We arrived home from California on Monday just in time for Diana to rest up for the big day – Back to Work! She started as a VP of Operations for NTT Data on Tuesday. Her week was spent meeting her team, peers, and folks that she’ll be working with – a busy week of back to back meetings and trying to keep all the names straight. She seems to be working with a good group of people and will enjoy it once she gets settled back into a routine.
We had been looking forward to our Saturday concert for a while – The Eagles with special guest Chris Stapleton at AT&T Stadium (the Cowboys home stadium) in Arlington. If you ask Diana who her favourite band is, she’ll always answer that it’s the Eagles. We were guests in a suite that included dinner in a nice club and so arrived early to beat the crowd of 75,000 entering the stadium and enjoy a relaxing dinner. This also allowed Diana to select the perfect seat in the box.
Chris Stapleton has an interesting story. He moved to Nashville to be a songwriter and has contributed over 150 songs to albums by such artists as Adele, Luke Bryan, Tim McGraw, George Strait and Brad Paisley. He has won five Grammy awards and seven Academy of Country Music awards. His performing career really took off in 2015 when he sang his cover of the song Tennessee Whiskey from his recently released Traveler album as a duet with Justin Timberlake at the Country Music Awards. A huge audience was introduced to his soulful voice and guitar playing and the album was number one for many weeks.
We both thoroughly enjoyed Stapleton’s show which included all our favourites – “Fire Away”, “Traveler”, “Parachute”, “Broken Halos”, and “Tennessee Whiskey”.
By the time the Eagles took the stage at 9pm on the dot, the stadium had filled to a capacity of close to 75,000. The band included long time members Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmitt, and Joe Walsh with new additions Vince Gill and Deacon Frey (replacing his father and founding Eagle, Glenn Frey, who died in 2016). Do you think Deacon looks anything like his father at the same age?
The new members did a great job as you can see in the video of Vince Gill singing “Take it to the Limit”.
The last time we saw Timothy B. Schmitt was in the small, intimate Granada theater and AT&T stadium is about as far from that as could be imagined.
Here’s Deacon singing one of the songs that his Dad made famous:
The top song of the night for me was a cover of the Tom Waits song “Ole 55”:
The first encore was the song most associated with the Eagles, “Hotel California”. I enjoyed the trumpet introduction – there was a 5 piece brass section on several songs including the James Gang song “Funk 49”.
Of course there were the classic Joe Walsh songs – “Life’s Been Good” and “Rocky Mountain Way”:
And it all came to a close over two and a half hours later with Diana’s favourite, “Desperado”:
We spent the night at a hotel near the airport so that Diana could catch her flight out to California to babysit for John and Maddi, who are enjoying a few days in Hawaii. She’ll enjoy spending time with Alicia before she starts college.
I had a quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon and finished the book, “The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music” by Steve Lopez. Lopez is a Los Angeles Times journalist and this book is about his experiences in befriending a mentally ill homeless man who he had noticed to be an amazingly gifted musician. As it turned out, the man, Nathaniel Ayers, had been trained in classical music at Juilliard. He attended Juilliard on a full scholarship from 1970 – 1972, when black students were extremely rare – especially ones from lower-middle-class, single-parent families. He did extremely well in that ultra-competitive and stressful environment (straight A’s in music performance classes; and also in other classes until his schizophrenia kicked in and his grades began to fall) until the illness finally forced him out. Ayers had been living on the streets for 33 years and was in his mid-50’s when Lopez met him.
This beautifully empathetic and honest book is as much about Lopez’s efforts to help Ayers as it is about Ayers himself. There are many memorable sections – one of my favourites describes Ayers’ reunion with Yo Yo Ma at Disney Concert Hall – they attended Juilliard at the same time. The book concludes with Ayers finally accepting use of an apartment and music studio in a care facility on Skid Row – he is the musician in residence at the studio.
I highly recommend this book.