Elton John (non-poker content, but c'mon, Elton John!)

Vegas is a place that can get you used to things being free that aren't usually free elsewhere--like meals, drinks (which would be really great, except that I don't drink, so the whole concept is kind of wasted on me), parking, etc. It's also not terribly hard to get free tickets to lots of the shows in town, if you know where to look. But the premium ones don't get offered for free very often. So I was delighted when a friend-of-a-friend kind of connection unexpectedly brought me tickets to see Elton John's "Red Piano" show at Caesars Palace tonight. It has been one of a handful of shows on my "must-see-someday" list.

Here's the review in brief: Even better than I have spent the last few years thinking it would be, and overall the best pop music concert I've ever been to.

Sorry for the crappy photos. It's my low-resolution/wide-angle cell phone camera again. It makes it look like we had the worst seats in the house, but really they were pretty good--maybe 50 yards from the stage. And did I mention that they were free? That's right, baby, $175 tickets, gratis, because I'm so well-connected with all the VIPs and the Beautiful People in town, y'know. (Cough, cough.)

For several of the well-known songs, these concert versions are much longer, and a lot of the extra time is Elton pounding away on the piano. I thought that was the best part of the whole experience. I really wish I had recordings that included those long piano solos. (Maybe there are some concert recordings that do--I haven't looked into that.) His music is so good to begin with, in large part, because it is so harmonically complex. You don't find three-chord garage bands covering very many Elton John songs, because they require lots of interesting and unexpected musical turns. I think the only other pop songwriters that are as consistently interesting, in a musical sense, are Lennon/McCartney, Billy Joel, and Jim Steinman. This complexity reaches mind-blowing levels live with the solo riffs, with chord changes and modulations that you'd never see coming. Really great stuff. I couldn't tell how much of it was improvisational versus rehearsed, but I didn't care.

My main puzzlement was why the piano was out of tune. It wasn't horrible, but it was noticeable. It didn't sound deliberately detuned as if they were going for a honkey-tonk sound--it just sounded, well, neglected. I wondered about that many times over the course of the show.

He started the show by acknowledging that he had until recently shared the concert hall with Celine Dion. He added, "I miss that skinny bitch."

Much has been written in other reviews about the creative photography and videography projected on a giant screen behind the stage for many of the songs. It is as interesting as people have claimed. I frequently felt torn between wanting to watch Elton and wanting to watch the video interpretation of the song he was singing. I suppose that too much good stuff happening all at once is a nice problem to have.

Have to admit, though, that a couple of them were real head-scratchers--hard to interpret, at least on first viewing. For example, accompanying "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" there were clips of a naked woman with a bloody nose, sitting in an executioner's electric chair with a lighted sparkler in her crotch, interspersed with clips of a guy wearing a purple bear costume, dancing on ice skates. Maybe I just haven't done enough drugs in my life to grasp the deep significance of it all.

If you've ever felt perplexed by what's supposed to be going on in the lyrics of "Daniel" (what's this business about dead eyes and scars that won't heal and Spain?), Elton sort of clears it up for you. He just thought the lyrics as originally submitted to him made the song too long, so he crossed out the last verse--the one, unfortunately, that explained all of the previous ones. Oops. This was new information to me, though I see now that it's not exactly a deep secret--you can find it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_%28song%29).

All in all, this was one of the three best Vegas shows I've seen, right up there with Penn & Teller and Ka. If you've loved Elton John's music for a few years or a few decades (and who hasn't?), it's well worth pencilling him in to your next trip out here--even if you have to pay for the tickets.