As I mentioned in my last post, I had back-to-back concerts to attend in Ridgefield, WA at the RV Inn Style Resorts Ampitheater and this night I was there to see the legendary Robert Cray, along with one of my top all-time favorite Rock and Roll bands, The Doobie Brothers.
Robert Cray opened the set to a less than full audience as people were still milling around out in the concession area. I don’t think people really understood how iconic of a performer he is, as there weren’t a lot of lights or other gimmicks and the audience was talking most of the time. I mean, this musician has put out 23 albums over the past 45+ years. It was almost like attending a semi-private concert in some underground bar, except it was in an Ampitheater that holds 15,000 people.
Robert and his band played for about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, this was probably the worst seat of my summer concert season, so while the audio isn’t too bad, the video is pretty poor, as I was zoomed in most of the time (I am happy to at least have the videos embedded now with transitions between songs).
During the intermission I headed back over to the Ilani VIP club, grabbed a drink and tried out their very delicious stack of four hot honey chicken sliders with fries, which was spicy, messy, super delicious and filling for like $15 bucks.
For the second half of the concert the Doobie Brothers came on stage and played a who’s who of their very best songs. When you have been playing together for 54 years, and have a discography that includes 15 studio albums, 6 live albums, 9 compilation albums and 36 singles, you are going to have a lot of go-to songs that everyone in the audience will know and be able to sing along to.
Even though it was nearly 100 degrees as the heat wave hitting the West Coast was at its worst on this day, and you can tell that Michael McDonald and the rest of the band have aged and their voices aren’t what they used to be, this was still a magical evening getting to hear these guys live in concert after at least 45+ years of listening to them on vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, DVDs and today as core songs on my favorite digital Classic Rock and Roll playlists.