Melissa Etheridge, shown her from a 2016 show in Florida, showed off some impressive guitar skills during her two-hour concert at Fox Tucson Theatre Sunday night.Â
Melissa Etheridge grabbed a pair of drumsticks and jumped up on the platform next to drummer Fritz Lewak.
She lit into the cymbals, banged on the snare drum and matched Lewak beat for heart-pounding beat on "Like the Way I Do," the encore of her sold-out, two-hour Fox Tucson Theater show.
The mostly female audience filling nearly every seat of the downtown theater had been on its feet for the past four or five songs, and by the finale, they were screaming so loud they threatened to drown out the percussive thumps that rocked from the stage.
There was a feeling that if Etheridge, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, and the theater's management had allowed it, the audience would have stayed all night. We were the first stop on her "Yes I Am" 25th Anniversary Tour celebrating her landmark 1993 multiplatinum album's release, and we wanted to revel in the memories of that album, from the deep cuts to the mega hits.
Listening to that album recreated live 25 years after its release was like going back in time. We sang the "oh, oh, oh" chorus from "If I Wanted To" and instantly we were back in the audience at the amphitheater where we first heard her sing that song live in 1993-94. We pumped our fists at the title track anthem of "Yes I Am" and we meant it just as strongly Sunday night as we did the day in early 1993 when Etheridge came out as lesbian at President Bill Clinton's inaugural ball.Â
The sting of "Silent Legacy" still lingers a lifetime later and the painful hurt of "I Will Never Be the Same" still recalls scenes of love lost.Â
Etheridge, 57, opened the show with "No Souvenirs" off her platinum-selling 1989 album "Brave and Crazy" and sprinkled in hits from that album and her eponymous 1988 debut album ("Like the Way I Do," "Similar Features") in between songs from "Yes I Am." The audience Sunday sang along to every song, even the deep album cuts including "Ruins" off "Yes I Am" and "Chrome Plated Heart" from "Melissa Etheridge."Â
"You bought the record, didn't you?" she said at one point and the crowd screamed and applauded. Â
She recalled a trip to Tucson early in her career when she booked her own gigs at small cafes. One of those was in Tucson and when a women in the audience screamed that she remembered the show, Etheridge quipped that there were only five people there that night. But that show and Tucson must have impacted her; she included Tucson in "Sleep While I Drive," and when she sang the verse â "We'll go through Tucson up to Santa Fe" â the audience went nuts. They screamed and applauded as if the Tucson of her memory was their memory.
She showed off blistering guitar skills during prolonged solos on "Don't You Need" and "Let Me Go" and a pair of women in the front row leaning against the stage bopped and hopped so energetically folks behind them called in security to settle them down without making any sort of scene.
The pair wasn't alone; throughout the theater, fans were rocking, swaying and dancing from their seats, sometimes bumping gently into one another. It was impossible, frankly, to sit for Etheridge's show. If you thought that 25 years would slow her down, you were happily disappointed. She played with the same frenetic energy she had back when she first toured with "Yes I Am" and her rough-hewn alto sounded just as bluesy and soulful.
Etheridge saved her Grammy-winning "Come to My Window" for the end and the audience of 1,100-plus became one giant chorus, singing back every word of the song that won her the Best Female Rock Vocal Performance Grammy in 1995. When she finished, Etheridge handed her guitar to a stage hand and took from him a cellphone selfie stick to capture a video of Sunday's audience.
"Tucson, you were amazing!" she shouted over the screams. "You made me feel like a youngster."
