I only had three beers all night.

One of my passions is music. When I say passion, I mean obsession. As a kid, I learned to play the drums until the noise got on my parent’s nerves, which is when I was directed to focus more on sports. Although the drums went away, many a weekend morning was spent taping America’s Top 40 on the old “jambox”. I never lost my love for music and always wished that I had taken up another instrument, the guitar specifically. I own three guitars now and play none of them well. I’m working on it though… slowly.

As a part of my obsession, I go see my fair share of live shows throughout the year. Tonight was one of those nights. One of my favorite bands is Staind, who is fronted by a guy named Aaron Lewis. Lewis came through town and stopped at Nokia Theater to play “Solo and Acoustic” to what seemed like 3000 people. Nokia is a great place to see a show, especially when they put up to side curtains to make the room more intimate. They sold only the middle section of the lower part of the Theater. It was really a great setting, aside from the drunk asshole next to me yelling “Play Floyd” all night long. Hey buddy… he played Floyd… and it’s Pink Floyd. He might as well been yelling “Freebird”. I might have choked him out for that.

I love all music, but the music that I listen to most is this type of music. I relate to it well. It’s honest, which is most appealing to me. Lewis’ lyrics resonate with me particularly strongly. He sings about the people that are important to him, like his daughter, “Zoe Jane”. He sings about the troubled times in his life in songs like “Fade” and “Something Like Me”. He sings about people that influenced him that are now gone, like in his tribute song “Layne” to the now dead lead singer for Alice in Chains, Layne Staley. He’s in his mid-30’s, has a wife he loves, a couple of kids he loves, has bouts with some interesting emotions and ADD, and he works his ass off (this is his third time through Dallas in the last 13 months). He and I have  few things in common, or at least I think we do.

The show was great because it was 100% acoustic. It was Aaron, a mic, a stool,  and a couple of really nice acoustic guitars. I was about 15 rows back, so I can’t be sure about this, but they looked like Gibson Guitars. One of which had the most beautiful inlays that I have ever seen on a guitar. He played a bunch of Staind songs, a fair number of Alice in Chains songs, and probably my favorite grunge rock song of all time, Pearl Jam’s “Black”. He also played a really interesting mix of cover songs as well, like “Moondance” by Van Morrison, “On and On” by Stephen Bishop, “Rainbow Connection” of Kermit the Frog fame, a great Tool song named “Sober” which was better than the original in my opinion, and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”. He brought out a friend of his named Chris Ballini, who is an amazing guitar player. Together they reminded me of the pairing of Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains. It could have been that they did two or three Alice in Chains songs while Chris was out there that made me think that.

It was another great show. So great I thought about driving to Shreveport on Tuesday to see it again.

If you get the chance to see this show, do it.