No Doubt Concert. Just got back from the no doubt concert, with special guests... (why do they always say "special" guests? where are they holding concerts with just regular guests, and how can I get tickets?) Garbage, and the Distillers. Okay first, The Distillers... marginal. A three piece punker band with chick guitar player/singer. (I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, just noting that the singer was female because of the fact that Garbage also has a female singer, as does No Doubt.) A couple of cool things about the Distillers: 1) their bass player had his mic stand so high that he had to throw his head back like he was staring at the ceiling to sing into it. It was cool. 2) they only played like 4 songs (it actually sounded like the same song the whole damn time).

Okay run down on Garbage. I really had no clue about the band other than they had maybe one song that made the radio, and they had some connection to Nirvana (helped them produce an album or something). Anyway, I liked them more than I thought that I would. They had some catchy songs, and their singer is, like Gwen Stefani, very upbeat and energetic.

Okay, now for No Doubt. Very entertaining show. They also did a couple of cool things worth mentioning... they opened the show by coming up on an elevator to the very front of the stage... the runway part that stuck out into the crowd. Full drum set and all. Then everyone in the band started wandering around the rest of the stage, except for the drummer. So for the first 3 songs the drummer was the front piece of the band. I liked it. It was cool. Another cool thing that they did was showing a slide show during some of their songs which was very entertaining as it had pictures of the band from various eras in the band's history. Another cool thing... the drummer makes really funny faces when he plays. For two songs they did them "acoustic" out on the runway, it was nice. And the vocals were actually quite good, harmonies and all, which is rare these days in live shows. Okay the one annoying thing that went on was the mentioning of "San Jose" about a million times during the show. That has always seemed to me like a cheap tactic to get the crowd to cheer... she did it a lot. That wasn't cool. Overall it was a great show, and I'm glad that I can now say that I've seen No Doubt live.