit substances in our section got a bit too bothersome near the end so we had to make a break for it before they finished their encore.